GA Fights for Survival

For readers who missed Australian Aviation’s earlier report, the Civil Aviation Authority has been directed to extract an additional $10 million from the aviation industry as a whole during 1993-94 to partly fund the Regulatory and Surveillance aspects of the CAA’s Safety Regulatory Function. Further charges to be levied upon the industry at an increasing rate during 1994-95 would recover more than $23 million by 1995-96 – claimed to represent full cost recovery for these functions. (In-depth analysis of the situation was provided in our April 92 [p67] and June [p63] issues).

The CAA cost recovery proposal outlined at the industry meetings envisages charging for services provided for safety regulation and standards setting, including industry surveillance by CAA officers, on an hourly basis. During 1993/94, General Aviation flying operations surveillance would be charged out to operators at the rate of $110 per hour, with airworthiness surveillance at $80 per hour. Basic charges for a Category III (single pilot RPT) Air Operator’s Certificate holder would amount to $4180 for flying operations surveillance and $2640 for airworthiness surveillance. Additional charges would be made according to the number of checkpilots engaged in the company, aircraft types and synthetic trainers in use, and revenue hours flown.

At the other end of the scale, a Category V (flying school limited to visual operations) Certificate holder would pay a basic fee of $2200, plus $440 if it also held a charter licence, with a further $1100 for an Instructor Rating course. Fees for General Aviation maintenance surveillance would range from a basic charge of $4320 plus $2400 per base for a Class A maintenance organisation, to $1200 per base for a Limited Class B organisation. Additional charges would be levied to cover surveillance of component overhauls.

The overall industry reaction to the series of “consultative” meetings has made it overwhelmingly clear that such charges are completely unacceptable. Even at the proposed initial 50% recovery rate, their impact on the industry would probably force most small General Aviation operators out of business. Further charges, based on full cost recovery, could not even be contemplated.

Devastating though the prospect is for the GA industry, it is of little use for operators to vent its spleen on CAA staff, tempting though this may be the understandable but age-old reaction to “shoot the messenger”. But when all is said and done, CAA staff are merely firing the bullets made for them, as the CAA’s Lawry Cohen, Manager, Industry Support Branch, of the Safety Regulation and Standards Division, (and former editor of Australian Flying), repeatedly and defensively stated during his chairmanship of the series of industry meetings.

It is quite true that this particular chairman’s demeanor during some of the meetings did little to endear himself to those attending, or to reassure them that their expressed grave concerns for the future of the industry would be faithfully conveyed to the CAA Board. Nevertheless, it has to be said that numbers of CAA staff, particularly those who have survived from the days of the old Department, and those who have been recruited from the industry itself – are sympathetic to the needs of General Aviation and share the concern for its future. So where are these destructive policies emanating from? To whom should the industry appeal before it is too late? To the CAA Board?They, like the CAAitself, are men under orders. To the politicians elected representatives? Are they the ones who have collectively decided that General Aviation is irrelevant? It seems doubtful.

Two decades ago, General Aviation in Australia was riding high. Traditionally regarded over many years as the basis for civil aviation as a whole and the key to overcoming the nation’s pervading tyranny of distance, it was a growth industry. The Department of Civil Aviation was continuing to develop improved facilities, light aircraft sales were booming, the pilot population was burgeoning, and all manner of commercial services were prospering. And it was still universally considered a good thing for the nation’s development.

How then do we account for the complete reversal of official attitude to General Aviation that is so manifest today? Is there some sort of a conspiracy in high places to quietly do away with General Aviation? If so, why? The change is undoubtedly part of a subtle but fundamental change in the whole national ethos over the past 20 years-one that has taken traditional, politically naive Australians (like most aviators), largely unawares. Unlike the past official concern and sense of responsibility for the welfare of the nation’s rural and isolated communities, today’s official preoccupation with multiculturalism, immigration and urban development spares scant sympathy for the plight and future development of our hinterland – except perhaps as a source of tourist dollars. This official disregard for traditional Australians in such communities – once regarded as the backbone of the nation – amounts to little less than contempt.

I well remember the shock of first encountering such attitudes in the halls of power in Canberra some 10 years ago. During a visit to the Bureau of Transport Economics, I happened to be told that air mail subsidies for third level airlines serving remote settlements in Queensland’s gulf country were to be discontinued. I protested that for these communities, the regular air service was a veritable lifeline-not simply for mail, but for communication, medical supplies, and the necessities of life. Unbelievably, the response from the comfortable Canberra bureaucrats (who clearly had no concept of life in nonurban Australian society) was a cold and clinical: “If those sort of townships cannot become financially viable, then they will have to die”. (A similar situation exists today where Australia Post’s new Print Post category for magazines and periodicals sees a doubling, even tripling of mailing costs to rural subscribers. Ed) This is surely an illustration of the “culture” that has grown up within today’sCommonwealth bureaucracy-a far cry from industry might confer on the nation is far outweighed by the cost of administering it, and the political and community inconvenience if generates, particularly in urban areas, Excep- tional, necessary GA services such as aerial ambulance and Flying Doctor operations can be dealt with as special cases, perhaps under contract with the major airlines.

General Aviation, as Australia has known it, is therefore irrelevant. Like the Jews in Nazi Germany, it has been quietly marked out for “elimination” – not by any overt action that could cause major political embarrassment – but quietly and by stealth.

It is naive therefore to imagine that impassioned pleas and appeals to officialdom on the basis of “fairness” to General Aviation can produce any real or lasting effect. The short lived rejoicing over the apparent abolition of the proposed Safety Tax is testimony to that. Neither is any hair splitting argument over how industry cost recovery could be better apportioned – such as by a minimal ticket tax as AOPA and the General Aviation Association has proposed – likely to be to any avail. The only action that will change the agenda is a massive political noise produced by a concerted effort on the part of all whose livelihoods and interests are affected. And perhaps only in the National Party, with its old Australian roots and traditional concern for the non-urban sector of the nation, will GA find an ally with the political clout to do something about it before it is too late.

The time is long past for the intense individualism and narrow self interest that has characterised and defeated General Aviation’s attempts to present a united political front in the past. The industry simply has to pull together if it is to survive. Every individual will have to put aside his or her particular prejudices to encourage and get behind the combined efforts of the Australian Aviation Industry Association. Only such concerted action can produce the political impact necessary to effect the required change in government and bureaucratic attitudes.

The GA industry is fighting for its very existence! the days when air services were seen as essential to the maintenance and development of our remoter centres of population, and a valuable national resource in terms of defence.

It is vain to imagine that matters would have been vastly different had a Liberal Government come to power in the recent Federal election. One has only to recall the Fraser Government’s refusal to honour its former shadow minister’s promise to restore the Department of Civil Aviation following the unexpected dismissal of the Whitlam Government, to be reminded that politicians usually do what is expedient, not what is right.

What is expedient in government circles today is the implementation of the “user pays” principle-not just to aviation, but to almost every facet of the nation’s life. Is now a bipartisan view, for which we have to thank the excesses of the Whitlam Government in overturning long established practice in so many areas.

But while it is the Government in power that makes policy, it is the permanent bureaucracy that implements it – the entrenched, senior power brokers of the Commonwealth Government public service. As all devotees of “Yes Minister” appreciate, it is not the elected politicians who make the running in these matters. Government Ministers come and go, but the senior career bureaucrats – those who determine and effect the detail of broad government policy – abide forever. In its zeal to promote the current “user pays” culture, the bureaucracy had clearly targeted many areas of former government expenditure, one of them the costly overall infrastructure of aviation. That part of it which services the major airline industry clearly cannot be drastically curtailed. But the bureaucracy has obviously decided that Australia no longer needs a General Aviation industry. It is no longer needed for the sake of remote Australia, because remote Australia must stand on its own feet. It is no longer needed as a training ground for the airlines, for the airlines now have operations like the Ansett- BAe College at Tamworth.

In the view of the bureaucracy, any small benefit the GA