[Peetwo]

The following is a lengthy but very relevant post to this thread...

Courtesy Paul Phelan & ProAviation - A twenty-five year disgrace

..The failure of CASA’s regulatory review program (RRP) to deliver on expectations has many contributory factors, and an understanding of its sad history is going to be essential if the program is to be prevented from evolving from a stalled project into a high-cost self-perpetuating industry.


Failure? Yes, failure. You only have to compare all the promotional material, statements of expectations, ministerial and CEO directions, guidelines and debate that came with the RRP’s inception.

To refresh the reader’s memory the expectations variously included:

• outcome-based rather than prescriptive regulation, which is the basis of aviation regulation in all other aviation-significant democracies;
  
• alignment with overseas regulatory structures so that Australia could achieve true bilateral agreements with the leading overseas aviation authorities;
  
• ‘plain English’ rules that are easy to understand, administer and enforce;
  
• the elimination of wasteful and un-necessary administration, including evaluations of cost benefit and safety relevance of proposed regulations;
  
• compliance in rulemaking with Australian law, government guidelines; international (ICAO) standards; and
  
• two-tier regulation to replace the existing multi-layer regulation comprising the Civil Aviation Act, Regulations and Orders, policy documents, individual rulings and permissions, exemptions and other instruments.
  
  

In its background discussion on the regulatory reform program (RRP) the ASRR Panel estimated that “it will take at least another five years to complete.” That timeframe of course, would depend on when the reform process actually starts. But even then, the ASRR warns that as of right now we cannot expect the program’s founding goals to be attained:
“The final product of regulatory reform will not meet the aviation community’s needs and will not be consistent with the ICAO principles for plain language, easily understood, safety rules. Nor will the final regulations be harmonised with those of any foreign jurisdiction. The 25-plus year history of regulatory reform has been consuming the industry, and distracting the aviation community from the objective of managing safety in its operations. On this basis, the Panel concludes that continuing along the current path is not in the interests of aviation safety in Australia and that a new approach must be developed for regulatory reform.”

One of the first cracks to appear in the program’s structure was, and still is, the perception among our regulators that neither the Australian aviation industry nor CASA was sufficiently “mature” to operate under the concept of “outcome-based” regulation.

Just when the imperative of modernised rule-making is taking hold in other aviation-prominent nations and in our own Productivity Commission’s red tape reduction program, Australia is setting new records with word and page counts set to challenge the Bible (807,361 according to Google), and creating untold hundreds of new strict liability offences.

Whatever “maturity” is supposed to mean in that context, and whatever the specialist professional qualifications claimed by those espousing it may be, the creed has long been used to support the opinion that we unsophisticated colonials could only fly safely under a detailed prescriptive “criminal law” regulatory environment – probably similar to what prevailed among the first settlers but fortunately minus the floggings.

Players in the consultative committee game report the “immaturity” view as having been frequently expressed by various officials including the CASA lawyers who were or still are involved with the RRP.

Of course it’s utter rot, and reveals apparent ignorance of the historical fact that aviation as we know it began evolving all over the world in the first  two decades of the 20th century, with ongoing interaction and alignment between most States, and is therefore equally “mature” as arre all but the most dysfunctional of emerging nations...

Cheers, beers & MTF..P2