Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Aged Care, Disabilities and Carers) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the motion from Senator O’Brien to conduct an inquiry into the operations of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority in Australia. In doing so, I am speaking on behalf of the families of the 15 people who were tragically killed in May of last year in the accident known now as the Lockhart River disaster. Can I also say to Senator Ferris that I reject absolutely any allegation that this inquiry has a political motivation. The families of those people who were killed are desperate to understand what led to that disaster. It is part of the grieving process that an understanding of why an event occurred needs to be found in order to even start thinking of any sense of closure. I am actually quite annoyed, to the point of angered, that there would be a suggestion that an inquiry such as we are proposing would be a political inquiry, as she has suggested. It is an inquiry that is in the public interest, and it is in the interest of those 15 families.

Since the disaster in May 2005, a series of allegations about the operations of Transair and its sister company in Cairns have been made. Three separate former pilots of Transair came to us, and their allegations were aired in Senate estimates. They alleged serious mismanagement by this company and serious lack of maintenance of their aircraft prior to the disaster. These were serious allegations, and they were not allegations from an opposition operator; these were allegations from inside the company. We have had to take those allegations through the Senate estimates process to try to find out some answers on behalf of the families.

As I said, former pilots have made some serious allegations and other airline operators based in North Queensland have also made allegations. It has come down to using Senate estimates to try to get some understanding of whether or not these allegations have any basis in truth. Since the disaster last year, my colleagues and I have used every estimates to try to get CASA to explain what they knew and when they knew it about the operations of Transair. Basically, every time we have asked questions I have essentially been patted on the head and told that it is okay, that everything is fine. Our questions have been partially answered. I have to say that I believe CASA has been uncooperative and unhelpful in assisting to test the serious allegations that various people have made. In fact, in May of last year, Mr Gemmell from CASA was asked by a colleague of mine about another audit that had been conducted. The question was:

You did this safety audit on TransAir back in February-March. Media reports ... suggest that CASA gave TransAir a clean bill of health ...

Mr Gemmell said:

Clean bill of health stuff, I think I said last night ...

These are the sorts of answers that I have been receiving: ‘Everything is fine. Stop worrying about it, Senator McLucas. Everything is going on okay.’ But continually we are receiving more and more allegations of things that are not going right. So we turn up again at Senate estimates and continue to ask those questions.

We have had two ATSB interim factual reports, as I recall to this point. I do not think that they have given any comfort to the families about the operations of Transair and the operations of that flight that went from Bamaga to Lockhart River on that day. The first interim factual report indicated that the cockpit voice recorder was not functioning. So we do not have any information about the last minutes of that flight. We do not know what occurred. The report also indicated that there was no load sheet left at Bamaga, the port of departure. Further, this was normal practice from Transair. They did not bother leaving a load sheet so that someone could find out what the weight on the plane actually was.

The third thing that we found in that first interim factual report was that human factor management training, which was mandated in the operations manual, was not complied with by pilots that were flying that plane. That sounds like a technical item that was identified in that factual report, but the thing that troubles me about that is that every time I ask CASA why they did not ensure that the pilot and the copilot of that plane had undertaken human factor management training, even though it was mandated in the operations manual, they tell me that they do not worry about making sure that everything that is mandated in the operations manual is actually complied with. I have to say I get pretty offended when Mr Gemmell tells me that they do not follow up everything that is in the operations manual because they put things in the operations manual like ‘you have to wear a long-sleeved white shirt and epaulets’ and they could not be bothered following that up. He then equates human factor management training with a white shirt and epaulets. I have to say that the people that I talk to in Far North Queensland find that mighty offensive.

The second interim factual report was also pretty revealing. Basically, it confirmed that the regulatory oversight of Transair—that is, the operation of CASA—was still a matter under investigation. The ATSB itself was looking at the way that CASA was providing regulation over Transair.

Those two interim factual reports raised more questions than answers in the minds of the families and more questions in my mind, and they were questions that needed to be answered. So, as usual, I turned up at Senate estimates last round, having indicated in advance to CASA that I was going to ask some questions about the enforceable voluntary undertaking that had been signed between Transair and CASA on, I think, 5 May this year. When I started asking questions about the EVU at Senate estimates I was pretty annoyed when Mr Byron essentially said: ‘We have not got that detail with us here. We’ll take that on notice.’ That has been his tactic right from the beginning—not to have the material with him and to say: ‘That’s fine. We’ll take that on notice. That’s very complex, Senator.’ I actually found his behaviour towards me quite patronising and offensive, so I said, ‘No, you will answer these questions tonight.’

It was only after really pushing him that he finally said, almost as an aside, ‘Oh, by the way, you probably need to know that we’ve withdrawn Transair’s air operating certificate.’ This is the company that operated the flight that killed 15 people in Far North Queensland—‘Oh, by the way, Senator, we’ve just taken away their AOC, something that might be of interest to you.’ I then had to extract from them bit by bit what the enforceable voluntary undertaking actually enumerated.

The act requires CASA, when it has made an undertaking with a company, to place ‘details’ of an EVU on its website. The ‘details’ of the EVU run to about 15 lines and give people no information of what that EVU entails. As Senator O’Brien has said, the EVU is alarming. The EVU points to an ongoing failing by CASA to maintain, in my view, any regulation of Transair since 2001. The third point of the EVU states:

The company was the subject of CASA audits in November 2001, August 2004, February 2005 and February 2006, which disclosed to CASA auditors that it had ongoing compliance and structural problems.

This is not something that happened after the accident; this has been ongoing since 2001. How do you think the families of those 15 people feel when they read that and know that CASA placed on its website not that document but a paltry—