Tone Deaf & Colour Blind

With the ink barely dry on a scathing review of its performance, CASA finds itself in another controversy

Though CASA has made no public comment about the Aviation Safety Regulation Review released at the end of May, the results of the government-ordered inquiry could hardly have been received as a compliment. Appearing to foreshadow a significant overhaul of the air safety regulator, the review described CASA as inappropriately adversarial, a poor communicator, and so out of touch with the industry it oversees that its leadership was only dimly aware of how deeply it was resented.

If those judgments left CASA feeling chastised, however, it didn’t immediately show. Barely a week after the review was released, the agency was back in the news over an episode that, to critics, displayed exactly thekind of heavy-handed touch for which it had just been criticised.