Federal Government Airport policy under fire

Australia’s major airports have started a major push to see the Government amend or overhaul it’s recently revamped aviation policy, claiming it is hampering the growth of inbound tourism.

Melbourne Airport has blamed its first dip in year-on-year international passenger numbers since the 2003 SARS scare on the Federal Government’s reluctance to help boost airline capacity into Australia.

“In my view the Federal Government has got the balance wrong,” said Melbourne Airport chief executive Chris Barlow. He said the Federal Government’s $180-million marketing campaign to lure foreign tourists would be in vain unless it adopted a “genuinely liberal attitude toward air access issues”.

Following the recent breakdown of aviation liberalisation talks between the Australian Government, Qatar, Vietnam, Taiwan and Singapore, Mr Barlow said: “It’s just the degree that the Government is going is a bit excessive.”

“Tourists bring a whole lot of money into the country. I’m not putting this forward just for Melbourne Airport. I’m saying this for the sake of the country,” he said.

“The Government on the one hand has been putting money into promoting the ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’ advert, which is really successful and doing really well,” Mr Barlow said.

“And then airlines come along and say, ‘We’d like to fly all these tourists into Australia’, and at the moment the Government’s got a nasty trend of knocking them back.”

After a period of significant liberalisation, the Federal Government completed a nine-month policy review that said increased access to Australia needed to be balanced by increased rights for Australian carriers.

The airports believe an open-skies policy would lead to sustainable international passenger growth into Australia and boost tourism.

Brisbane Airport chief executive Koen Rooijmans said open skies were in the nation’s interest.

“We believe the market is robust enough to sustain such growth,” Mr Rooijmans said.

“We appreciate the Government must weigh the costs of such competition against the obvious benefits to the tourism, leisure and investment economies, but at the end of the day open skies is the only way to go if we are to remain globally competitive.”

Sydney Airport, whose ex-chief executive Max Moore-Wilton has long advocated Singapore Airlines’ entry into the Sydney to Los Angeles route, said it would continue to support “the liberalisation of air rights”.