[Peetwo]

Changing the Act: Consensus debate heats up?

Because this is much bigger than AOPA Oz, who IMO it would appear (after an excellent lead up - see HERE) have dropped the ball literally metres from the touch line, I have dragged this debate on to this thread...

"...With respect to the proposed changes, the Minister has called for general aviation consensus, to assist the government in this process.

The AOPA Australia through our Australian General Aviation Alliance will now hold a General Aviation Summit in Wagga Wagga on the 4th to 6th June 2018, inviting representatives from all general aviation associations to participate.

The purpose of the Summit will be to develop a consensus proposal for the government on the issue of change to the Civil Aviation Act...".

There are indeed several points of debate on this - example via the AOPA thread:
 

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Sandy - I regret to say that AOPA should not have agreed to obtaining a “consensus” before the promise of reform, inferred by the Minister, has any solid shape whatever.
 
 The Ministers plain duty is to resolve disparate views in the National interest.
 That reform is urgent has already been proven and the turnout to Dick Smith’s Wagga meeting endorsed this fact. So why more meetings that can only be attended by essentially the same people? Those retired GA types who don’t have to be struggling under the weight of the expensive and impossible strict liability criminal sanction rules of the implacable regulator.

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LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION.....
In essence I understand Sandy’s point and don’t disagree - we’ve had more than enough waffle, conversations, meetings, talk fests, wank fests and in the words of Seinfeld; ‘yada yada yada’. That being plainly obvious, Sandy said;
“So why more meetings that can only be attended by essentially the same people”
With all due respect Sandy, the same people may attend these meetings, but the scope and direction of the meetings are changing. Dick, Ben and Mark aren’t attending just to air their grievances, they are pushing for the public to see that that our industry is dying and successive Governments, Ministers and their agencies are the ones responsible and need to be brought to account openly and publicly, even if that means targeting marginal seats and applying pressure and having their sorry asses kicked out. The situation is now critical and the muppets in fairlyland Cant’berra can’t see beyond their comfy offices and superannuation accounts. The public meetings and forums need to continue to shift from a ‘how do we fix this problem’ approach to a ‘you will fix this problem approach and if you don’t or won’t then we will publicly push for and support any politician who will fix the problem’.
The only way to force change, other than by means of a smoking hole with a Roo tail sticking out of it, is to target politicians, their seats, their comfy disconnected existence and careless attitude towards aviation constituents they are paid to represent....
TICK TOCK

Sandy also took up his dismay, on the AOPA announcement, over on Facebook:

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Now I totally commiserate with both sides of the argument but history is very much against Ben Morgan and AOPA Oz. Like a broken record, the following is a post that I made just 3 short months ago: http://www.auntypru.com/forum/showthread...82#pid8282

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Dear Sandy -

I agree about the Parliamentary inquiries and government reviews. The effectiveness of such inquisitions is completely undone by bureaucratic obfuscation and procrastination, all designed of course to wait out and wear down the significance and urgency of the current inquiries/reviews latest findings and recommendations.

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However I believe if the minister/government had the political will to cauterise the CASA Iron Ring and it's malevolent loyal lieutenants, then I think some kind of Judicial inquiry will be required to build a legal case for prosecution of what amounts to decades of ingrained bureaucratic malfeasance that has cost 100s of millions of dollars for no discernible safety benefit to either industry or the air traveling public.

Of course such an inquiry would still take time and money but it is probably a necessary evil if you are to ensure the cancer within has been fully cauterised. After all isn't that exactly what the Kiwis did?  

From P7 on the AMROBA thread: post #95

ATSB and CASA must be disbanded; the Kiwi’s did it very neatly and have never looked back. They reformed the regulator; then the regulations and have set an enviable bench mark for sanity, economy and a way forward ever since. Can anyone see CASA agreeing to that?

&..

But at the end of the shift – you still have to convince a basically uninterested politician to tangle with CASA and make some radical changes. That politician must be persuaded that ‘the Act’ as it stands is unconstitutional; that CASA is an escaped lunatic and that the blood is not on his hands.

And from your post in response Sandy:

Secondly it behoves all of us to share and refine our thoughts on what is wrong and to reach some consensus on the method of reform. To this end it is clear that only by a change to the Act can reform occur. In the variety of diverse opinions about specifics, one would be hard pressed to obtain clause by clause complete agreement. Therefore the focus must be on the necessity for legislative change by demonstrating that the current trajectory is one of failure.

Because such an inquiry is being conducted does not mean that the legislative solution (that most believe is required) could not be acted on by the government and parliament, as such legislative changes are a parliamentary process and not subject to Judicial review or the ultimate findings of such an inquiry.


MTF...P2  

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After listening several times to the excellent Dick Smith oratory, I never thought I'd say it, but I would be more inclined to believe the veracity of the Albo offer of genuine discussion on changes to the Act...


MTF...P2