QUOTE:
Lead Balloon:
Thorn bird: Pages of regulations (1988 + 1998) plus civil aviation orders plus manuals of standards plus determinations, permissions, approvals and exemptions?
My estimate, based on a page count of the more substantial bits of the dog’s breakfast: Around 30,000 pages and growing.
I doubt whether anyone could reasonably be confident of knowing and understanding the entirety of the current Australian civil aviation regulatory regime. I would presume any claimant of that knowledge and understanding to be a psychopath or insane.
"...total of ALL material of a legislative or associated nature for Part 61 alone is now put at 6000+ pages..."
CASA LORE AND THE MYTH OF REFORM
At last count there were well over 10,000 pages of Australian aviation regulations, written by lawyers, for Lawyers, in the legalise language.
Lots of people from industry complained that the rules were indecipherable and inordinately complex.
CAsA has now embarked on a program to explain their rules in plain English so the people who don't speak legalise can understand them.
Which sort of begs the question, why were they not written in plain English in the first place?
CAsA maintains it's because of our Westminster system of government. Yet the Kiwi's managed it and I thought they had a very similar system as ours.
Seems like we took the best of British bureaucracy and refined it into a unique Australian art form.
It Cost almost half a billion dollars to write the rules they have enacted so far with more to follow, a lot more.
Are they going to expend a further half a billion dollars to explain Australian regulations so those that have to comply with them can understand them?
The sheer volume of the regulations makes it impossible to be in complete compliance. To comply you really need to understand the meaning and intent of the law, laws which are very opaque and ambiguous.
This means that at all times somewhere in Australia someone is unknowingly becoming a criminal because CAsA moved aviation law into the criminal code, one of the very few aviation regulators in the real world who have done so.
CAsA has morphed itself into an enforcement agency rather than a service provider and is currently employing a large number of enforcement officers, ex policemen and ex spooks to catch non-compliers. A very vexatious issue in the industry as the same entity that writes the law, enforces the law, an anathema to natural justice.
CAsA have a rather embarrassing record on the rare occasions they have dragged perceived miscreants before an actual real court. In an attempt to circumvent that, they reversed the tried and proven British convention of innocence until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, to one of Strict Liability where your guilty until you prove yourself innocent.
Notwithstanding, courts can be a pain for CAsA. Rules of evidence apply, even though CAsA is a far from model litigant. With the public purse to draw on, and employing very expensive legal teams they can still quit often lose the argument.
When all else fails or seems likely to fail, they tend to use what they call “Administrative Action”.
Administrative Action is where the hierarchy of CAsA, the so called “Iron Ring” decide, independent of any scrutiny from a higher Authority, to suspend or cancel approvals, certificates or licences issued by them under the guise of an imminent risk to safety. Even the threat of this action has the affect of grounding an operation thus denying its revenue flow.
Aviation is an inordinately expensive industry to be involved in, cash flow is its lifeblood, very few in the industry can afford to remain grounded for very long.
CAsA can and do obfuscate, ignore and delay until their target becomes insolvent.
Access to real courts for small to medium operators is out of the question. Time is their enemy and legal costs.
They have the option of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, however evidential rules of a real court don’t apply there. Opinions, rumour and innuendo can be brought to bear with impunity.
A model litigant CAsA is not, even up to committing perjury, but even then they can often lose the argument. Generally though their victim goes broke before a case is even heard.
The huge volumes of regulations requires operators to produce massive volumes of company regulations to explain in plain English how their company and their employee's will comply with thousands of regulations written in a virtual foreign language.
Unfortunately many CAsA officers are not lawyers either and do not understand the legalise language. Their interpretation of the meaning of the law, even amongst themselves is variable and may not be the same interpretation as the industry
For this reason CAsA produces "Policies". Policies are used to explain in plain English what CAsA management considers the law to mean for selective regulations.
Unfortunately policies may not necessarily say what the law means.
The only way to determine exactly what the law means is by testing it in a court.
A court is a place where a panel of experts in the legalise language, called judges, determine what a law says in plain english.
Aviation is very complex and highly technical industry and though the panel of experts in the legalise language may determine what the law says, it needs other people to argue what the law actually means. These people are called lawyers.
Lawyers are people who have an understanding of legalise, but must be briefed by experts who understand technical matters.
Unfortunately not too many people in CAsA have a great understanding of technical matters, the real expertise lies with the industry, which may be a reason why they don't do so well in courts.
Unfortunately Lawyers cost a lot of money and not to many aviation operators can afford them, having spent all their money on proving to the regulator that they are at least capable of complying with the regulations that they don't understand or which defy logic. Also they have to employ a lot of unproductive people who's job it is to continually attempt to unravel what the regulations mean, amend the companies regulations in accordance with the constantly varying opinions of the ever changing parade of CAsA enforcement officers. Even then, after agreement is reached between CAsA officers and their industry counterparts that compliance is achieved, CAsA management, at any time, may countermand that, bringing an operation to a stop.
That is the sovereign risk facing anyone invested or contemplating investment in Aviation.
When regulations have a detrimental affect on an operator or unintended consequences become apparent, CAsA may issue exemptions to the law as opposed to amending the law. An expensive exercise and in reality only open to large operators, and the flawed law remains in force.
An exemption may be issued largely because big operators quite often have considerable political affiliations, which they might use to severely embarrass CAsA. Also CAsA dread being dragged before a panel of legalise language experts where it could become apparent that their regulations are in fact gobbledygook, which would really be extremely embarrassing.
Some would say the above is a product of my warped imagination. I'm prepared to accept that.
CAsA however will never admit their warped attempts at regulation are in any way gobbledygook nor fit for purpose, nor that they are morally corrupt.
That their complex amateur regulations have unnecessarily destroyed many viable businesses, stifled investment and thrown a lot of people onto the Dole queue, as well as costing the Australian taxpayer a lot of unnecessary wasteful expense.
CASR Part 61 relating to flight crew standards and its attendant Manual of Standards are a classic example of exactly why Australia has become a bit of an international joke. CAsA requires thousands of pages to enunciate what the Americans and New Zealand can do in less than a hundred and still achieve better safety outcomes than us.
CAsA maintain they regulate for safety, which must allegedly be their only consideration. That’s a noble ambition, but why does it take CAsA tens of thousands of pages of indecipherable gobbledygook, which heaps enormous compliance costs and complexity on industry, to achieve a safety record no better than the US or NZ with less than a thousand pages in total?
There has been much talk about high airfares in regional Australia.
When one compares our ticket price against the US for a comparable journey one could ponder how do they manage to do it so cheaply?
What I have never heard from any inquiry is what percentage the cost of compliance adds to a ticket price in Australia.
P7 - GOLD star and a Tim Tam Thorny - nicely done.
Lead Balloon:
Thorn bird: Pages of regulations (1988 + 1998) plus civil aviation orders plus manuals of standards plus determinations, permissions, approvals and exemptions?
My estimate, based on a page count of the more substantial bits of the dog’s breakfast: Around 30,000 pages and growing.
I doubt whether anyone could reasonably be confident of knowing and understanding the entirety of the current Australian civil aviation regulatory regime. I would presume any claimant of that knowledge and understanding to be a psychopath or insane.
"...total of ALL material of a legislative or associated nature for Part 61 alone is now put at 6000+ pages..."
CASA LORE AND THE MYTH OF REFORM
At last count there were well over 10,000 pages of Australian aviation regulations, written by lawyers, for Lawyers, in the legalise language.
Lots of people from industry complained that the rules were indecipherable and inordinately complex.
CAsA has now embarked on a program to explain their rules in plain English so the people who don't speak legalise can understand them.
Which sort of begs the question, why were they not written in plain English in the first place?
CAsA maintains it's because of our Westminster system of government. Yet the Kiwi's managed it and I thought they had a very similar system as ours.
Seems like we took the best of British bureaucracy and refined it into a unique Australian art form.
It Cost almost half a billion dollars to write the rules they have enacted so far with more to follow, a lot more.
Are they going to expend a further half a billion dollars to explain Australian regulations so those that have to comply with them can understand them?
The sheer volume of the regulations makes it impossible to be in complete compliance. To comply you really need to understand the meaning and intent of the law, laws which are very opaque and ambiguous.
This means that at all times somewhere in Australia someone is unknowingly becoming a criminal because CAsA moved aviation law into the criminal code, one of the very few aviation regulators in the real world who have done so.
CAsA has morphed itself into an enforcement agency rather than a service provider and is currently employing a large number of enforcement officers, ex policemen and ex spooks to catch non-compliers. A very vexatious issue in the industry as the same entity that writes the law, enforces the law, an anathema to natural justice.
CAsA have a rather embarrassing record on the rare occasions they have dragged perceived miscreants before an actual real court. In an attempt to circumvent that, they reversed the tried and proven British convention of innocence until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, to one of Strict Liability where your guilty until you prove yourself innocent.
Notwithstanding, courts can be a pain for CAsA. Rules of evidence apply, even though CAsA is a far from model litigant. With the public purse to draw on, and employing very expensive legal teams they can still quit often lose the argument.
When all else fails or seems likely to fail, they tend to use what they call “Administrative Action”.
Administrative Action is where the hierarchy of CAsA, the so called “Iron Ring” decide, independent of any scrutiny from a higher Authority, to suspend or cancel approvals, certificates or licences issued by them under the guise of an imminent risk to safety. Even the threat of this action has the affect of grounding an operation thus denying its revenue flow.
Aviation is an inordinately expensive industry to be involved in, cash flow is its lifeblood, very few in the industry can afford to remain grounded for very long.
CAsA can and do obfuscate, ignore and delay until their target becomes insolvent.
Access to real courts for small to medium operators is out of the question. Time is their enemy and legal costs.
They have the option of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, however evidential rules of a real court don’t apply there. Opinions, rumour and innuendo can be brought to bear with impunity.
A model litigant CAsA is not, even up to committing perjury, but even then they can often lose the argument. Generally though their victim goes broke before a case is even heard.
The huge volumes of regulations requires operators to produce massive volumes of company regulations to explain in plain English how their company and their employee's will comply with thousands of regulations written in a virtual foreign language.
Unfortunately many CAsA officers are not lawyers either and do not understand the legalise language. Their interpretation of the meaning of the law, even amongst themselves is variable and may not be the same interpretation as the industry
For this reason CAsA produces "Policies". Policies are used to explain in plain English what CAsA management considers the law to mean for selective regulations.
Unfortunately policies may not necessarily say what the law means.
The only way to determine exactly what the law means is by testing it in a court.
A court is a place where a panel of experts in the legalise language, called judges, determine what a law says in plain english.
Aviation is very complex and highly technical industry and though the panel of experts in the legalise language may determine what the law says, it needs other people to argue what the law actually means. These people are called lawyers.
Lawyers are people who have an understanding of legalise, but must be briefed by experts who understand technical matters.
Unfortunately not too many people in CAsA have a great understanding of technical matters, the real expertise lies with the industry, which may be a reason why they don't do so well in courts.
Unfortunately Lawyers cost a lot of money and not to many aviation operators can afford them, having spent all their money on proving to the regulator that they are at least capable of complying with the regulations that they don't understand or which defy logic. Also they have to employ a lot of unproductive people who's job it is to continually attempt to unravel what the regulations mean, amend the companies regulations in accordance with the constantly varying opinions of the ever changing parade of CAsA enforcement officers. Even then, after agreement is reached between CAsA officers and their industry counterparts that compliance is achieved, CAsA management, at any time, may countermand that, bringing an operation to a stop.
That is the sovereign risk facing anyone invested or contemplating investment in Aviation.
When regulations have a detrimental affect on an operator or unintended consequences become apparent, CAsA may issue exemptions to the law as opposed to amending the law. An expensive exercise and in reality only open to large operators, and the flawed law remains in force.
An exemption may be issued largely because big operators quite often have considerable political affiliations, which they might use to severely embarrass CAsA. Also CAsA dread being dragged before a panel of legalise language experts where it could become apparent that their regulations are in fact gobbledygook, which would really be extremely embarrassing.
Some would say the above is a product of my warped imagination. I'm prepared to accept that.
CAsA however will never admit their warped attempts at regulation are in any way gobbledygook nor fit for purpose, nor that they are morally corrupt.
That their complex amateur regulations have unnecessarily destroyed many viable businesses, stifled investment and thrown a lot of people onto the Dole queue, as well as costing the Australian taxpayer a lot of unnecessary wasteful expense.
CASR Part 61 relating to flight crew standards and its attendant Manual of Standards are a classic example of exactly why Australia has become a bit of an international joke. CAsA requires thousands of pages to enunciate what the Americans and New Zealand can do in less than a hundred and still achieve better safety outcomes than us.
CAsA maintain they regulate for safety, which must allegedly be their only consideration. That’s a noble ambition, but why does it take CAsA tens of thousands of pages of indecipherable gobbledygook, which heaps enormous compliance costs and complexity on industry, to achieve a safety record no better than the US or NZ with less than a thousand pages in total?
There has been much talk about high airfares in regional Australia.
When one compares our ticket price against the US for a comparable journey one could ponder how do they manage to do it so cheaply?
What I have never heard from any inquiry is what percentage the cost of compliance adds to a ticket price in Australia.
P7 - GOLD star and a Tim Tam Thorny - nicely done.