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

It's appropriate that we are debating the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Continuing ACCC Monitoring of Domestic Airline Competition) Bill 2023 today—the day after the Reserve Bank of Australia was forced to once again lift interest rates as a result of the Anthony Albanese Labor government's failure to address inflation. Aviation is another area where the government has conspired to keep prices high—against the interests of Australian travellers, Australian freight exporters and Australia's tourism and small business operators. The government has kept the price of airfares high by restricting competition, by failing to make decisions on the things that are sitting on Catherine King's desk right now—slot management and monitoring the competitive nature of our domestic airlines, cancellations, delays and the drag on productivity that those bring—and by refusing to review its decision to reject Qatar Airways additional flights.

Their failure to make decisions on this raft of measures has meant that Australians are paying more than they need to to access our aviation sector. Coalition backbench senators have this private senator's bill before the Senate to do something about it—to deliver on one of the recommendations of the select committee's inquiry into bilateral aviation arrangements. This recommendation was backed by the current ACCC chair and former commissioners Fels and Sims, by a raft of academics and by aviation experts, who said that reinstating ACCC monitoring would be good for competition, transparency and accountability and would force changes in behaviour by particularly one airline that has had in recent times an incredibly poor track record of cancellations and delays—the Qantas Group.

We've seen cancellations and delays of not just significantly on the Sydney-to-Canberra and Sydney-to-Melbourne runs but, a couple of weeks ago, those cancellations and delays into Adelaide went up by 35 per cent, particularly by the Qantas Group. It seems that the Prime Minister's best buddy Alan Joyce's game plan and trajectory of poor market behaviour that was so exposed at the Qantas Group's AGM last week continues. Whilst the government made a big hullabaloo a few weeks ago about having reinstated the ACCC monitoring, the fact is, as we found out in estimates last week, the Treasurer is yet to direct the ACCC to do it. They put out the press release, got the positive news stories and got the votes, but has anything changed in the ACCC? No. You know why? The government hasn't sat down and written the direction letter.

It's not hard to make things happen. It's not hard to reinstate this monitoring. It just requires the Treasurer to actually follow through with actions rather than just trite press releases following a vote to not bring back Alan Joyce before this Senate to actually face legitimate and necessary questions from senators on behalf of the Australian public.

It's not just the Labor Party who refuse to bring Alan Joyce back into the Senate to face serious questions; it was the Greens and it was Senator Pocock. Some may say that those decisions were made because the government promised to reinstate the ACCC monitoring. Well, guess what? You were sold a pup, because they haven't reinstated it. That's why this bill before the Senate is so important, because it will not rely on a tardy treasurer to get the job done.