Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I hear that, but by saying it's the 'primary', the 'most important', still doesn't mean that by putting in these economic and social considerations, you're not actually weighing these things off against each other. As I said, I understand that the intent was to get rid of unnecessary costs that in fact weren't helping with safety. But my reading of this bill is that it goes far further than that. It's not just my reading. The pilots that have written to us are concerned. The quote I read out from the pilots association said that the danger to the public safety interest comes from a regulator that gets role confused and starts to act like an economic regulator. These are the kinds of things that need to be considered in an inquiry into this bill, because there are different interpretations of what is being proposed here. By adding in these social and economic costs, it may have the best of intentions to not be impacting on safety, but I cannot see it. There's no way of reading it, other than to know that the primacy of safety as the thing that CASA is concerned about is being impacted.

I think the community service flights that Senator Patrick talked about were in fact a good case study of how the regime should work. If there was a sense that by putting safety as the primary consideration that there needed to be other factors that were taken into account, then it would be appropriate for the parliament to be disallowing the regulation, for us as a parliament to make that judgement, rather than for the safety regulator to make that judgement. I am deeply disappointed. There's probably nothing more that you will be able to tell me that will set my heart at rest that we are not undermining the safety standards of our civil aviation safety agency.