Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I'm really pleased to have the opportunity to actually answer a question on aviation policy, because this is what the previous government was trying to stop me saying before. We support sustainable aviation growth. Our aviation green paper, which is out shortly, will go to issues of competition and international aviation agreements, issues around disability standards at our airports and issues around consumer rights, something those opposite failed to protect.

It might be useful to remind the House that requests for additional capacity are made routinely to governments around the world, including Australia. These requests are not always granted, including by those opposite. In fact, when the very same question was put in front of the member for Riverina, he made a decision to 'put on hold an application by Qatar Airways'. That 'putting on hold' was for four years. That's not putting it on hold; that's actually not making a decision for four years—effectively, a nonapproval. By the time a decision was actually taken, nearly half the coalition's time in office had elapsed, and at the end of that four-year hold Qatar Airways were granted only an additional seven flights per week. So worried were the previous government about this airline that, for the first time, they added an antidumping clause to the international air services agreement. Those new flights only started early last year, in 2022. That's when that new capacity, asked for in 2018, was actually given to Qatar Airways.

In the case of the Qatar Civil Aviation Authority's request, I determined that it was not in Australia's national interest to grant their request for an additional 28 flights per week. I know that there are some businesses and airlines that would've liked me to make a different decision. I have not based that decision on any one company's commercial interests but on the national interests. Again, as the member for Riverina has said, he introduced that safeguard article because 'you can't have an airline coming in from overseas and just undercutting to the point where Australian jobs are at risk and Australian airlines are placed at a disadvantage'.

He said:

We can't have an airline with very deep pockets undercut, undercut, undercut and … people go to them as opposed to an airline that may be majority Australian-owned and unable to compete with this unfair undercutting of prices.

There you go. No wonder they didn't want me to answer the question about Qatar Airways. The previous government has not got a leg to stand on with the way in which it gave $2 billion of JobKeeper to Qantas without any strings attached, and saw hundreds of jobs outsourced without any possibility of saving them. Thy name is hypocrite. (Time expired)

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