Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) | Hansard source

I've previously, in this House, referred to Qantas and Virgin as 'the mafia of the skies'. For far too long we have seen the airline industry fail to respect and protect the consumer rights of passengers. This legislative package, the Aviation Consumer Protection Bill and its associated bills, does represent some progress. The establishment of an independent aviation consumer ombudsperson, an aviation consumer protection authority and the framework for a passenger rights charter are all steps in the right direction. But the legislation still falls short of the changes which have been recommended both by experts and the AEC. It falls well short of the protections that are delivered in comparable countries and the protections that Australian travellers deserve.

Let me begin with the facts. In 2025, Qantas recorded a domestic cancellation rate of 2.7 per cent, significantly above the long-term industry average of 2.2 per cent. QantasLink did worse: 3.6 per cent. On-time-arrival performance across the city fell below historical benchmarks, with fewer than 80 per cent of flights arriving on time in several of the months of 2025. In December 2024, only 73.7 per cent of flights arrived on time, well below the long-term average of 80.5 per cent. One in five flights are not arriving when they are scheduled to.

Despite some improvements since the chaos of the post-pandemic years, Australian passengers still have to contend with delays and cancellations that are among the highest in the developed world. There has been some recent improvement in those measures, but the numbers are still too high. Meanwhile, airfares remain elevated. The ACCC found that, despite capacity growth outpacing passenger demand for six consecutive months to January 2026, fares in December 2025 was still 4.3 per cent higher than December 2024.

The Qantas Group and Virgin Australia now service nearly 99 per cent of Australia's domestic passengers. In a duopoly, if you are unhappy with your service, you have limited options. We see the limitation of options in the recent actions of Virgin, where it put in place a situation where Australian consumers were about to lose $93 million in credits relating to COVID era cancellations. The fact is that if an airline cancels your flights, you may then lose your reason for taking that trip. The reasonable response to that would be for the airline to refund the money you have paid for that ticket. Instead, we have seen Virgin keep that $93 million for a number of years and now it's asking people to book flights before 30 June or they will lose those credits altogether.

Over recent years we have seen what the rest of the world does. In the European Union, regulation EU 261 provides passengers with fixed automatic compensation for significant delays and for cancellations. For flights under 1,500 kilometres, passengers receive 250 euros if they arrive more than three hours late. For longer flights, compensation rises to 400 euros or 600 euros, depending on the distance. This right applies unless the disruption was caused by extraordinary circumstances outside the airline's control—genuine extraordinary circumstances, not a broad, industry drafted exemption. The EU scheme is so effective that the European Parliament is currently considering strengthening it, including maintaining the three-hour threshold and banning fees for check-in and for child seating. In Canada, passengers on large airlines receive between C$400, for delays of up to six hours, and C$1,000 for delays exceeding nine hours, with smaller carriers also carrying some liability.

But in Australia, under this bill, a passenger whose flight is cancelled or significantly delayed still has to lodge a complaint with the ombudsperson, has to wait for it to be assessed and has to hope for a favourable determination—a determination that is binding on the airline, but not on the passenger. There is no automatic compensation. There is not even a fixed entitlement. The government hasn't even bothered to include a draft charter of passenger rights in the legislation. What should be the centrepiece of a new framework for customer protection in the aviation industry has been delegated to regulation and to consultation, which has been ongoing for years but which is still not complete. As the Law Council of Australia has said, in its submission to the Senate inquiry, parliament can't assess the adequacy of protections because their substantive content is absent from the legislation. So we have been asked to pass a framework with no content.

Now, the government has argued that a European style compensation scheme would drive up airfares and damage a competitive aviation sector. That argument has been made by airlines in every single jurisdiction that has contemplated reform. But in every jurisdiction that has actually implemented reform, it turns out the airlines have survived. What the argument really reflects is the power of an industry that has benefited from inadequate regulation for decades. The ACCC, the government's own competition watchdog, has long called for stronger consumer protections for passengers in our commercial aviation industry. CHOICE has welcomed this legislation, but has explicitly noted that it falls short of EU 261. Even the government's own aviation white paper acknowledged that the scale of consumer dissatisfaction with the existing deeply inadequate state of affairs continues.

It's worth asking why successive Australian governments, both coalition and Labor, have consistently fallen short on this issue. To some extent at least, the answer might lie in the nature of the relationship between our major airlines and the politicians who should be regulating them. Qantas in particular has cultivated deep and deliberate influence in Canberra for many years. Joe Aston's book The Chairman's Lounge and the parliamentary debate that it prompted in 2024 documented in detail how that influence has operated—through Chairman's Lounge memberships extended to politicians across the spectrum, through upgrades, and through access and proximity that is not available to community organisations, to not-for-profit groups or to ordinary constituents, who might also appreciate the welcome attention of their representatives.

I'm not naive about this. I've experienced it myself. When I was first elected in 2022 I initially accepted Chairman's Lounge and Virgin's Beyond memberships. It seemed to come with the job, and let's face it, there are practical advantages to lounge access when you're constantly travelling between Melbourne and Canberra. But I relinquished that Chairman's Lounge membership in 2023 because I'd become concerned about the extent to which perks extended by the airlines to politicians could affect government decision-making. Airlines don't offer these things for no reason. Research in medicine has shown that even small gifts from pharmaceutical companies can influence doctors' prescribing patterns. The same dynamic applies here. When politicians are guests of the very industry they are meant to hold accountable, we can't be surprised if that accountability falls short.

On sitting days there are almost 2,000 lobbyists in this building, between 10 and 15 for ever member of the House and the Senate. Most are not on the Lobbyist Register, because the existing register is toothless. Ministers are still not required to publish their diaries. The airlines don't have to have a formal lobbying presence. They've already built the access that they need through other means. That's the context in which this bill has been developed, and it could help explain why a government that has expressed genuine concern for passengers has nonetheless declined to legislate the automatic compensation that those passengers need and deserve.

There are other significant gaps in this legislation. The bill excludes services that are not directly paid for by consumers, meaning that inter-airline connections and codeshare arrangements may fall outside its scope. It has limited coverage of third-party intermediaries, such as booking agents, and its broad exemption powers risk creating the same loopholes that have allowed airlines elsewhere to avoid accountability. During the COVID recovery period, complaints to the Airline Customer Advocate rose by 138 per cent, even as passenger numbers fell very sharply. Most of those were related to the refusal by Qantas and Jetstar to offer cash refunds. The Airline Customer Advocate resolved fewer than half of those complaints. That's what happens when a complaints mechanism is funded and controlled by the industry it is meant to police. We shouldn't replicate that model with a different letterhead.

I want to briefly acknowledge what the bill does achieve. An independent ombudsperson with binding determination is meaningfully better than an industry funded body. A new Aviation Consumer Protection Authority with enforcement capability is better than voluntary compliance. These are genuine improvements on the status quo.

The minister has claimed that this is the most significant aviation consumer protection reform ever introduced by an Australian government. That may be true, but it's a pretty low bar. For too many years—through the pandemic, through Qantas selling tickets on already-cancelled flights, through its illegal sacking of ground workers, through flight credits that passengers couldn't use—Australian consumers have long been left exposed by aviation consumer protection in this country. This bill is an inadequate remedy to a longstanding injustice.

Incremental improvement is not the standard we should be setting. This is our only opportunity to get this right, and the government is squibbing it. The standard we set should be a gold standard—the same protections available to passengers on the same routes operated by carriers flying in or out of the United Kingdom or the European Union. What the Australian passenger deserves is automatic, fixed compensation for significant delays and cancellations caused by factors within the airlines' control, a passenger rights charter with mandatory minimum content that is legislated not delegated, genuine coverage of charter operations and third-party intermediaries, and robust exemption criteria that cannot be gamed by carriers seeking to avoid their obligations.

Australians deserve to know what they're entitled to when things go wrong before they board a plane—or before they wait for hours in the airport—not after a complaint process that might take months and not subject to the discretion of an ombudsperson, whose caseload will quickly become unmanageable if this scheme does not change behaviour. They should know that now, automatically, as a right. That's what the rest of the world provides, and that's what this parliament should deliver.

With that, I move the amendment as circulated in my name:

That all words after "notes that" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"(a) the Aviation Consumer Protections Charter has not been presented to Parliament, preventing members from assessing whether the protections it will deliver are adequate, despite consultations on the Charter occurring nine months ago;

(b) the bill creates no automatic entitlement to compensation for passengers affected by delays or cancellations within an airline's control, leaving Australia's consumer protections well below the standards available in the European Union and Canada; and

(c) the bill's broad exemption powers and exclusion of charter operations and third-party intermediaries risk leaving significant gaps in consumer protections; and

(2) calls on the Government to:

(a) table a draft Charter with mandatory minimum content before the bill proceeds to a third reading; and

(b) amend the bill to provide for fixed, automatic compensation for controllable flight disruptions consistent with international best practice".

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