The chief executive of Canberra Airport has told a parliamentary committee that Qantas should be broken up so its budget Jetstar airline is hived off.
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The alternative, Stephen Byron suggested, was to have a third airline competing with Qantas and Virgin Australia on routes within Australia.
This would need what he called "significant intervention" by the government.
Mr Byron cited what he called Qantas' "unlawful behaviour" when he was giving evidence to a Senate committee examining the Australian market for passenger flights.
He said Qantas and Virgin controlled more than 95 per cent of the domestic airline market in Australia, with Qantas the bigger part of the duopoly.
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That market power was being misused by Qantas to the detriment of customers, he argued.
"The status quo is not an acceptable outcome. There needs to be significant change and this will not happen without a significant intervention by the government," he said.
"Qantas has demonstrated that unless they are forced by a regulator or the highest court in the land, they will do what they please."
He said the early departure of the Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce hadn't altered the need for action.
"Airfares have not gone down since the Qantas CEO departed and nothing has changed," Mr Byron told senators.
He said that the competition regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, should monitor Qantas, in particular its level of flight cancellations from Sydney Airport.
Official figures show that more than 11 per cent of Qantas flights between Sydney and Canberra are cancelled every month, the highest rate of cancellation by Qantas on any of its routes in Australia.
Mr Byron said that if cancellations were high Qantas should be compelled to "show cause".
He cited three cases where he alleges Qantas started up flights to drive out competition.
Link Airways started a flight between Canberra and Hobart on November 5, 2020. On the same day, Qantas said it would do the same.
He said a similar thing happened when Alliance Airlines started flights from Canberra to the Sunshine Coast and when FlyPelican started a service to Ballina.
Mr Byron said he was in favour of changing the rules so that international flights to Australia could stop off at smaller destinations in Australia to pick up domestic passengers.
Qantas, he felt, had trashed its own reputation.
He cited the revelation that the airline had been selling tickets for flights which it knew weren't going to run, and the recent decision by the High Court that Qantas had illegally sacked more than 1600 workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Qantas is a company that Australians want to love. We love the Spirit of Australia - or at least we did until recently," he said.
Steve Evans
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
