Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate expresses its concern at the Albanese Labor Government's rank hypocrisy when it comes to its promises of being a more accountable and transparent government, as demonstrated by its failure to be honest with Australians about why it rejected the application by Qatar Airways to have more international flights, and its failure to be transparent about the use of Special Purpose Aircraft flights.

This motion is relating to the Albanese government. It's relating to how hopeless the Albanese government has been in providing an affordable, reliable and safe aviation industry for Australian travellers. Today is a win for the Australian travelling public. Australians want to be able to purchase a plane ticket to a destination of their choice. They want to make sure that their plane takes off on time and lands on time and that, when they get to their destinations, their bag actually arrives with them and they've got some money left in their pocket to have a good time. It is the job of the government, as the regulator, to ensure that that is achieved.

We are one of the most successful multicultural nations in the world, and right now there are a lot of Australians who can't see their families overseas simply because they cannot afford the exorbitant international plane ticket prices, which are 50 per cent higher than they were pre COVID. The government had a decision to make that would have put downward pressure on those prices, by allowing Qatar Airways another 28 flights into capital cities in this country—one a day in four capital cities. But they didn't want to do that. They don't want to tell us why they made that decision. The more the government refuse to answer basic questions, the more the public have reason to think they are hiding something.

If the public didn't think the government were trying to hide something because ministers refuse to answer questions on this topic in question time or from the media, they would think so after what we saw here in the Senate. I know we are a little cabal unto ourselves and not many people peek through the curtain of the mysteries of the Senate, but here we saw, day after day, this government seek to shut down a select committee into that decision and other matters surrounding the competitiveness of our domestic and international aviation sector. Day after day, they sought to shut it down, trying every parliamentary trick in the book till four o'clock this afternoon, a Thursday afternoon—quite incredible. But they did not succeed. I'm the proud chair of that committee. I'm committed to working with all senators in that committee to achieve recommendations that will be of benefit to Australian travellers and our nation as a whole. Submissions are due by the 18th. We'll be out for public hearings shortly.

As I said, the coalition wants to see an affordable, reliable and safe aviation industry where our airlines are profitable, because they do employ tens of thousands of Australians right across the country. But we don't want them ripping people off. There's a difference between being a profitable company that provides great, well-paid, safe jobs and ripping off your customers. What we've seen in evidence extracted from senior officials of some of these companies and through the good work of our competition watchdog is that something is definitely wrong in the state of Denmark, and it stinks. It looks like this stinky fish head is right at the top of the Albanese government. Is it the cosy personal relationship between the Prime Minister and the former CEO of Qantas, or is it the ideological bent of those on the far left who seek to renationalise Qantas?