Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) recognises:

(a) the critical role that Australia's aviation sector plays in the lives of all Australians;

(b) that 45,000 Australians work directly for airlines in Australia and hundreds of thousands more in related industries including aviation and tourism; and

(c) that the response to the COVID-19 pandemic has taken a huge toll on the aviation industry in Australia and around the world;

(2) notes the:

(a) Government's ad-hoc and piecemeal approach to Australia's aviation sector during the COVID-19 response, putting thousands of jobs at risk;

(b) Government's failure to take an equity stake in Virgin resulting in the company collapsing into voluntary administration, putting at risk the livelihoods of almost 16,000 workers; and

(c) inequitable treatment of the 5,500 workers of aviation support company dnata, who were told on 1 May 2020 that they would not be eligible for Jobkeeper payments; and

(3) calls on the Government to outline a comprehensive plan for aviation to ensure the best outcome for both the travelling public and the thousands of workers whose jobs depend on a vibrant aviation industry.

When I first gave notice of this several months ago, the aviation sector was in absolute crisis. Dnata workers, 5,500 of them, were being denied access to JobKeeper payments and basically were on no money at all. We had Virgin just going into administration despite desperate pleas to the government to resolve the issue prior to going into administration. We had Qantas starting to say that they were under enormous pressure and they needed to look at shedding jobs and outsourcing some of their workforce. We had regional airports across the country, many of them owned by local councils, saying they were ineligible for JobKeeper payments and were in trouble and worried about being able to keep on really qualified security staff, in particular. We had regional aviation saying it was in trouble. We had corporate air saying they were in trouble financially. We know this is a sector where there are 45,000 people employed directly, but overall the entire sector is 200,000 people. It is a massive jobs generator. This sector was the hardest hit, the hardest hit first, alongside tourism, because of the nature of COVID-19 and the shutdown.

The government's response has been entirely piecemeal throughout this process. It decided that it didn't want to pick winners. It decided that in essence it was going to fix and patch holes where it saw them. But it decided, in essence, that it was going to pick winners; that it was going to say, 'We'll rescue some parts of the sector but we'll leave others to work it out themselves.' That's what we've seen with the government's approach. The end result of that is what we are seeing today.

It is absolutely critical to Australia's economy and in the long-term interest of jobs in this sector that we have an aviation industry that is made up of two full-service airlines underpinned by budget carriers, underpinned by regional airlines, with a mix of those to ensure that regional Australians continue to have access to capital cities and other regions and other markets; underpinned, obviously, by a strong freight sector, both domestically and international as it relates to aviation; and all the other ancillary workers and workforce that supports aviation, whether it be in the corporate air space or other services at airports. That is the structure of the industry that is vitally important, but that is also the structure that this government has decided it is going to completely abandon, including the thousands of workers who rely on this industry for their employment.

We saw just recently the government taking the decision that they were not going to intervene in Virgin going into administration. They said, 'We're going to let the market go. There will be a market solution.' 'We're very happy that there was a market solution,' they said. Well, be careful what you wish for, because what we are now seeing is that it is very clear that the market solution is about to deliver a significant change to the aviation industry and a significant change to that structure that underpins the aviation industry but also underpins the jobs of thousands of workers. We've already seen Qantas shedding workers. We've seen Qantas taking a decision to outsource many of those workers and potentially seeing a downgrade in pay and conditions for that workforce. We've seen the conditions at Swissport. We do not want to see a replication of that for the many hundreds of Qantas workers who have worked for the sector for so long.

Virgin, if reports are true in the media, is about to become a budget carrier, not a full-service airline, and that will again see the shedding of hundreds of jobs across the sector. It will also lessen competition. It is long past time that this government understood that the market is not working at the moment. It is not working anywhere in the world and it's not working in any industries, but it is particularly not working in aviation. They need to have a very clear vision about where they want aviation to be when we emerge from this crisis and they need to do the work now to make sure that there are good jobs available in this sector, but so far, what we've seen from this government is that they've picked winners—in particular, giving large grants to certain airlines and not supporting others—and have literally abandoned the thousands of workers who work in aviation across this country.

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