MOTIONS

Mr BIRRELL (Nicholls) (15:49): I'm talking about the Aviation Consumer Protection Bill. I will talk about the coalition's proud record of aviation during the pandemic and the way it acted honestly and decently during that terrible time, which is in absolute contradiction to what we just saw, which was an act of betrayal—trying to ram through bills that you hadn't taken to an election.

The public will wake up to that, and you will feel the pain of that, I'm sure, at the ballot box because the tradition of parties taking legislation, saying what they're going to do if they're being elected when they're significant changes and then doing the exact opposite does not go down well with the Australian people. Mr Venning: They lie! Mr BIRRELL: When it comes to aviation, the coalition has a very proud— The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Claydon ): The member for Grey will withdraw that comment immediately before he leaves the chamber.

Mr Venning: I withdraw. The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Under section 94(a), you are asked to leave the chamber. Mr BIRRELL: When it comes to aviation, the coalition has a very proud record.

When the pandemic happened, that industry was faced with its greatest crisis. Aircraft were grounded, passenger numbers collapsed almost overnight and the regional routes stood on the brink of disappearing. It was a coalition government that stepped in and kept Australia flying.

The coalition government didn't treat aviation as just another business; it treated aviation as critical national infrastructure and acted to protect it. I'll come back to that record because it matters, and the records of what all parties do in this place matter and should be subject to the Australian people. Put your policies out there, say what you'll do and then follow through.

This is relevant because it is the lens through which the coalition approaches everything in this portfolio. We start with the traveller, we start with the regional community, and we start with one question: what policy will actually work? It would be good if more people developing policies in this place said, 'What policies will actually work?' We've all been there.

Anyone who travels frequently will have a tale to tell: a flight cancelled an hour before boarding, a connection missed by 10 minutes and the bag that flew to one city while you flew to another. That happened to me and resulted in me having to present to a regional health conference in Perth looking very casual because I was in what I'd been wearing the day before.

It turned out the great medical practitioners of Western Australia were equally casual, so it was okay. The hours on hold, the holiday, the wedding, the funeral, the medical appointment you simply cannot get to—we've all faced it, and our constituents face it constantly. They are absolutely tired of it.

So, when Australians hear the government has a bill about airline consumer protection, they want to know one thing: will it make it better? That's the test. In this test, we believe these bills fail.

It should be about outcomes, not bureaucracy. Let me be clear on where the coalition stands. We support stronger consumer protections for airline passengers, we support accountability and we support fair treatment.

We support a system that gives Australians confidence that, when they buy a ticket, they get the service they paid for. But supporting stronger protections is not the same as supporting this piece of legislation, because these bills deliver more bureaucracy than accountability, more costs than compensation and more processes than outcomes. Australians do not want another complaints body to write to after their holiday is already ruined; they want fewer cancellations, fewer delays and better communication.

In the instances where we can't get the airlines to perform better in relation to those things, they need real compensation when things go wrong. But instead Labor has delivered a framework built around complaints and paperwork after the damage is already done, and the damage has been considerable. Over the past four years, Australians have watched airline performance go backwards while airfares climb.

On the government's own figures, more than 50,000 domestic flights were cancelled during Labor's first term. More than 427,000 were delayed, and behind every one of those numbers is a person who missed a holiday, missed a family event, missed a business commitment, missed a medical appointment. Yet, extraordinarily, these bills provide no direct compensation for the lengthy delays, for cancellation, for lost or damaged baggage.

The coalition has this belief—and you would think it would be a common belief: consumers should be at the centre of aviation policy, not an afterthought, not buried three layers deep in regulatory framework. If accountability is what the government truly wants, then let it apply to everyone whose decisions affect passengers, not just the airlines. Airservices Australia sits outside this framework, yet its decisions can directly caused delays and cancellations.

We have seen exactly that with recent staffing shortages. Australians do not care whether a delay is the fault of an airline, an airport or a government agency. They just want it fixed quickly and fairly, and this model does not deliver that.

Regional aviation is essential infrastructure in Australia. I want to raise an issue that deserves far more attention than it gets in this place, and that is the issue of regional aviation. For Australians in our capital cities, a plane is one option among many.

You can drive. You can take the train. For regional Australians, aviation is essential infrastructure.

It's how some people reach their specialist health care. It's how families stay connected. It's how businesses operate and how communities attract investment, tourism and skilled workers.

Right across regional Australia, a flight is not a luxury. It's not only a way to get to your holiday. It's an absolute necessity.

When a route is lost, a town does not simply lose a timetable; it loses a key connection. Every proposal that touches airlines and airports must be tested against one question: what does it mean for the bush? Here the coalition has a serious concern.

The legislation risks loading new costs onto smaller operators, operators already battling against rising fuel prices, climbing maintenance bills and chronic workforce shortages. At a time when regional routes are under pressure and communities are fighting to hold onto the services they still have, the last thing this parliament should do is to pile on more regulatory burden without showing a single corresponding benefit.

The government says regional airlines handling fewer than one million passengers annually will be exempt from the scheme, yet that exemption does not appear in the legislation before the parliament. It should not be left to ministerial discretion to exempt regional airports. It should be in the primary legislation.

All through question time and during the course of voting for these bills—and what's been going on in the Senate—we've been seeing legislation on the run. Rushed legislation that people don't understand and ministers can't explain is bad legislation. This brings me back to the coalition's record in the pandemic—and it matters in this debate.

When COVID-19 struck, aviation was one of the first industries hit and one of the hardest. Aircraft were grounded, passenger numbers collapsed overnight and airlines faced a crisis which was unprecedented. Regional carriers faced something worse: that was an existential crisis.

Routes that were ordinarily viable became uneconomic in a matter of weeks, and whole communities faced losing their air links entirely. At that moment, the coalition understood something fundamental, and that is that regional aviation is simply not a commercial enterprise; it is critical national infrastructure. It connects Australians to health care, to education, to work, to family, to opportunity.

So the coalition government acted and moved quickly to support the sector through one of the most difficult periods in our nation's history. We knew that, if regional aviation networks were allowed to collapse, the consequences for rural and regional Australia would be devastating. That support preserved aviation capability, protected jobs and kept critical routes alive that would have otherwise vanished.

Those decisions really mattered because, once an airline collapses, the skilled workers leave and the routes disappear, rebuilding is neither quick nor easy. In some cases, it's impossible. Our focus was on connectivity, on jobs, on competition and on making sure regional Australians would have flights to catch when the pandemic ended.

And it paid off. Communities stayed connected, essential travel continued, supply chains kept moving and our regional airlines were given the chance to survive an extraordinary period of disruption. That record stands in stark contrast with what we see today.

Under Labor, two regional airlines have collapsed and the domestic market has grown more concentrated than ever; Qantas and Virgin now account for more than 98 per cent of it. Less competition means fewer choices. Fewer choices means higher prices, and higher prices hurt consumers—above all, the regional Australians who often have no alternative but to fly.

Here is the truth that the government keeps missing: the best consumer protection is not another layer of bureaucracy; it is a competitive market. The market can work if you let it and if you don't put heaps of regulatory burden on it. It will lead to reliable services, strong regional connectivity and genuine accountability when things go wrong.

So we want to see reforms that passengers can actually see. That's why the coalition keeps advocating for practical solutions. Take, for example, the pay-on-delay legislation, brought forward in the last parliament by Senators Bridget McKenzie and Dean Smith.

Unlike Labor's approach, it put direct compensation in the hands of passengers who copped lengthy delays, cancellations and baggage failures. That sort of thinking leads to real outcomes. It's something a passenger can actually see and benefit from.

Take as another example the COVID-era flight credits. Many Australians accepted credits during the pandemic because extraordinary circumstances left them with no real choice; there were no other flights. Now $93 million in Virgin Australia COVID credits are at risk of expiring.

Australians should not have to fight to recover money they have already paid for services that were never delivered. A flight credit is consumers' money; it's not airline profit. Those are the issues that matter to people far more than the creation of another complaints desk.

The government says these bills are about consumer protection, but consumer protection is not measured by the number of regulators you create; it's measured by positive outcomes. So let's judge it by what positive outcomes would be in the aviation sector. Will flights run on time?

Will the number of cancellations fall? Will passengers be compensated? Will regional routes stay viable?

And will travellers pay less? Those are the questions Australians are asking, and the government has not shown how this framework answers a single one of them. We still do not know the full costs.

Key details have been left to regulations that we have not seen, and the government has not even undertaken a regulatory impact assessment. I would have thought that was very straightforward. In conclusion, Australians deserve an aviation system that works.

They deserve reliable services. They deserve accountability. They deserve real compensation when airlines fail to meet their obligations.

And regional Australians deserve certainty that the decisions made here in Canberra will not make it harder or more expensive to keep air services going in the communities that depend on them. The coalition's record speaks for itself. When aviation in this country faced its darkest hour—something that was unprecedented and couldn't have been foreseen—we acted to protect the networks that hold regional Australia together.

We understand now, as we understood then, that aviation is essential infrastructure, not an optional extra. We're here to back consumers and genuine consumer protections, and we're going to stand up for regional communities. We're going to fight for policies that actually improve things and improve the lives of passengers, not just an expanding bureaucracy, which seems to be the answer to everything: tax more, have more public servants and more bureaucracy, and that'll fix everything.

Well, it doesn't fix everything, and I think with these tax changes we're about to see that some of this stuff makes the economy a whole lot worse. For those reasons, we remain deeply concerned that these bills fall well short of what Australian travellers and regional communities deserve.