The Senate has voted for an inquiry into regional air travel. Not before time, says Rex Patrick, airport screening costs are forcing up prices in the regions.
Everyone wants air travel to be free from the risk of terrorism; everyone. So, it’s easy to have sympathy for the move by Canberra bureaucrats in 2018 to propose security screening be put in place at smaller regional airports.
So, what’s the scam in that?
The scam is that it’s local councils, who own most regional airports, who have to come up with the funds to run a couple of security screening shifts at their airports, sometimes for very few flights.
When the screening requirement was first imposed, after some pressure from me (as a senator) and the National Party, the Federal Government agreed to pay the screening charges.
However, after the Labor Government came to power, councils were left to their own devices.
In Whyalla, the response to this was to increase take-off charges to Rex Airlines and Qantas by between $35 and $40 per passenger, which was passed on to the passengers. Rex quickly announced it was leaving the route.
Prior to COVID, 1,500 passengers travelled through Whyalla Airport per week. That number has now dropped to roughly 900 a week. That’s hundreds more people using the road to travel to Adelaide, a much less safe way to travel. In the alternate, people in Whyalla are minimising travel to their medical services, training courses, business meetings or private recreational events in Adelaide.
The same thing is occurring right across regional Australia.
Local councils are paying national security costs, and people in the regions are, in turn, having hefty levies added to their already expensive ticket prices.
People in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne pay less than a dollar for airport screening. The government could share the cost so that everyone around Australia just paid $1.50 per flight. No-one in those cities would even notice, and if they did, they wouldn’t care. They’d be happy to help out.
So, it’s great to see the Senate today vote for an inquiry into regional air travel which will, in part, look at screening costs. Labor voted against the inquiry.
Rex Patrick is a former Senator for South Australia and, earlier, a submariner in the armed forces. Best known as an anti-corruption and transparency crusader, Rex is also known as the "Transparency Warrior."