Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

Today we are debating the Aviation Transport Security Amendment (2009 Measures No. 2) Bill 2009another bill amending Australia’s aviation laws. Indeed, it seems like only yesterday that I was in this place speaking to the government’s last bill on the matter, the Aviation Transport Security Amendment (2009 Measures No. 1) Bill 2009. I have no objection to speaking about aviation in this place—or, for that matter, anywhere else. It is an important part of the transport network in Australia, and it deserves due attention from both the government and the opposition. But it does seem odd to me that the government do not have their act sufficiently together to have incorporated the amendments proposed in this bill into one of their previous bills on aviation.

We seem to have a succession of quite trivial bills dealing with minor amendments to aviation matters. Surely a government that were properly on top of their policy development and knew what they were doing would have been able to incorporate all of these measures into a single aviation bill. So, in this last sitting week of 2009, and with nothing much else for the government to talk about, we are back onto aviation and a bill that contains very minor amendments on a subject that we dealt with only a few months ago, when there was another series of fairly minor amendments made to transport security measures. That is not to say that transport and aviation security is not important—it clearly is—but you would have thought that a government that understood the issues and knew what they were doing in aviation security would have been able to resolve all of these things in a single bill. I do not know whether the government are trying to get their score up for the number of bills that they have dealt with in the year, but I would have thought the content of the bill would be more important than the number.

This is a case of another uncontroversial aviation bill coming into the parliament to deal with some changes in relation to security arrangements, particularly for cargo. But this bill, like the previous one, has avoided all the really important unanswered questions facing the aviation sector. While we are dealing with comparative trivia, the government have failed to address the important matters regarding aviation policy. It has been nearly a year since the government presented their aviation green paper to, in their own words, ‘secure Australia’s aviation future’. The minister’s media release of 2 December 2008 promised:

… a detailed National Aviation Policy Statement (White Paper) in the second half of next year.

Well, we are in ‘the second half of next year’. There was later a suggestion that it was going to be September 2009—and now it is going to be December. If the government are going to bring out this white paper on the eve of Christmas, again one has to wonder why they have not been prepared to address these issues more openly, rather than hide them in the run-up to Christmas.

We are well into the second half of 2009 and there is still no white paper. Like many of those involved in the aviation industry, I look forward to what it will contain and I hope it will resolve some of the issues facing the sector at this critical time. We have been waiting for the white paper. There has been a policy vacuum ever since the government came to office—a hiatus of two years when no important decisions have been made on aviation policy. Measures underway by the previous government, particularly things such as the general aviation action agenda, were put on hold. They had to wait until the green paper, and that took a year. When that came out we were told to wait for the white paper and in that time nothing has happened. The momentum for reform and change in the general aviation sector has been lost.

Nothing has been done about other key issues that people might be interested in. The government has been flagging its interest in what it might do about the second airport for Sydney. Bear in mind that there has been bipartisan support for the reservation of the Badgerys Creek site now for many, many years. Now we are told that the government is going to abandon Badgerys Creek, that it is not going to be built; but of course it has no other alternative. Ideas have been floated around about Goulburn and distant places. Last week we heard Richmond come up again for about the 10,000th time. Governments of both political persuasions have considered Richmond seriously over recent decades and have always rejected it because it is an unsuitable site for a major airport for Sydney. There are serious environmental issues with Richmond, issues such as fog and approaches to the airport and suggestions that hundreds of metres might have to be taken off the top of the Blue Mountains to enable approaches to be made to the airport. There are certainly key issues for towns like Richmond and Windsor—historic parts of the Australian landscape—if Richmond is to be used as a major airport for Sydney. Richmond is back on the agenda again. It is always rejected. It has been rejected previously by Labor in government. On previous occasions it has been rejected by the coalition. But it is back again because Labor has no other ideas. The concept of building a second airport for Sydney at Goulburn or Newcastle seems to me to leave a lot to be desired. If you are travelling from Melbourne to Sydney, you do not want to land in Newcastle and have a 1½-hour or two-hour journey back to Sydney. You do not want to land in Goulburn and have a couple of hours drive back into Sydney. It is simply not a practical option as a second airport for Sydney.

Of course, there is actually no need for a second airport for Sydney for a lot of years, even decades. The current airport will be able to meet demand for the foreseeable future. The government is raising this issue again and again. It has no answers. The green paper took a year. Now the white paper has taken a year. There have been no answers and no policy issues to address aviation in all that time.

There are plenty of other key aviation issues that the government might be prepared to consider if it was generally interested in some of those important questions. I have already mentioned Sydney Airport. The government needs to reverse its decision to abolish the Enroute Charges Scheme—an incredible decision to disadvantage those trying to provide services in regional Australia. We have already had services closed at a result of this $5 million-a-year decision of the federal government. When the government is out there spending billions and billions of dollars, running up $315 billion of debt, it has to slash $5 million off a scheme to reduce the aviation charges to small airlines running on largely uneconomic routes to small regional communities. As I said before, a number of services have already been axed as a result. No new ones are likely to start because of this extra cost. If the government is at all serious about providing proper aviation services to regional Australia, it needs to look thoroughly at the wisdom of that decision.

See this speech in context