Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

There's something new every week in this joint. In addition to the extraordinary explosion we just heard over here, there's something new every week! This newfound interest from the coalition in competition policy is extraordinary, really. It may be that there's a bit of freelancing going on as they jostle with each other. The failure of the coalition to appoint a replacement for Mr Robert has obviously left a yawning gap in their economic capability—a Stuart Robert sized hole in their economic capability—and people are freelancing searching for it.

I heard in question time Senator Brockman, drawing a very long bow, talking about passenger movements into Perth and live sheep exports. There was a stream of consciousness connection of these ideas, as if the application by Qatar were in relation to Perth. There's obviously a bit of a misinformation thing going on in here with Western Australia, and I'm very confident that Senator Smith won't continue with it, because he only ever tells the truth. Qatar's application had nothing to do with Perth. The Qatari flag carrier had been seeking to add 21 flights, or one extra service per day, into Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, not Perth, not the carry-on that we saw earlier as if this had any relationship to what was going on in Western Australia.

Then we found out that this was not the first time that this application had been declined. A previous minister for transport had, in a similar set of negotiations and discussions, declined the application from Qatar in support of its national flag carrier for additional flights. Who was that transport minister? It was Mr McCormack who declined it on the basis of very similar national interest grounds as have been outlined by the current Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government. So this confected carry-on over the course of this week, as if what is proposed is a sort of free-for-all for which the coalition, if it were in government, would just agree to additional capacity going into Australian airports from a newcomer—that is not the case. It is not the case in terms of any sensible regulation of Australian airlines.

The truth is that the airline industry has been on life support around the world over the course of the last three or four years. Thousands of jets have been furloughed in deserts all across the world. You only had to fly into Alice Springs over the course of 2019, 2020, 2021 or 2022 to see hundreds of big jets parked in the desert as airlines furloughed them. All around the world millions of staff were suspended. Tens of thousands of Australians engaged in our airline sector were suspended and were being supported by the Commonwealth government.

It is true that Australians have been disappointed that our national airline—privately owned, but our national airline—has not met the mark; that is has not met the expectations that customers had of it, that its staff and unions had of it and that, indeed, the Australian government should have had of it. That has been the subject, as it should be, of enormous controversy.