Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the minister for transport. Last week, 2,000 Qantas workers were made redundant when their jobs were outsourced. One of these Qantas workers, Sean from Canberra airport, asked:

How do I explain to my three girls that it is not whether you do a good job or not, it is just that they can bring someone else in and do it for cheaper than you?

Why is the Morrison government standing by as thousands of aviation workers lose their jobs and are pushed into insecure work?

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Fenner for his question. Sustaining Australia's aviation sector is something we have absolutely got behind. Aviation was hit first and hit hardest—it is a global pandemic. As I said last week to the House, there are many aviation companies—many airlines—which have closed, which are now not flying. We know that jobs on the ground rely on planes being in the air. We've done everything humanly possible to make sure that workers such as Sean have a job into the future. If Sean has been laid off, then we hope that Sean is able to return to the aviation sector at some point in the future.

Certainly the aviation industry is nowhere near back to where it was pre-COVID. In fact, the CEO of Qantas, Alan Joyce, says that, leading up to Christmas, it will be back to 60 per cent. That is actually ahead of where they thought they would be just a few months ago. I spoke to the new Virgin CEO, Jayne Hrdlicka, last week. She hopes that Virgin will be back domestically to somewhere around 60 per cent by late January or early February. These are tough times for the aviation sector and certainly for the workers in it. That's why we provided $2.7 billion of assistance, and we've done it on a sector-wide basis.

We've done it with the Regional Airline Network Support scheme, and that has provided support to more than three dozen or thereabouts communities which would otherwise not have seen a plane throughout the global pandemic. They would have been left very much high and dry when it came to receiving personal protective equipment, face masks, respiratory devices and, perhaps, most importantly, frontline medical personnel. We provided that RANS assistance and then we extended it.

Similarly with the Domestic Aviation Network Support program: we made sure that there was connectivity between capital cities and connectivity between key regional hubs and metropolitan airports to ensure that we kept people going around the country as best we could, given the fact that border restrictions were put in place. But we're doing everything we can to ensure, through JobKeeper, that the aviation sector has the support it needs, and we will go on making sure that the aviation sector has support.

We've also got, of course—and it closed a couple of Fridays ago—an aviation plan to look at five years hence, to make sure that we've got the right programs and the right projects in place for aviation support. That comes to remote airstrips and regional airport upgrades. We're doing it, we're supporting the aviation industry and we're supporting the airlines that fly people around this country.