[Peetwo]

Sandy on a mission - 

Via the UP:

The ASIC is impractical and worse than useless

A very well known and highly experienced instructor and charter pilot, retired a couple of years ago, confided to me that the initial ASIC was acquired (when first promulgated) and was used until retirement.

This person flew regularly from the base security controlled airport (SCA) to and fro to many other SCAs.

Never pulled up for wearing an expired card.

Apart from the obvious impediment to the general attraction of GA and therefore contributing to its decline, it’s meant that some outback flyers have been reluctant to service their aircraft where maintenance is, for some, within practical reach only at an SCA.

Broken Hill would likely be a good example, used to be a very busy GA airport with several dozen aircraft on tie-downs and numbers parked in and around the now non existent maintenance business. Last time there about four years ago, maybe half dozen GA aircraft.

Another unfortunate unintended consequence is that there are far fewer knowledgeable eyes at SCAs, eyes that might pick up on suspicious behaviour.

There’s been a few suggestions in this thread about how to change the ASIC to make it more palatable. I’m drawn to LB’s thoughts:-

“I’ve always been struck by the fact that many pilots are their own worst-enemy. They revel in the mystique of aviation, which merely invites more and more regulation and bureaucratic intrusion. Flying is ‘special’. We must make sure only special people - like me - can fly. People with the ‘right’ ‘background’ - like me.”

Human nature has its various qualities, ego is undoubtedly playing out here. Having been CFI and CP, including RPT, and active flying from the mid 60s, I look back and ask why should we not fly in a regulatory environment that would have similarity in risk management with other means of transport, such on our roads. I don’t agree that BFRs are necessary, and I heard today that CASA is requiring the instructor rating to qualify for Chief Pilot. The applicant, with one five pax twin and a couple of singles has been trying for three months (so far) to obtain a charter AOC, CASA keeps on coming back for rewrites. How different in the USA where there’s a practical template and minimal cost, or as it used to be here. I started with a charter licence by submitting a 12 page ops manual, no interviews and no fees paid. If Australians want to be strong in an uncertain world, and want prosperity for health and happiness then free enterprise must prevail, people vote with their money and assess risk. If we want to encourage responsibility then, at least by degrees, people must be allowed to choose.

It all comes back to politics, and few people actually engage with their representatives. Politics should be seen to be our most important skill in society and we need to grow up in this regard because all too often we denigrate politics and politicians. Maybe it’s because it’s too much like hard work to be really involved and it confronts our own behaviour in the sense of what we would be like if in the shoes of MPs.

Next via the AP email chains, Sandy in reply to this Scott Hargreaves letter to IPA members:

Dear IPA Members

Talking with IPA members about the challenges facing Australia, it’s not uncommon to hear the lament: ‘where are the business leaders?’, with the emphasis on leadership. Australia over many generations benefitted from great business leaders who provided leadership to the wider community by identifying the challenges of national development, and keeping politicians focussed on the power of markets to unleash prosperity. Some of them came together to found the IPA in 1943. Whereas now there is perception that most corporate CEOs mainly grandstand on woke issues under the guise of ‘ESG’ concerns. 

But at least on Wednesday this week, thanks to [i]The Australian Financial Review[/i], we know exactly where Australia’s official business leadership was: on the Prime Minister’s jet travelling from the Business Council’s conference in Sydney to the Jobs and Skills Summit at Parliament House. Even the Qantas CEO Alan Joyce caught a lift – perhaps he didn’t want to fly on his own airline in case he got a last-minute text saying his flight has been cancelled as experienced by so many Australians recently.

As I will discuss further down in this email, the Summit is not actually focussed on the real issues facing Australia. It is an exercise in what is called corporatism; the idea that Big Government, Big Unions and Big Business can sit down and agree on what should be done. They meet in the Great Hall at Parliament while the chambers of the House of Representatives and the Senate, where the people’s representatives sit, lie empty. It is by its nature a project of the elite institutions. It is our local version of what in America they call ‘the Swamp’.

This was also a criticism of the original summit convened by Bob Hawke in 1983, but that at least had a broad remit to look at the key economic issues facing the nation. The 2022 version was limited to ‘Jobs and Skills’ – and then stacked with unions who made up 25 per cent of attendees. The result from Day One was a series of stage managed ‘outcomes’ in industrial relations, for what the Albanese Government and the union movement wanted to do anyway.

The rejoinder might be that 25% of the attendees were from ‘business’, but what we increasingly see in Australia is that the peak industry bodies are becoming more and more detached from the views of their members, and more and more reliant on government. Earlier this year I checked the annual report of a State Chamber of Commerce and saw that revenue from governments exceeded that from members – as it soaked up grants for ‘training’, ‘marketing’ and so on. How likely are they to go against the preferred narrative of Government?

Political editor for The Australian Financial Review, Phil Coorey, said it was like a ‘two-day episode of The Drum’, referring to the ABC’s program on which ‘approved’ voices get to appear and agree with each other on why the government should do more on issue x, y or z. It is now 1,592 days since anyone from the IPA was invited to appear on The Drum (and come to think of it, the IPA’s invitation to the Jobs and Skills Summit must have gotten lost in the mail). In any event, Coorey concluded:

All the public sees is a government being collegiate and consultative, unaware and unfazed it may have all been pre-ordained.

Small business barely gets a look in, and didn’t go much beyond the Council of Small Business Organisation (COSBOA). It doesn’t fit the corporatist model. COSBOA, meanwhile, has agreed to the Government and union proposal to shift from enterprise bargaining to a ‘multi-employer’ model, and this is being touted as a ‘win’, but those who remember the damage done to business by ‘pattern bargaining’ in the 1970s and 80s would disagree.

To me it seems more that the pressures put on small business by the current system are so intolerable they’re prepared to consider something else. The Age in Melbourne this week reported on the struggles of my favourite independent chain of bookstores, Readings, which employs 170 people and has been put through hell in its struggles to conclude an enterprise agreement opposed by the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union.

It’s dividing staff ... they’ve been mounting a public campaign outside the shop which has been very distressing for me and others who work for me, as the people outside the shop aren’t Readings staff members.

That quote is from the founder, Mark Rubbo. No wonder the article says:

He is open to multi-employer bargaining agreements after describing his business as being locked in a ‘traumatic’ and ‘extremely expensive’ enterprising bargaining stoush.

As the Maritime Union leader, Christy Cain, said of the invite list for the Summit: ‘If you’re not at the table, you’re part of the menu’.

In a shameless digression I might say also that no-one invited Zoe Buhler to the summit to talk about being arrested and handcuffed in her own kitchen while pregnant, in front of her children, or more generally the damage done to the rule of law in Australia by draconian lockdowns, particularly in Victoria. Fortunately, Zoe had her own forum to speak to Australians, on the steps of the Ballarat Magistrates’ Court, with the IPA’s John Roskam standing beside her.

I was very proud of the IPA when I saw the photos of John and Zoe on our Facebook page, and the interviews with them both on the main TV channels [Watch coverage on Channel 7 here], and when I read Chetna’s wonderful email to members yesterday. The positive response has been overwhelming. As one member wrote, ‘the IPA’s support of Zoe is the reason I am an IPA member’.

So what should a meeting of the nation’s actual leaders talk about? For that I will turn to one of our newer and younger Research Fellows, Paddy O’Leary, who has just published in Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph a terrific article on the real context our nation’s leaders should be considering:

Today, as tensions rise throughout the Indo-Pacific with China’s expansionist intent on show for all, a frank assessment of Australia’s resilience is overdue.
On a recent podcast episode with the Institute of Public Affairs, former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, highlighted three crucial components for national defence: alliances, firepower and national resilience.
Alliances and firepower are obvious. ‘The one thing we’re not thinking about at all’, the former PM emphasised, ‘is the national resilience piece and that’s what we really need to be focusing on’.
National resilience involves safeguarding supply chains, securing our energy independence, stockpiling crucial resources and ensuring we have the means to function in times of great crisis.

Mainstream Australians understand the linkages between energy security and national security, even if those gathered in Parliament House this week do not. In March 2022, the IPA commissioned a poll of 1,007 Australians and 61% of those thought ‘The federal government should be more focussed on national defence than meeting Australia’s net zero emissions by 2050 target.’ [Read here]

Paddy is a Research Fellow within the IPA’s Centre for the Australian Way of Life, and makes the link between our national security and the state of our culture:

The fundamental prerequisite for any national security and defence strategy is a citizenry who are willing to fight, endure and, if necessary, sacrifice because they believe their country is worth defending. Patriotism, of the humble and dutiful kind, is just as important as submarines. Henry Kissinger, in his most recent book Leadership, points this out: ‘No society can remain great if it loses faith in itself or if it systematically impugns its self-perception.’
It would be naive to assume that decades of culture wars, identity politics, climate doomism and historical revision have not affected our willingness to endure the costliest of burdens – war – to preserve the Australia we know today.

Paddy pointed to the corrosive impact of the National Curriculum and the deconstruction of our national heritage undertaken within our universities, and says:

All of this has an effect. Many Australians have lost trust in political authority, traditional institutions are decaying and ideas of national identity are dividing rather than uniting.
Earlier this year polling commissioned by the IPA revealed that barely one-third of young Australians surveyed believe Australia is worth fighting for. The nation we are today is the outcome of a long history of efforts, sacrifices and fidelities. Australia, for all its flaws, is a remarkably successful country with an extraordinary history.

This is why we have the IPA, and the Centre for the Australian Way of Life, and why we are proud to provide an opportunity for young Australians like Paddy who can make the case for Australia. As he concludes:

We are far from perfect and there is work to be done. But what we have is worth defending. [Read here]

Thank you for your support.

Scott

Scott Hargreaves

Executive Director
Institute of Public Affairs

Sandy's reply:

Excellent letter Scott, thank you. 


Resilience goes to our strength and our posture as seen by states with potentially coercive, or worse, intentions. A ‘think twice’ stance from us. 

This is why I’m passionate about the 3/4 bureaucratic destruction of our General Aviation (GA) industry and the irresponsible alienation of Commonwealth airport land away from aviation uses. Particularly at our major secondary airports, Moorabbin and Bankstown as examples (they used to vie with each other as to which was the busiest in the Southern Hemisphere) where aviation businesses have been evicted in favour of warehouses for the profit of land developers. 

Aviation allows speedy transport of personnel and materiel, of crucial importance for defence. 

Successive governments, since Gareth Evans pushed aviation out of his Department in 1988, have allowed a runaway Commonwealth monopoly corporate to fee gouge and run a continuous make work program with ever more extreme and complex regulations. The Parliament rubber stamps all, including inappropriately migrating the regulations (a mountain) into the criminal code. As a private pilot I could be prosecuted for the criminal offence of not filling in my log book. This ‘crime’ doesn’t rate a mention in the USA.  

But wait there’s worse.

Zoe Buhler, of course a shocking transgression of our freedoms, but the very well respected Glen Buckley of Australian Pilot Training Alliance has lost his business, had to sack employees, tried to carry his staff but finished up losing his home. He was taken on as an interim pilot instructor with another firm but lost that job because CASA told his employer that it couldn’t countenance him in any GA employment. 

His only sin, no safety issues anywhere, an exemplary operator, was creating a practical system for flying training clubs and businesses to comply with CASA’s extreme, complex (unnecessary) and very expensive new strictures under an umbrella organisation. 

If interested search Glen Buckley and APTA. 

You couldn’t make it up and be believed. 

Rule of law? Where’s our leadership? 

Sandy Reith 

MTF...P2