Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker Ewen Jones, I take this opportunity to congratulate you on your elevation to the Speakers' Panel. It is good to see you up there, and I am sure you will bring a level of intensity and a dedication to the role that it deserves. Congratulations to you.

I rise to contribute to this debate on the Civil Aviation Amendment (CASA Board) Bill 2014, and in doing so acknowledge the importance of a strong, experienced, balanced and fair Civil Aviation Safety Authority to Australia and to my electorate of Swan. Obviously, most members in this place will know that I have the Perth airport in my electorate. I share that with the member for Hasluck; I have all the good bits and he has the brickworks and some of the other industrial areas! But I have the runways—all the stuff that people in my electorate and outside my electorate go to to spend time in the observation area for, watching the planes coming in and out of Perth.

The people in my electorate of Swan often remark that they can almost touch the planes as they come in to land at Perth airport, particularly over the residential areas. My office does receive calls from residents where there are aircraft that seem to be flying particularly close to the ground. Just to give you some background: in 2008 we had some aircraft flight routes change due to the WARRP process, which was initiated by CASA around the issue of safety. There was no consultation with stakeholders—people in my community and people around the CBD of Perth. Because of that, we received a lot of calls with regard to changes in flight paths. We managed to get a Senate inquiry in Perth on that issue. At the same time, we directed a lot of inquiries towards the then Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, the member for Grayndler, who has also spoken on this bill.

In fact, the billion-dollar Gateway WA Perth Airport and Freight Access Project is in my electorate of Swan. That is a major roads upgrade project on the periphery of the airport and bordering residential areas in the Belmont area. This involves land excavation and works to ensure that complex interchanges sit at an acceptable height so as not to interfere with low-flying incoming aircraft. This again comes under the auspices of CASA. They would have had some involvement in making sure that the safety of the aircraft and the people on the ground was paramount.

As the Minister for Infrastructure explained yesterday in question time, this is a roads project that could never have been delivered under the previous government, which had said that the funding for the project would come from the mining tax. I am sure we are all aware in this place that the mining tax never raised any money. It is an anti-Western Australian tax. I mention the project during this speech because it is closely associated with the safety around the airport, which CASA oversees.

Safety is certainly always in the minds of residents and workers in my electorate of Swan, and I am pleased to be able to comment on this bill today. The bill's primary purpose is to give effect to an election commitment, made by the coalition and announced on 30 August 2013, to increase the membership of the CASA board. This is an increase from five members to seven. The bill also makes two minor amendments, consequential to increasing the size of the board. These amendments increase the number of board members required to constitute a quorum at a board meeting and increase the number of board members required to initiate an ad hoc board meeting.

This is a government that delivers on its commitments to the Australian people. It will deliver on these commitments to reform the structure of CASA. Part of this reform involves enhancing CASA's abilities to function as Australia's key aviation safety regulator by establishing a firm strategic direction for the organisation. The need for increasing the size of the board comes from the need to put some aviation experience on the board—which it currently does not have.

I received an email yesterday from one of my constituents in Langford. The member for Tangney is next to me. I am sure that he knows Langford, because it used to be in his electorate. The member for Tangney is also going to speak on this bill, because his office is also hounded by people who are complaining about aircraft noise. The constituent who wrote to me yesterday nominated that he is a pilot. He says:

As background I am a pilot who is very frustrated by what I see as unrestrained corruption and overreach in CASA. I'm not going to bore you with a diatribe about it but CASA really is Royal Commission territory as it appears that ultimate power ultimately corrupts.

So obviously there is a perception within the industry and the public that there need to be changes to the board of CASA.

As our pre-election policy outlined, CASA's board has been repeatedly established, abandoned and re-established. While boards in other agencies have been successful in setting and implementing the strategic direction of their agencies, CASA's board structure has been the subject of criticism.

While CASA was established in July 1995, under an update to the Civil Aviation Act, the CASA board in its previous form was established under the previous government in 2009. As I said before, CASA's involvement in the flight path changes in the electorate of Swan at the Perth airport was extensive. The WARRP review was undertaken to change aircraft flight patterns, which CASA, at that particular time, believed were unsafe. As I said, the outcome of that review was a Senate inquiry which made some recommendations to the government about what changes should be made to consultation between CASA and Airservices Australia when future changes are made to flight paths.

Following the Senate inquiry, the then member for Pearce, Ms Moylan, and I put its recommendations into a bill, the Air Services (Aircraft Noise) Amendment Bill 2011. While the bill was focused on changes to Air Services Australia, it was certainly brought in in the aftermath of the CASA flight path review of Perth airport. As Judi Moylan said in her first reading speech:

The apparent clandestine nature of the processes precipitating the flight path changes, however, as well as the uncertainty and the inconsistency of the rationale for not providing the CASA report to the public, highlights some of the current flaws in the consultation process and the reason for such disquiet from within the community.

The relationship between Air Services Australia and CASA is an interesting one and needs to be considered. The bill drew the support of the Liberal Party, the National Party, the Greens and initially the Independents but was then voted down. There was extensive consultation with the Australian aviation authorities but it seemed to fall upon deaf ears. I remind the House that that bill was lost by one vote in the House. Unfortunately, it displayed the fact that the Labor Party had no interest in helping the residents of Perth with aircraft noise. I am sure the member for Tangney was just as disappointed as I was that the Labor Party spoke about aircraft noise in Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane, where we saw many Labor ministers fighting for their constituents, but when it came to Perth airport, they had no interest at all and voted the bill down.

I note the member for Grayndler's contribution to the debate yesterday evening in the chamber and his call for a non-partisan approach to civil aviation safety. But I have to take issue with the member for Grayndler on a couple of points he made in his speech. The member called for everyone to support the government of the day on issues related to CASA, but many constituents would find that difficult following the Western Australian Route Review Project, which was conducted in near secrecy, altering flight paths over my electorate of Swan and in Tangney, Hasluck, Pearce and Canning. This was of course the finding of the Senate inquiry in 2010. CASA's operations should be transparent and the people should be informed about changes to flight paths in the airspace above their houses. It was not good enough for the previous government not to explain these changes to the people of Swan, just responding that it was all down to 'safety matters', a continual line during that period by the previous government. It is good to see we are finally getting some action from this government to improve the performance of CASA by having some board members who have aviation experience. This is a view I know the minister also shares. I remember a freedom of information request by the former member for Pearce coming back to her with line after line redacted—it was virtually pages of black lines, demonstrating how secret the previous government kept their report.

It is certainly not the case that flight paths cannot be adjusted safely. We have seen this recently with an ongoing trial to change a flight path over the member for Hasluck's electorate. The response of the public has been very positive to these changes and, as I understand, the authorities are completely satisfied with the safety result. So it is not acceptable for CASA to just respond with 'safety reasons' to every inquiry about flight paths. It is, I feel, a lazy approach.

Secondly the member for Grayndler spoke about the white paper, and I say to the member that parts of that white paper were highly partisan. There was a section talking about a curfew review for Brisbane Airport—coincidentally an issue affecting former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's electorate. There was nothing for Perth, though, which remained one of the few major airports in Australia with no noise amelioration measures. Along with the member for Tangney, we have spoken to constituents and public groups advocating that there be a review of the ANEF contour system because under the current system only about 60 houses in Perth qualify for any noise amelioration similar to Adelaide and Sydney. There needs to be a review of that ANEF contour system so that we can move forward in trying to get the same noise amelioration schemes that the people of Sydney and Adelaide are the beneficiaries of.

I think the comments by the member for Grayndler are simplistic and not reflective of what happened under his government. I sought on many occasions during the last parliament to have a meeting with the member for Grayndler to present the concerns of my constituents. But in all that time that he was the minister, he never met with me once. It shows that, with regard to the concerns of the people of Perth, his focus was eastern-centric. He was however only too keen to travel to Western Australia at the time of the last state election to meet with the state Labor candidate Hannah Beazley, who was running for a seat in the member for Tangney's area. He was all over that and spruiking the talk, but in the six years I was the member he never met with me once. I think that says it all about his commitment to nonpartisanship in this area.

The Perth Airport and the aviation industry are vital to the Western Australia economy and it is vital to our mining industry. We need to make sure that we have a healthy board that overlooks Western Australia and the Perth Airport and that we have people with experience on that board.

I would like to finish with a comment from a recent meeting I had with CASA. The member for Tangney would know that there is a flight path which takes off from Perth Airport and heads south and then heads to the west and goes down the river. It is a consistent flight path for all of the fly-in and fly-outs to the north-west of our great city for the mining people. The flights are from 6 o'clock in the morning and there are a consistent 90 flights within a short period of time, which has a real effect on the lives of people in that particular flight path. In looking at the sharing of those flight paths and the aircraft noise, we asked CASA to look at making a trident type flight path where there could be three legs heading out so that some of the noise could be shared and it would not all be concentrated in one space. The answer, typically, came back from CASA that it was a safety issue and they could not look at it. It was really disappointing that they continue to hide behind safety issues. We need some people with aviation experience on the board who can look at these types of things for the benefit of people in Perth and around the Perth Airport. I support the bill.

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