Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Leichhardt quoted Love Actually, and that's a favourite movie of mine too. I promise I won't show the chamber the little Love Actually clip I once shot whilst I was Deputy Prime Minister—maybe it might come out one day! But, to quote the airport scene, the Prime Minister, Hugh Grant, said this:

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport.

And indeed any prime minister these days would have enough reason to feel gloomy about the state of the world. We live in troubled times; we do.

But, rather than just standing up here and giving brickbats, as sometimes opposition members do, I do want to say to the government that I acknowledge the support that it has provided Rex Airlines. Regional Express's home is very much in Wagga Wagga, and, indeed, 180 people at those hangars at the Wagga Wagga Airport can't be wrong. It's the maintenance base and the base for so much of Rex's activities, and they pump $12 million worth of wages into the local economy each and every year.

It was important that Rex, when it did hit turbulent skies, got help from the government. I very much appreciate not only the Prime Minister ringing me whilst I was overseas at the time—returning my call—but also the minister for infrastructure and transport, the member for Ballarat, talking to me, because they knew how important Rex was not just to Wagga Wagga and the Riverina but, indeed, to the wider regional economy. I note with interest that Labor has a fund to help councils which have suffered losses through the Rex downturn, and I sincerely hope that Wagga Wagga is able to recoup some of the money that it lost when Rex hit troubled skies.

I'm pleased that Rex has got a new owner, but I'm very disturbed by the fact that Qantas has dropped its flights from Albury and Wagga Wagga to Melbourne. Of course, when Rex decided to get too big and take on Qantas on the Melbourne-to-Sydney route and many, many other capital-city-to-capital-city routes, it took on a behemoth. It certainly did and it certainly found out the hard way that you don't get a future by doing that. Obviously, Qantas took on some of the Rex regional routes as well. One of those regional routes was Wagga Wagga to Melbourne—there was also Albury to Melbourne—and now Wagga Wagga people are disadvantaged by the fact that they only have limited access to Melbourne via the aviation route, and that is deeply disappointing.

The former member for Farrer and I have both written to Qantas seeking explanation. I realise they're a business and I also appreciate that they have to operate according to shareholders, according to their margins et cetera. But I think Qantas is big enough to sustain more regular flights to Melbourne from both Wagga Wagga and Albury. Whilst I appreciate that they were operating with less than half of their passenger capacity, it's simply not good enough for the national carrier to just dump that route full stop. I know you would share that view, Member for Indi—although I won't verbal you, seeing as though you're in the chair—given your close proximity, obviously, in Wodonga to Albury.

I heard the member for Leichhardt talking about the airport upgrades. There's nothing new there; the coalition had that as well. I'm proud of what we did during COVID, when we kept Virgin—which was on its knees—Qantas, Rex and other airlines in the skies, because I knew, and we knew, that planes in the air meant jobs on the ground. And I have to say that, when 26 airlines of a size comparable to Virgin at the time went belly up across the world, we were able to maintain all of our airlines across Australia, and that was very important. Not only that—we were able to, obviously, fly in vaccines and health professionals to regional and remote communities, including the member for Leichhardt's. So it's important.

Aviation is a huge player in regional Australia. It shouldn't be that, when you are in pain, you have to catch a plane. Certainly, with today's limited air travel, we should have more health professionals in country areas, and we certainly work towards achieving that through the Murray-Darling rural medical school network et cetera. There are certainly a lot of issues confronting the government, and one of the most important of these is regional air travel. Anything the government can do to help that, I will support.

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