Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to support the disallowance. The reason for this is pretty clear to me, having worked in a number of workplaces in my life. The best way to encourage increased performance is to have a culture in which people can talk about ways to improve what they do and cite examples of where things have not been done as well as they might. If you have a culture of self-improvement then you have a culture in which people report on where mistakes have been made and how things can be done better. If you introduce a criminal sanction for individuals, as this does by bringing in a criminal sanction against a pilot who for some reason does something such that the cockpit door is unlocked or some issue occurs in relation to cockpit security, then they will not report. If they know that by reporting on that they will incriminate themselves and then be liable for a serious criminal offence, you are going to introduce a culture of secrecy and cover-up and at best people turning a blind eye to things that have happened, because they do not want other people to suffer criminal consequences over matters that might be inadvertent and quite innocent.

It is appropriate that the companies have liability, because it is up to the corporation to have a culture of self-improvement and improved safety standards and it is up to airlines to institute that with their pilots. But I really do not like a scenario where a criminal sanction is introduced such that it is not in the pilot’s interests to report and to engage in real self-monitoring of the security system. It is pretty clear to me that you are changing from a culture of encouraging appropriate monitoring and appropriate self-evaluation and improvement to a culture of secrecy and cover-up. That is not in the best interests of security.

It will also cause a lot of conflict, I believe, because there will be people who think that something ought to be reported but who are reluctant to report it because they know that someone is going to suffer the consequences of criminal sanctions and so on and so forth. Everybody is clearly interested in airline security.

I concur with what Senator Macdonald has said. I have been on many flights across Bass Strait in the old days of the Focker Friendships when the pilot encouraged children on board to visit the cockpit. When we got underway, parents would ask whether their children could come up and have a look in the cockpit. That was organised. It was a pleasant and exciting thing for young people—especially if they had never been in a plane before—and it let them learn new things. It was a way of encouraging them to feel safe and secure in flying, and so on. Things have changed. Security is critical. We have to make sure that the travelling public is protected. But the best way of protecting the travelling public is to encourage a culture of openness, transparency, self-evaluation and improvement. I do not think that putting criminal sanctions on pilots is the way of doing that. In fact, it is counterproductive in an age in which we need people to be very upfront about mistakes that are made, so that we can correct those mistakes immediately and not make the travelling public vulnerable rather than cover mistakes up and perpetuate them, which might in the end lead to a disaster.