The Court held that the jurisdictional bar in s 642(1)(a) of the HVNL — which prevents a stay of a reviewable decision made on the basis of a 'public safety ground' — is engaged where the Regulator's reasons, read fairly and as a whole under [name withheld] principles, disclose in substance that cancellation was considered necessary to prevent an unacceptable risk to public safety, even though the precise phrase 'significant risk to public safety' from s 640 does not appear in the reasons. The Court rejected the argument that the different statutory language used in s 473(1)(e)-(f) ('public safety has been endangered, or is likely to be endangered') represents a deliberately lower threshold than the s 640 formulation, holding there is no hierarchical conception of public safety across the HVNL and that a finding of endangerment inherently describes a state of affairs involving significant and continuing risk. The Court distinguished between decisions cancelling accreditations for non-compliance or regulatory discipline that merely touch on safety, and decisions where continued operation under the accreditation itself poses an unacceptable risk to public safety — only the latter engaging the s 642(1)(a) exclusion.
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