[Peetwo]

LMH 25/03/19: The Federal Government and the regions, more Angel Flight and a new Senior Contributor. 

...Do not adjust your sets, this is in fact Monday. Last Friday we had a technical glitch in the Sydney office that prevented the weekly newsletter from going out, so we postponed it until today. Apologies to all those that may have been wondering what happened ... we are still sort of wondering ourselves!


The Federal Government released their manifesto Planning for Australia's Future Population last week, a large part of which is effectively a policy of investing in the regions to restrict the relentless march of capital-city suburbia. It talks about new roads, new rail infrastructure and jobs growth among many things. Out of curiosity, I searched the document using the term "aviation" and got NO RESULTS FOUND. Searching again under "airports" found reference to Western Sydney, a rail connection to Tullamarine, and Hobart Airport. That's it. Our industry and community gets no other mention in this tome, which can be taken squarely as a pitch for votes in the May election. Such scant mention of aviation in a policy that boasts about "better connecting regional Australia" tells the aviation community exactly where we stand: nowhere. Despite the rhetoric of successive ministers it is clear the government believes aviation plays no part in the future of Australia other than as gateways to and from the capital cities. How can a serious government honestly believe it can connect regional cities by ignoring the most efficient way of doing it? It is a depressing norm that aviation always gets the rhetoric, but not the action. This time we've even been excluded from the rhetoric, an effect of not representing enough votes to make politicians sweat at night.

"..the industry decline co-incides with the death of the Department of Aviation.."

Perhaps the goverment would have done well to consider Ken Cannane's position on jobs in the regions. The head of AMROBA last week outlined how he believes regulation is stifling the industry's potential to generate jobs. His plan is allow small operators in flight training and maintenance to function without having to abide by the heavy regulations that load so much cost onto businesses without returning even a reasonable increase in safety. According to Cannane, the industry decline co-incides with the death of the Department of Aviation and the rise of the Civil Aviation Authority and the CARs in 1988. The CAA became CASA in 1996, which it does appear only exacerbated the problem. In short, not all the functions and responsibilities of the DoA were picked up by either CASA or Airservices Australia. One of these was simply looking after an industry that reported employs 200,000 people in this country. Cannane is a firm believer in the concept of independent flying instructors and LAMEs as a way of taking general aviation back to the regional airports and therefore catalysing the process that turns small into medium and results in the very jobs the government says it wants to generate.

Angel Flight suffered a bit of check last week in its bid to thwart CASA's new regulations on community service flights (CSF). The Federal Court in Victoria ruled against their application to stay the new rules, which means they are now in effect. Angel Flight's battle is not lost though. They still have the option to argue in the courts that CASA didn't actually have the right to make the rules they've made, which was an argument put forward from the very beginning. On top of that, Senator Rex Patrick has promised to move a motion of disallowance when the senate sits again in April. My fear for all of this is that the collateral damage caused by such a passionate fight has wound back the clock to a time when CASA and the aviation community basically had no co-operative relationship at all. Good steps have been made since the Stakeholder Engagement Group was founded and consultation has certainly increased with the advent of the Aviation Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), but any good will from those initiatives stands to be wiped-out as the aviation community sees the new CSF rules as the old CASA rising up from the ground and smiting Angel Flight with unjustified regulation exactly the way they used to...

Read more at http://www.australianflying.com.au/the-l...zD9ACOV.99

P2 comment - For some reason Hitch did not publish the following comment from Sandy, but that doesn't mean Aunty Pru won't - 

   

Hitch, great spadework, very well put the case and state of play for aviation in Australia from the Commonwealth’s perspective, and in particular for General Aviation. 


A big fat zero from the Coalition which includes the National Party, the Party that claims to represent regional Australia. What a sick joke! The NSW election results with the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party taking former Nat strongholds might just prise open a few Nat eyelids to what is glaringly obvious, the relentless smashing of a perfectly good GA industry, a thirty year process of death by a thousand regulatory cuts.
 
One issue I would take up with Hitch is the effect on safety by, quote, “heavy regulation...without even returning a reasonable degree of safety.”

With respect to that opinion, from my perspective having been at the business of GA flying since 1968 as airport and aircraft owner operator, including scheduled services and training as CP and CFI, safety has been reduced, considerably reduced. Lower throughput means fewer experienced personnel both in training and maintenance Specialised skills are lost, cost increases may lead to increased risk taking.

Fewer hours flown by individuals means loss of recency and aircraft that sit around tend to deteriorate. Many in the outback have just dropped out altogether, and some are flying without medicals or maintenance releases Shock horror you say? Is it a huge problem? No its not, they are not idiots bent on killing themselves. Oddly enough it gives the lie to the whole edifice of way over the top regulation.  

In addition, we can’t imagine all the advances that we might have initiated, tested and adopted, world beating advances to our great benefit because we have the spirit and wherewithal as an advanced nation. We shouldn’t just look backwards, we should aim for much better, the world is not stationary.  

Then there’s the wider picture, and that is our rights in a free country, and that freedom that actually delivers a high standard of living. For example Ken Cannane’s excellent proposition for independent instructors, qualified instructors are prevented from plying their trade against the human rights provisions, restrictions of trade, of the UN to which Australia is signatory. No such problem in the US where, according to John King of highly respected John and Martha King Aviation, 70% of US pilots are trained by such independent instructors. Ring write or email your federal MP and State Senators. 

Lastly, hats off to Senator Rex Patrick for taking the plight of GA seriously. 

LMH 29/03/19: Hitch playing politics etc..etc - 

The Last Minute Hitch: 29 March 2019
29 March 2019
Comments 0 Comments
    
– Steve Hitchen
I find it amusing that the Civil Aviation Act 1988 requires "clear and concise" regulation, yet the federal government's Office of Legislative Drafting and Publishing (OLDP) basically exists to make sure that doesn't happen. Regulations are written in legalese in order for lawyers to be able to frame arguments in front of a magistrate, not as rules that can be easily understood by those they apply to. The Aviation Safety Regulation Review (ASRR) hammered the point home when they recommended a third tier of regulation to be written in plain English. CASA, to their credit, is taking up the challenge by producing a plain English version of Part 91. Good on them; I am an advocate. But there's a couple of problems. Firstly, who gets to judge if the plain English version is clear and carries forward the intent of the regulation? I suspect it will be the legal eagles, who are likely to completely destroy the document in a red-pen frenzy howling that the legislation is clear already. Secondly, CASA did not demand that the people who are writing the plain English Part 91 are actually qualified to write in plain English. So there are some challenges, and if CASA actually succeeds, I have some advice for them: throw out the legislative version and make the plain English version the law. In the meantime, we struggle on. I don't often refer my readers to PPruNe, but this time I will. Someone who has obviously been on the wrong side of legislative interpretation has opened a poll to see if the industry believes CASA has complied with the Act's "clear and concise" requirement. It's probably a Monty that most will vote "No", but it will be worth getting a reasonable measure anyway. Have a look at the URL below.

https://www.pprune.org/pacific-general-aviation-questions/619804-quick-poll-if-you-have-moment-much-appreciated.html

we really don't need another long period of uncertainty and inaction

It's budget day on Tuesday, but also the day the senate sits again. If he's true to his promise, we should see Senator Rex Patrick rise and move a motion to disallow CASA's new regulations on community service flights. What happens next is currently anyone's guess. When the Prime Minister moved the budget forward one complete month, he telegraphed to the nation that he's looking to send us all to an election sometime in May. The 11th and 18th are currently leading the betting market. The PM must be looking to place the government into caretaker mode very soon, in which case the motions of disallowance–one in the House and one in the Senate–are not likely to get heard. With the Labor Party an almost certainty to get in, aviation will get a new/old minister for transport: Anthony Albanese. History has shown that Albanese is not a friend of aviation. Who remembers the White Paper? Labor has indicated they will dust off the document,  give it a coat of paint and present it back to the industry as their aviation policy again. Consequently, there is a chance that all the work done in the last few years cajoling the Coalition government into revitalising GA could have been wasted. No matter what happens, we really don't need another long period of uncertainty and inaction.

Read more at http://www.australianflying.com.au/the-l...uqBOZgf.99

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View Poll Results: Have CASA achieved clear and concise aviation safety standards as per the Act?
This poll will close on [b]4th Apr 2019 at 23:58[/b]
Yes, they have

20
2.15%

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No, they have not

853
91.82%

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Don't know/undecided
[img=0x10]https://www.pprune.org/images/polls/bar4.gif[/img]
3
0.32%

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Should Australia adopt the New Zealand Regs? 

53
5.71%

MTF...P2