AlfaRomeo

Consider yourself fortunate pmc that you haven't experienced so much of RA-Aus that you are familiar with all the ins and outs (and in-outing ). I long for the day when there is nothing much happening in "Governing Bodies" and we can all get back to the fun and informative stuff in the other sections.

If, as Kyneton implies, you are a Victorian resident, you would not have received voting papers because the only candidate, Jim Tatlock, was returned unopposed. No vote needed.

DWF, A lot of good sense in what you say. A couple of questions interspersed below: Independent? of whom? Skills based? - how elected/appointed? Agreed. Nominated? Selected? By whom? I agree but sub-committees have not worked either well or in some cases at all. Consider the Ops Manual Review Committee - years went by with no output and then output went to CASA without any review by the members (NPRM) and, I could be wrong, but I believe some Board Members got no input or comment before it went to CASA. After many years it suddenly became "Urgent" - where have we heard that excuse recently? I believe Middo and Tizzard were responsible for that one. There is a proposed amendment to the Constitution that sets out to recognise the nature of the Secretary and Treasurer roles as oversight rather than hands on. Agree completely. With a 13 members Board and last century communications and small staff there was some merit for an Executive. There is no merit now and would be even less with a 7 member Board. There is a lot of potential available in looking at legal structures of RA-Aus. This work was being done by the Ferrier/Kidd Restructure Committee. I believe they will be doing s presentation to the AGM at Narromine. This is often apparent with older, long serving Board Members who are committed to the past and can't visualise the future. They should move on and let the people with grander vision have a go. Can be done. Have a look at the 15 amendments to be voted on at the AGM this year. The CRC was parked up by the Board for the second time. Myles B who was chair of the CRC resigned from the CRC and the Board to "pursue other opportunities" which we later came to understand to be a lucrative job gifted to him by the then President. This time it was to allow the Restructure Committee to get on with their task. I believe the Board took forever to give the terms of reference to the Restructure Committee if they ever got them. The CRC has restarted but will not have anything to be voted on at the AGM but may have a presentation for us. How do I know? I asked. Why don't we all know? Buggered if I can answer that. Agreed. Have a look at the amendments proposed in the August edition.

I agree Proxy voting is clumsy. It is very messy as we saw at Queanbeyan when there were probably 700+ proxies. Imagine having to count that many and get a verifiable result in a reasonable amount of time. Regarding an address for your Board Rep: C/- RA-Aus, 3/1 Pirie St, Fyshwick, ACT 2609 is sufficient, has been used in the past and not disqualified the proxy. You can direct your Proxy to vote as they see fit on the day rather than direct your Proxy on how you want him/her to vote on each issue. But of course you would want to be sure your Proxy's view on all matters before doing that. One of the proposed amendments to the Constitution attempts to address the problem but the real solution, imho, is postal voting. Why ask somebody else (who you hope gets to the meeting) to vote for you when you could do it for yourself? From the notice on the website concerning the election nominations "Voting will close at 4pm EST, Friday 16th August 2013." From the July edition of SportPilot, page 44: "Voting will close at 4pm EST, Friday 16th August 2013." From the website notice for the NQ By-Election, nominations closed on 31 July 2013. That is too late for the candidates names to appear in the August edition of Sport Pilot and so they will appear in the September edition along with voting papers for residents of NQ. Close of voting for the NQ By-election will be announced in the same edition.

f_t asked the question "Any ideas why the majority of RAA members never vote?" My guess is that RA-Aus members, in the past at least, have not participated in their democracy simply because of the usual Australian cultural reasons . . . ignorance and apathy. The worry is that the ignorance might just have been contrived by the Board to keep the apathy alive and growing. Mushroom cultivation techniques can be very effective. You could certainly believe that contrived ignorance was their strategy by the way they burred up if ever asked a question about wtf they were doing to RA-Aus. That they had to be brought kicking and screaming "witch hunt, pitchforks . . . etc." to Queanbeyan to account for their unholy mess speaks for itself. And then after giving all the assurances sought at Queanbeyan they delivered on none and four months later the mess was simply deeper and smelling even more organic. Respect for CASA's legal requirements nowhere in evidence. But, the apathy would have existed regardless of what the Board does or fails to do as is evidenced by the current half-Board elections. Following the worst period ever experienced by RA-Aus (thanks Middleton, Runciman and Reid), members could still not be bothered to stand for election to the Board or even vote in the election where there was more than one candidate. All but NSW/ACT representatives were "elected" unopposed. Whoever wins in NSW will, after the exercise of preferences, have been elected by as few as 300 members. So, stretching the arithmetic logic a little you could say that half the Board was elected by 300 out of 10,000 members, i.e. 3% of the membership. 97% apathetic?No wonder the previous Boards have felt that they were a law unto themselves. Some have been on the Board for decades and have an awful record but keep backing up for another term and we return them unopposed. Seems in the past we have got the Board Members we deserve. Thank goodness (active members) we have some new blood coming on to the Board in September who have promised good governance as their minimum. Even if RA-Aus gets out of the current quagmire, in short time it will simply fall back into the bog unless there is a fundamental shift in the culture of RA-Aus members. "I just want to go flying" has surely proved to be unsustainable? It is remarkably like "She'll be right". How many CFI's impress on their students that it is important to take an interest in what's going on in Fyshwick? How many CFIs identify students with strong high level management experience and suggest they consider running for the Board? Instead we end up with 80% CFIs on the Board all who have a vested interest in RA-Aus being successful but also with a perceived conflict of interest on almost every matter that the Board considers. Democracy is the best form of government? I don't think so. You have to remember that half the population have below average intelligence! And a lot of the other half lack our common sense. I was persuaded by my old dad that a benevolent dictatorship is a far superior form of government but then you run into the "Power Corrupts" syndrome and we're back to an ordinary crap democracy.

Perhaps to wrap this one up, a quick read of the RA-Aus website would show any member that the SMS is now being progressed by the Board to CASA's satisfaction. CASA would not be happy it is late but content, so they say, that it is now progressing satisfactorily. No doubt they will keep a close eye on its implementation.

Mick, my vote with your name on it has been mailed. We need people on the Board with your capabilities. Fellow members, don't forget to put your member number on the back or else they won't count your vote. Voting in NSW/ACT is your responsibility - otherwise we will get the people on the Board we deserve!

80kts, So much of that I agree with. My biggest disagreement with KRudd is that I won't get to vote against her and see all her chickens come home to roost. Your argument is essentially that we need diversity and of course I agree with that. All lawyers and accountants would be as bad as having 80% CFIs. Having two of our Board with knowledge that keeps us legally compliant within legal strictures would not be a bad thing compared with the ignorance that has got us into the mess we are in now.

Bryon, If Maj was standing for Technical Director, I'd go along with you. From what I have read on here of his aviation maintenance experience and knowledge he'd definitely be the man. But, what we need on the Board are people with skills and experience of Board level management. No question Maj is a good bloke, an experienced pilot and a skilled aviation engineer but that doesn't necessarily set him up to be successful at Board Level. Please correct me if I'm wrong but I seem to recall Maj supporting the concept that it is OK for Board Members to ignore the Constitution if the feel the need to. If you or I wanted to do something contrary to what the Constitution dictates then we'd have to go through the process of developing an amendment to the Constitution and getting 75% of the voting membership to agree to the change. What is the point of having a Constitution if Board Members feel it doesn't apply to them? And why would you elect a person to the Board if they declare that the Constitution only applies to them when it suits them?

Keith, I know you would be disappointed if I went all quiet and didn't help you with this issue. So, rather than risk your ire by keeping quiet, I'll do as you bid and offer a few comments that I hope you find helpful. The big issues here are fair democratic principles and a Board with the capability to keep us out of the crap we are currently in up to our eyeballs. In a truly democratic organisation the "rep to member ratio" would be the same for all regions - that is the vote of every member is exactly the same. This feature of a representative democracy is usually framed as "one vote one value." When you don't have that, as was the case I believe in the Sunshine State for many years, you have a gerrymander - not invented by Joh but very successfully adopted by him I'm told by my banana bending cousins. We do not have one vote one value in RA-Aus because of the distortion of NQ, NT and Tassie and to a lesser extent in SA and WA. In each of the smaller (member numbers) regions a handful of members elect a Board Rep (or don't bother to vote and the sole candidate is elected unopposed no matter how unsuited they might be to operate at Board level). When our "founding fathers" set out to allow for all sorts of things like jam tin and string communications and small-minded, parochial, xenophobic members from big states and low potential Island dwellers they came up with a system that has not served us well. Look what the Apple Isle has put on the Board for the last 25 years or so. This is the Board Rep who gave his mate Tizzard the CEO job after sacking a high potential CEO in Robbie Costemeyer. In NSW/ACT the ratio is about 1,000 members per Board Rep from NSW/ACT. You tell me what the ratio would be for NQ or NT or Tassie. Considering the bulk of the membership is resident in SQ, NSW/ACT/VIC the "geographical balance" is way out of wack. But, jump into the 21st Century for a bit and consider the fact that we are not Queenslanders, Sand Gropers, etc. but Australians. We have one CASA and one set of air laws - not one for each state or region. We have the same issues whether you live in Albany WA or Cooktown Qld., Maitland NSW or Maitland SA. States and regions have no bearing on anything. The only value state boundaries have any more is to make football and cricket games a bit more interesting. The most important thing about the people we put into the top tier of policy making in RA-Aus is the quality of their qualifications, experience and the skills and judgement they possess, the effort they are prepared to bring to the task and their integrity and ethical principles. Their Postcode adds exactly nothing to their capability to run RA-Aus. A member from Victoria who is an experienced company law barrister is surely better suited to be Board Secretary than a mechanic from North Queensland. It is really is that simple.

TP, I think you will find that we are a lot closer on this than others may deduce from our "discussion". We both agree that RA-Aus needs a Safety System and in my 5 minutes on the Board, we signed off on a Safety System that CASA was pleased to give us a tick for. The full Board, with the exception of Myles Breitkreutz (who, ironically, judged it not critical he attend), underwent an intensive Risk Management workshop that was sponsored by CASA and would have been paid for by CASA if the Board hadn't taken forever to get around to doing the workshop. That sfa had since happened with the roll-out of the RA-Aus System remains beyond my influence. It is now, as it has been since February 2012, in the hands of the Board. There is no doubt that every enterprise, to be successful, needs to operate systematically. A system, as you know, can be summarised along the lines of input, processing and output, with a feedback loop to continuously correct and improve the process. This applies to every facet of an operation. Nobody has argued on here, that I know of, that RA-Aus does not have safety obligations. No smart thinking person would argue that those obligations could be met other than systematically. For a system to function well, it needs good fundamental design, sound introduction and managed for continuous improvement based on data feedback. Then we come back to the question of Scale. You seem content that a one-man FTF would run a different scale of Safety System to an airline. So lets look at a big operation in a high risk industry. A mining operation of one of our big two miners, BHP B or Rio Tinto, typically involves assets in the range of $1 billion +/- a few hundred million. Typically, they can directly employ of the order of 1,000 people on site plus a considerable number of contractors. Each such site would have a manager dedicated to the Safety System and he/she would typically have an assistant. This is a support not a line function. The responsibility for the sound, effective operation of the Safety System is with line managers - not the Safety Manager. So, how about an operation the scale of RA-Aus? RA-Aus has assets of less than $2.5 million and a staff of 15. A permanent, full-time Safety Manager in an operation of that size is, as a professional organisation specialist might put it, "nuts". What's worse than the level of overkill is the adverse effect of that role on the line functions of Operations and Technical. But you've heard enough from me on that score. It is fair that you could point out that the 3,500+ aircraft with a value of somewhere approaching $200 million are the subject of the RA-Aus safety system as are the 10,000 pilots and perhaps up to a similar number of passengers and perhaps 10 times that number of people exposed to the overflying by RA-Aus aircraft. But, we already have an Ops and Asst Ops Managers looking after these Pilots and the 200 odd FTFs and we have a Tech and Asst Tech Manager with specialist contractor backup looking after aircraft construction and maintenance safety standards. In an organisation the size of RA-Aus, the GM ends up with accountability for everything. That is why when you have inadequate performance in that role that everything goes sub-standard and progree is indetectable. Each line Manager has Safety as a key component of their accountabilities. In my experience this is emphasised by being put as the 1st accountability in their role descriptions. All these people are pretty busy and have to cover a very wide range of disciplines. They do need the support of an experienced aviation safety professional to design and implement and subsequently AUDIT the safety system if it's going to do more than fill a lot of shelves with paper. But, the practice of safety management is the job of the Ops and Tech Managers - it is their very reason for being - it is what they do.

Sorry Turbo but for once I must categorically disagree with you. RA-Aus is not a large or even medium organisation. With 15 employees, it qualifies as a small business. For an SMS to be successful in a small business, it must be scaled to fit the organisation or else it will do more to harm safety than enhance it as everyone's time gets absorbed with paperwork instead of walking around and doing safety. RA-Aus needs to operate safely not just operate a complex safety system. In my view, a permanent safety manager erodes "safety" out of the jobs of the Operations and Technical Managers. Safety is a line function for line managers. They certainly need support to do the leg work of getting a suitable SMS in place but it is not helpful for the responsibility of managing safely to be supplanted by a permanent staff function. Safety of pilots and their passengers and the general public they fly over is not the responsibility of the Safety Manager it is the responsibility of the PIC, their aircraft maintainer and the Ops and Tech Managers. Surely what RA-Aus needs is a consultant with demonstrated expertise at establishing a SMS in the Aviation arena? There are a number of such organisations and RA-Aus has been in discussions with them very recently. Consultants are much better at auditing systems than the people who designed or operate the system. Consultants can be expensive but for a relatively short duration. A smart safety system is infrastructure in much the same way as the office building and computer systems. It is indeed a pity that we haven't all been advised about what is happening in this area particularly all the "sky is falling" warnings from Ed. While we can all hope that the Board will tell us soon, hoping and complaining about it here won't achieve a single (useful) thing. I will contact by Board Reps today and ask them to tell us all what is happening in this area and I urge all RA-Aus members to do likewise. I strongly agree with you that it is not appropriate to enter into a detailed public discussion of Myles's suitability for the role. From the outcomes we know of, you could logically deduce that the judgement of the Board Majority, who do know Myles, is that he was not suitable and that the process for his selection was not in keeping with sound management practices nor demonstrably ethical and nor in keeping with the principles of good governance which our Board Members are obliged to observe. It is time to let go of this unsavoury episode of improper conduct and cronyism and get on with the future.

Qui Amazing that you can draw so many conclusions based on not having read something. I had what I thought were the good manners to read what you wrote and give you a detailed, considered reply. Where are your manners? I am not a mind reader, I can only read what you write. If you want to supply an interpreter, I'd be happy to work with him/her.

OK Keith, I'm going to ignore my own advice to myself and go for one last attempt to reason with you. "Alfa old friend" is much preferable to your canine allusions of earlier even if you couldn't help playing the man and not the ball when you started to infer motives suggesting "egos" rather than logic were the reasons for our comments. Nothing challenges my mind more than trying to fathom the impenetrable depths of your posts. I should enjoy the challenge but I clearly don't. This is a good example of where you don't challenge what was said, the logic or factuality you ascribe motive with no evidence offered. The mess we are in now was created by a club thing - the old boys club with jobs for the mates like Tizzard and Breitkreutz. It took probably 10 years to dig this hole and the old boys club has been in ascendency on the Board, or like Middo in management, over that time. Its members include Reid, Middo, Breitkreutz, Caban and more recent recruits Runciman and Herring. Look a little closer Keith - good governance is required by the Corporations Laws it is not an option. We are the shareholders of this Incorporated Association and the Board has a duty to follow our rules not make their own up as they go along. It involves following the rules laid down by the members in the Constitution. It involves obeying the Law. The biggest political group in RA-Aus at the moment would be the 700 or so aircraft owners whose aircraft are collecting dust in a hangar. Believe me they are not happy, Jan. There were more than 300 members who called the Board to account for their appalling performance in failing 4 CASA Audits and getting our Registration privilege withdrawn. But you want us to ignore that? Its all just "political"? If you can find anyone else to support that viewpoint let us know. I completely agree with you Keith that the people we have been very critical of have not gone out of their way to make things worse. That they have achieved that while thinking they were doing their best demonstrates the level of their incompetence and the need for them to pursue other activities outside of RA-Aus administration. This is not about political groups or egos. It is about RA-Aus being all but destroyed by people who hung around at the top of RA-Aus long after passing their use-by date. The organisation that they may have served well in the past simply out grew their ability to manage it. The results of that are the lamentable situation that RA-Aus finds itself in. Have a look around Keith, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and nobody is enjoying having to swallow this rotten pie.

Et tu bruteass? OK - no, it is not the way to run a 10,000 member organisation - did you miss that bit in my post #936? But, asking for info on a forum is not the best way to solve the problem either. If it takes 10,000 phone calls to persuade the Board that being telephoned by members is not a useful communications system then why not ring you rep(s)? What "Alfa" and "B/S" in the same sentence - impossible! I see the Tech Manager is doing this but the info is still not sufficient to understand if they are getting on top or just holding ground. There's not much indication that they are winning. It is true that a lot of the problems we now face were created by a Board that operated in an information blackout. If we had heard of three CASA Audit failures we might not have been surprised when CASA pulled the rug out from under aircraft rego. We might even have had a word to our Board Reps to find out wtf they were/were not doing. Still, the new Exec, burdened as it is with a poorly performing Secretary (Mr Communication?) has only been in office for 20 days. Their first big test comes up tomorrow as to whether they achive or breach the Constitution requirement to report on finances within 30 days from end of year. If people here are prepared to put together a list of, say, five topics they would like reported on on the website each week I'd be happy to pass it on to Mark Clayton. Action speaks louder than . . . .