Rex Patrick (SA, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Aviation Transport Security Amendment (Security Controlled Airports) Regulations 2019, made under the Aviation Transport Security Act 2004, be disallowed.

It's worthwhile understanding a little bit of history as to why this disallowance has been lodged. In response to an Inspector-General of Transport Security report, the government announced back in May 2018 an intention to upgrade security at regional airports. All senators and most Australians would be familiar with the sort of equipment that would be installed in these airports—body scanners, luggage screening equipment and so forth. They also announced a $50 million grant fund to cover the capital costs of the equipment across more than 50 airports. All good so far.

I'll just park that there and go back a couple of years to a Senate committee that was running in parallel to all of this, inquiring into the operation, regulation and funding of air route delivery to rural, regional and remote communities. I have to pay considerable applause to the senators involved in that inquiry. Senator Barry O'Sullivan was on that committee, as was Senator Glenn Sterle, who played a big part in that inquiry. I also sat on that committee. During that committee inquiry we were made overtly aware of this particular plan and a number of holes that were in the plan—holes in the execution of it.

The first hole was a shortfall in funding for some of these regional airports. I will talk about Whyalla on a couple of occasions tonight but Whyalla airport is a good example. If you want to install equipment into Whyalla airport, firstly, you've got to have a big enough terminal, and Whyalla airport is not that big. It's particularly important if you want to have both screened and non-screened flights. It requires a larger terminal so that you can have a cleared area and a screened area. Certainly, the funding that was made available didn't contemplate that. I will acknowledge that the government has moved, in terms of ground, to help out some airports with terminal modifications.

Perhaps the biggest problem was the fact that there was no funding to cover the operational expenses, the operational costs. The interesting thing, and the committee basically revealed that, was that there were no studies done. Someone inside Home Affairs looked into the security issue and made a decision—and I'm sure there are good reasons for those decisions and the committee were briefed, to a certain extent, in relation to those reasons—but no-one looked at the problem holistically. No-one looked and said, 'What effect does this have?' There was no RIS carried out either, which makes me wonder whether or not the Office of Best Practice Regulation is doing its job properly.

We now know that the cost is well over $1 million each year to run Whyalla, which is a doubling of the operational costs for the airport per annum. There were no studies done. As a result—and this was the good work of the committee; once again, former Senator Barry O'Sullivan played a big part in this—we impressed upon the department of transport that they had to do some case studies, and off they went to do some case studies. To conclude, and it's really important in the context of this disallowance, what the inquiry found—and it won't come as a surprise to anyone who's gone anywhere near the bush—is that airfares to regional and remote communities are high.

The other factor we need to take into consideration is that regional air routes are the lifeblood of regional communities. They're the way in which we get medical services to the bush. They're the way in which we get medical services to regional centres. They're the way in which people in regional centres hook up with education services. They're the way businesses and agriculture connect with suppliers in the cities. Indeed, they're the way in which families make connections with people in the cities.

The committee found that you can have a situation where a doctor ends up getting frustrated about not being able to get back to Adelaide or Brisbane or Perth on a regular basis, because of the expense—and it is hugely expensive for people in the bush to get their families to the cities—and they leave. When a doctor leaves, suddenly three teachers decide to pack up and go because they don't want to live in a town where there's no doctor. We know, right across this country, there are problems in relation to doctors being available in regional communities. So it is really important that we make sure air services are maintained to these regional centres.

We took evidence from Qantas, Rex and Virgin, but, with my focus on South Australia, Qantas made it very clear that there's not a lot of margin on each seat. You increase the fare by just a little bit and suddenly there's no profit for the airline. Rex was very prescriptive about it. They said that they operate at $10 per seat; evidence to the RRAT committee last week made that clear. That's what they make for every seat, for every flight, if averaged over a year.

If you impose a charge upon a local council, because that's who mostly operates these airports, they pass that on by way of landing costs to the airline and the airline passes it on to the passenger. When the airfare goes up, particularly in some of these remote areas, the competition to the airline is not necessarily between Qantas and Rex but between Rex and the road. People take to the road. That causes a number of problems, in terms of safety and people being tired. Someone who needs to get to a medical appointment might need to drive seven or eight hours to get to that appointment. It creates a more dangerous situation. I'm not making this up. I believe the airlines. Just over the last four or five months in South Australia, and this is before COVID, we saw Rex pulling services out of Mount Gambier. We saw Rex announcing that it was leaving Kangaroo Island. We've seen the cessation of flights to Port Augusta.

We have to look beyond our capital cities. The people in the bush are fantastic and they're doing a whole range of stuff to supply us with food, fabrics, all that sort of stuff. They're really important, and we cannot continue to just lump costs upon them. We cannot continue to make things harder for them.

I'll go to the study that resulted from the pressure that came from the 2018 RRAT committee inquiry. There have been transport department case studies done. The first of the two I've focused on, and this won't surprise you, is Whyalla. The airfares in Whyalla will go up by $52 per passenger. These are not my numbers; these are the department of transport's numbers. This is already on top of the very expensive fares that the RRAT committee heard about last week—that it's cheaper to fly from Adelaide to Bali than it is to fly from Adelaide to Whyalla. That is the evidence the committee received. That's an unacceptable proposition. If this regulation is allowed to continue, we will see services from Whyalla dropped—no question. Just as people like Sanjeev Gupta are trying to put their foot on the accelerator there, we'll have the government putting on the handbrake.

We also took evidence from Armidale last week. I asked the CEO: 'What's the increase in ticket prices as a result of the security screening?' He said: 'I'm not really sure, Senator.' Then we took evidence from Fly Corporate, who fly into Armidale. They made it very clear that the air route most at risk in that little network was in fact Armidale to Brisbane. They said: 'It'll be on the rocks.'

But now we have COVID-19 and the aviation industry has been completely turned upside down. One of the two major carriers in this country has gone into administration. And we are having to prop up Qantas, Rex and other carriers to make sure we at least have some limited services going into our regional centres. I compliment the government on their response in relation to COVID-19. However, there is no question that what's going on here is unfair to people who live in the regions. And it will harm them; it will be devastating for them; they will lose services. This is just another example of chipping away at regional areas. At the end of it, we will look back and say that a bunch of bureaucrats made these decisions without proper consideration as to the effect—people who clearly don't get outside of the territorial limits of Canberra.

I want to make it very clear that my seeking disallowance of this regulation is not about airport security; I support airport security. It's about sharing costs; it's about being fair about how we distribute costs. People in the regions are paying for security but the threat is most likely in the city where they arrive. So we've got people in the regions putting their hands in their pocket to pay extremely high airfares, and they are doing so in the interests of the people in the cities. This is a national security requirement; it should not be a local council cost; it should be looked at nationally.

I acknowledge that there are a number of people in this place who have helped to examine this. Senator Sterle and Senator McDonald, the chair of the RRAT committee, have done a good job in teasing out all of these issues. We are well aware of what's going to happen here. We need to protect people in the regions, we need to stand up for people in the regions, so I ask senators to vote for my disallowance motion.