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Dickie King..."is fast making herself a figure of abject derision"?? - 

More from the AFR yesterday...

Minister for Qantas Catherine King crashes on take-off

Joe AstonColumnist

The federal Transport Minister Catherine King is fast making herself a figure of abject derision.

Having blocked Qatar Airways from launching 28 new flights to Australia per week over the howls of sundry state governments and the entire travel and tourism sector, King is now offering her fourth different rationale for that decision in as many weeks.

First, it was in response to a human rights incident at Doha Airport in 2020.


Transport Minister Catherine King has given yet another car crash interview on her decision to block new Qatar Airways flights to Australia. Alex Ellinghausen

“I want to be able to decarbonise the transport sector” was King’s second explanation last month – and a nonsensical one given Qatar operates one of the youngest and most fuel-efficient fleets in the global airline industry.

Third, King told parliament last week that she’d refused Qatar to protect “long-term, well-paid, secure jobs [for] Australians in the aviation sector”. Those would be Qantas jobs she’s referring to, of course, which are some of the least secure jobs going around. Just ask the 1700 baggage handlers Qantas sacked illegally in 2020 or the 8000 employees Joyce had already axed or outsourced before the pandemic.

On Tuesday, King went on Cairns radio and linked the Qatar rebuff to the fact “Qantas has just purchased brand-new planes – that’s at a significant cost … They’re bigger planes, they’re quieter planes, they’re … better for the environment, so we’re going to start to see a lot of that.”

Is she serious?! Qantas is an ASX-listed corporation, 24 per cent foreign-owned, generating record profits for its shareholders. It made $2.5 billion in pre-tax profit in the 12 months to June 30.

It did so, incidentally, by ripping the faces off its customers, by charging airfares previously unheard-of, for levels of service the airline conceded were “[not] what we expect of ourselves.”

That is what taxpaying Australian travellers got from Qantas in return for the $2.7 billion of Commonwealth subsidies the airline gobbled during COVID-19.

And now we have an Australian cabinet minister making a protectionist trade ruling for the primary purpose of subsidising the long-delayed capex bill of a publicly traded company. I mean, what planet are we on here?

The idea that Qantas needs or deserves further government assistance is completely risible. And is this seriously how the federal government is conducting Australia’s trade policy with our international partners?

A massive wealth transfer from Australian consumers to Qantas shareholders is now Albanese government policy. That’s the whole function of anticompetitive conduct, to create economic rents, or super-profits, that would otherwise be competed away.

Other operators, such as Qatar, look at those rents and say: “Gimme some of that; gimme some slots and even though consumer prices will fall, we can still earn an acceptable return on our capital.” And Australia’s government is saying “No thanks”!

King was not finished. Next, she regurgitated a version of her Question Time line that Qatar’s new flights are “not in our national interest.” Yet irreconcilably, she then noted that “we’ve also seen a lot of [other] international carriers … starting to ask to increase capacity as well.

“So, we’ve got before us at the moment Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam Airlines, I understand Turkish Airlines … and a few others are starting to show interest.”

Hang on, so new Singapore Airlines flights are in the national interest? Vietnam Airlines and Cathay flights are good for Australia? That makes zero sense. Don’t these flights need to be blocked as well, to help Qantas pay for its new planes (the ones 

it’ll only really start paying for after Alan Joyce collects his last bonus[/size])?

The Labor Party can’t seriously be taking a hard line against Qatar Airways on any geopolitical basis. Penny Wong just gave Palestine East Jerusalem for crying out loud!

King kept on digging. “It’s good to see, I think, Emirates has also increased its capacity as well, but international aviation – certainly incoming – is still not back to where we’d like it to be.”

King omits to mention that all Emirates flights to and from Australia are actually Qantas flights, so no wonder she’s delighted to permit more of them. The two airlines – indeed, the two largest international carriers in this market – 

operate as one business. They even have permission from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to collude on pricing.

Qantas’ far smaller rival Virgin Australia enjoys no such immunity. As a code-share partner, it sells Virgin tickets on Qatar flights to Europe and the United Kingdom and then relies on Qatar’s incoming traffic to feed on to its domestic Australian flights.

So, the Albanese government is not merely pampering Qantas to the detriment of its foreign rivals, it is quite nakedly preferring Qantas over its smaller domestic competitor. In her next car crash interview, we’d like to hear King explain why Virgin Australia jobs don’t count as “long-term, well-paid, secure jobs for Australians in the aviation sector”.

King concluded her baffling treatise by saying that, “Prices have been too high, and we know that. We’ve got an aviation green paper leading into a white paper about to come out shortly that talks a bit about the issue around pricing competition, consumer rights and the importance of that.”

Oh, don’t worry, there’s a green paper coming. It’s already late, but it will lead to a white paper in two years’ time!

This is King absenting herself from the decisions she could make right now to alleviate the pain of Australian travellers, facing fares to London, Los Angeles and Phuket that are 55 per cent higher than 2019, and the local tourism industry, operating with 60 per cent less visitors than 2019.

King seems to think she’s making a dessert. It starts green, then turns white, and in a flash a magic pudding will be served. In reality, it’s just another government process for Qantas to capture, and how hard could that be when the minister can barely sustain a logical narrative sequence?

It’s another triple jackpot for Joyce, a longstanding beneficiary of not just bad policy, but no policy. “Oh no, you can’t provide an emergency loan to Virgin”. Five minutes later: “Please give me $2.7 billion I don’t have to pay back.”

Nothing King has said thus far is defensible. Absolutely nothing. She’s had four goes at this and she sounds more deranged each time. Not to put too fine a point on it, but she may not be the sharpest mind ever to come out of regional Victoria.

What’s the fifth version of King’s reasons going to be? “Qatar” sounds too familiar to “Qantas” – this is now an international trademark dispute?

She should go and speak to her constituents in Wendouree West, a real hotspot for stolen TVs on Facebook Marketplace. After nearly two years locked outside Dan Andrews′ pitiless ring of steel, all they want is to use the last of their JobKeeper savings on a trip to the Gold Coast.

Sadly, Jetstar’s flights from Avalon now cost the equivalent of three weeks’ rent. They’re being wrung dry by Qantas, and their local member is public official number one protecting the racket. Catherine King, Ballarat’s finest.

And via the SMH: https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/tour...5dw1r.html

...King has struggled to explain why she blocked granting Qatar extra flights.

She told this masthead there was no link to her decision and the treatment of Australian women who were taken off their Qatar Airways flight and forced to undergo invasive searches at Doha Airport, despite having made her first comments confirming her determination in a private letter to them.

That correspondence has been seen by this masthead.

King has cited various reasons, including protecting the national interest, climate change and the desire to protect Australian jobs...

Plus this insipid performance where it appears the only one cheering DK on is Albo...

757 views  Aug 9, 2023

The Labor government decided adding extra routes with Qatar Airways was not in Australia’s “national interest”, according to Infrastructure Minister Catherine King.

“These are bilateral agreements that are made between governments,” Ms King said during Question Time on Wednesday.

“As with all bilateral agreements that are made between governments, they are international agreements, and that we only sign up to agreements that benefit our national interests.

“In all of its broad complexity, and that includes ensuring that we have an aviation sector through the recovery that employs Australian workers.

“The government has determined that agreeing to the Qatar Civil Aviation Authority request for additional services is not in our national interest.”

MTF...P2