[thorn bird]

Round and round and round she goes, where she stops nobody knows.

Words and more words and even more words on top of more words, all meaningless and futile.

All the while we keep being fed mother goose statements by our political elite and our regulator
that they really care about our industry and are working their butts off to head off its final demise,
shrouded in the esoteric prime directive of another word called "Safety".

Is Australia the safest country in the world to commit aviation? Statistics would suggest we are no better
and arguably worse in the safety stakes than other developed countries. One thing is absolutely undeniable,
we are without doubt the most expensive.
Cost is the biggest driver of participation in any undertaking, from the thrill seekers to the hobbyists,
to the commercial entrepreneurs.
There are plenty of things to do out there to satisfy the interests of all of the above to throw their money at than aviation.

From a sheer size comparison the United States has the largest and most successful aviation industry
on the planet, the vast majority of the aircraft we buy, the parts and equipment we need to maintain them, and the technology we need to install to make them even safer.

To me it beggars belief that Australia attempted to go it alone with regulation allegedly modelled on EASA rules, which history shows wiped out their GA industry and did little if anything to improve safety.

The world contributes to ICAO, who produce what are called SARPS to guide regulatory and operational oversight, yet we largely ignore them, so why do we bother to participate, if we are not bothering to follow their advice why are we wasting money contributing to the ICAO?

We never hear mention of US rules other than whispers and avoiding the subject whenever they are brought up, why is CASA so averse to even discussing US FAR's as a template for Australian regulation?

Under the US FAR's safety statistics are equal or better than ours, aligning with them one would imagine, is just plain common sense as New Zealand so successfully did, their regulations now adopted across most of the Pacific.

Aside from the massive cost burden our unique unaligned regulations impose on our industry, the cost of producing them is absolutely staggering. New Zealand reformed their regulation to align with the US FAR's for around five million dollars and it only took a couple of years. Australia has been playing the reform game for over thirty years, spent almost half a billion dollars, achieved little in the way of improved safety outcomes and decimated a whole industry that used to be a healthy and viable contributor to the countries GDP.

Same, same, with airports privatisation, gifted to big banks and property developers to make billions, quietly shuffled to offshore tax havens, resulting in the most expensive airports in the world.

And they call Australia the lucky country, lucky for some, just plain dumb for others.