Perin Davey (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) Share this | Hansard source

Australians are currently paying more for airfares. Reliability is going down. Flight cancellations are up and flights are less frequent. The fact of the matter is that we are now seeing higher airfares and fewer seats on international flights than before COVID. The Albanese government is failing Australian families and businesses by deliberately exempting Qantas, Virgin and the wider aviation sector from its recently announced review of competition policy.

The result of taking ACCC eyes off areas as important as aviation can be seen by what we have seen from our national carrier in recent times. The sorry story of Qantas as it stands today should be a lesson to all corporate entities, but also a lesson as to why it's important to have ACCC monitoring. Their once widely respected reputation is currently pretty trashed. First it started with the refusal of Qantas to allow Qatar additional flights into Australia—allegedly at the blackballing of the Qantas CEO. Then we saw Qantas standing on the moral high ground handing out free seats to 'yes' campaigners for the referendum. Meanwhile they cancelled nearly every flight I had been booked on in the last couple of weeks. That should have been enough to make people think. Then they saw the eye-watering bonus being handed to the departing CEO, who is actually still getting paid as much of a bonus even though he has brought forward his resignation. The poor incoming CEO, who probably thought she was getting the gold-standard job, is now faced with having to rebuild trust as a priority.

The absolute icing on the cake in the saga of Qantas is when the totally independent ACCC announced that it was taking court action, alleging Qantas had advertised, booked and taken money for flights that it already knew it had cancelled. That is what ACCC monitoring can highlight. That's what it can expose. The ACCC has alleged that, for more than 8,000 flights scheduled to depart between May and July 2022, Qantas kept selling tickets on its website for up to 47 days after it had already cancelled flights. People who booked on those flights know only too well the inconvenience, the frustration and the cost of doing business. Qantas treated its customers not as a loyal and valued part of the Qantas family but as disposable and dispensable ticket buyers. This is from a company whose brand was once 24-carat gold in the eyes of the world.

In all of this, the Prime Minister would appear to have been hoodwinked, because he's never missed an opportunity to be seen in the company of the now departed Qantas CEO, and he has fallen hook, line and sinker for the proposal by the aviation industry: 'We don't need to be monitored by the ACCC. We are all good corporate citizens.' Well, Qantas hasn't been acting as a good corporate citizen in recent days.

As important a business to Australia as Qantas is—and in the past it never shied away from competition, either domestic or international—it has become a corporate bully. It should be willing to compete strongly and successfully with the best of international and domestic airlines. I hope the new CEO rises to that challenge and I hope the board, bruised and battered from handing out a $24 million golden handshake, might realise that they need to turn the tables.

Australia does need Qantas. We need Virgin. We need others. We need competition. We need Rex. I need Rex because I fly regionally. We need healthy competition, we need transparency and we need monitoring, and the best way to assure us that we are getting that is to have the ACCC continue its scrutiny and monitoring of the industry as part of its competition roles and responsibilities.