I am going to make the assumption that you are a genuine seeker of truth and not some troll and attempt to explain why you are completely wrong in your belief that the words don’t matter.
Ultimately all CASA strategy, policy and regulation activities must conform to the intention of Parliament when they made the Act.. The ultimate arbiter of this is the High Court Of Australia; it is they who will construe the meaning of the words:
“establish a regulatory framework for maintaining, enhancing and promoting the safety of civil aviation, with particular emphasis on preventing aviation accidents and incidents.”
The High Court makes no judgement on the reasonableness of what these words mean save that they don’t conflict with the Constitution or other law. They will examine the literal meaning of what has been written without making any value judgements on what CASA has done with them.
…And what we find when we construe these words is that they give CASA unfettered power to do what it bloody well likes – which is exactly what it has done, capriciously,, corruptly, expensively, unjustly, inequitably and without a shred of procedural fairness and natural justice being afforded to its victims.
Furthermore your appeal to sweet reason and AVM. Skidmores good offices fails on the existing mountain of evidence of CASA’s serial misbehaviour – no, they can’t be trusted to be reasonable. Precisely because the Act doesn’t require them to be reasonable!
This is how CASA gets away with it:
“establish a regulatory framework for maintaining, enhancing and promoting the safety of civil aviation”
Nowhere does it define what Safety actually is. “Safety” is a nominative word that can mean what you want – it is not defined, thus CASA can and does do anything it likes and when challenged, retreats behind the mantra of “safety” without defining the term.
Furthermore, with absolutely no constraint on what CASA can do to achieve safety, they can do anything they like, including shutting down all aviation completely which is what they do regularly to people they don’t like and who CASA judges don’t have the political influence to complain.
Lest you think I’m joking, that is why the second strange looking phrase is included:
“with particular emphasis on preventing aviation accidents and incidents.”
This specifically refers to CASA the power to achieve it’s safety imperative by preventing accidents and incidents.
Now a reasonable person would assume that such an objective would be the outcome of a safety system, but instead what the Act does is supply CASA with an effing great big axe in the form of a specific power to prevent aviation at all if it thinks that this might prevent an accident ro incident, and of course this relies on “negative evidence” for if there is no aviation how can one prove that the prohibited operation was actually safe?
To put that another way; the Act has redefined safety as the act or preventing accidents and incidents, not the outcome of a properly operating safety system.
This phrase is the source of the strangely convoluted legal language used by CASA to justify so many of its worst atrocities: – those regulations that state: “CASA must not issue / approve / permit / authorise, unless it is satisfied that…..”. In other words CASA can do what it likes to its satisfaction. In a sane and just country these regulations would state that “CASA will issue / approve / permit / authorise on presentation of evidence that ..the person has satisfied the following criteria.”
There is no constraint on CASA’s activity except the High Court and Constitution. There is nothing in the Act that constrains CASA not to kill aviation stone dead and it kills parts of it every year.
What should have been in the Act are a series of constraints as follows:
– Perfect safety is impossible to achieve. By definition its cost is infinite as it can only be achieved by doing precisely nothing. CASA needs to be constrained to achieving worlds best practice benchmarks.
– CASA needs to be constrained to promote a safe and growing aviation industry, ie: remove its ability to achieve its objective by preventing aviation. This then introduces a requirement that CASA engage in evidence based rule making that includes cost benefit analysis.
Others have written more extensively on all this. Words matter, until the Act is changed, the industry will continue to decline.
Nice one Sunny…
5th Estate
