Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Before I go to the legislation before us, I would like to follow on from Senator Macdonald’s remarks about the inquiry the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport conducted last year and make a couple of statements in relation to the tragic accident up at Lockhart River when 15 lives were taken. As chair of that committee, I sat through the hearings and heard the presentations from the witnesses. It gives me some comfort to think that, following that inquiry and also the Australian Story program last week, Mr Shane Urquhart—who lost his daughter, Constable Sally Urquhart, in that accident—will be able to find some form of closure. I would like to wish Mr Urquhart and his family all the very best.

I am speaking in support of the Civil Aviation Amendment Bill 2009 and the Transport Safety Investigation Amendment Bill 2009, but I intend to concentrate my remarks on the Civil Aviation Amendment Bill 2009. I think it is fair to say that Australia can rightly claim to be amongst the world’s leaders in aviation safety. However, this does not mean that the government can relax on ensuring that the agencies charged by government and required by legislation continue to maintain Australia’s aviation safety regime at the highest levels of world best practice. The measures contained in the Civil Aviation Amendment Bill 2009 are about ensuring that Australia continues to have a civil aviation safety regulatory and surveillance regime that is second to none.

Australia was an early starter in the race to take up the opportunities of civil aviation in the early part of the 20th century. Australia had more than its fair share of intrepid pioneer aviators who pointed the way to the tremendous advantages that plane travel had to offer to Australia, with its vast distances and at a time when its economic growth depended so much on its pastoral industries scattered across the continent. Later aviation would have an even greater role in the development of Australia’s rich mineral resources—not least in that fantastic state of Western Australia, to name one. For a state as large as Western Australia, the development of air travel, right from the early days of civil aviation, played an important role in opening up the state’s economic development, particularly in the remote and rugged northern regions of the Pilbara and the Kimberley.

It was therefore not simply by chance that Western Australia led the way in the introduction of regular scheduled air services. In August 1921 Western Australian Airways, founded by Norman Brearley, was awarded a federal government contract to operate a weekly airmail and passenger service between those two great towns of Geraldton and Broome. As a result, Australia’s first scheduled air service commenced in Western Australia on 5 December 1921, from Geraldton to Port Hedland. Unfortunately, one of the aircraft on this first service crashed when making an emergency landing on route to Port Hedland, and the pilot and passenger were killed.

Right from the start of regular airline passenger services, safety was a prominent issue. The cause of the crash was believed to have been partly due to the poor state of the landing field. Western Australian Airways suspended the service until the then Civil Aviation Branch of the Department of Defence took action to ensure adequate landing fields along the route. The issue appeared to have arisen because of tardiness on the part of Canberra—that has a ring about it over the years—to allocate sufficient funds to prepare the required landing fields. The incident drew severe criticism from the Western Australian public and the problem was rectified. This is an early example of why Western Australia’s cynicism about its treatment by Canberra erupts from time to time. It is a feeling that has a very long history.

Regular flights between Geraldton and Port Hedland recommenced on 21 February 1921 and were extended to Derby via Broome in March the same year. The total flight time from Geraldton to Derby, a distance of approximately 2,000 kilometres, was 2½ days. When I came off the road as an burnt-out truck driver we used to drive it quicker than that!