SAFA Skysailor Magazine

42 SKY SAILOR December-January-February | SUMMER 2025/2026 The ADS-B Mandate Proposal and Consultation by Iain Clarke – SAFA Safety Manager Greeting fellow pilots. Recently, you may have seen that the Commonwealth Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts (‘the Department’) had requested submissions on a discussion paper that an inter-agency working group had put together, concerning options for a mandate for the carriage of ADS-B devices in Australian aircraft. Apparently there has been a lot of speculation about what it all means, and questions about what SAFA was doing.. Well, for those of you that haven’t read the discussion paper or our submission, or ended up being thoroughly confused by it all, I’m here to try and clear the air. Strap yourselves in and let’s start with… A history lesson Towards the end of the Morrison Gov- ernment, the then Minister for Transport, Barnaby Joyce, introduced the ADS-B Rebate scheme. From memory, this was an initiative to boost General Aviation recovery post-Covid. The origins of the initiative, and rationale, weren’t very clearly articulated as I recall. I suspect it had