Australian Travel Agents Co-Operative Future Focus Conference Speech
National Press Club, Canberra
20 October 2023
Good morning everyone. It’s fantastic to have you here and after a really busy sitting week, to actually be with people that run small businesses that live in small towns and suburbs right across our great country, that you come together to learn and celebrate what you do and I know you’re going to have a fantastic conference. And yes, I’ve spoken here a few times in my career and it looks very posh right now, with the wooden overlay. So Jack, I just want to acknowledge you as Chair, the other Directors of the Co-op. As a country girl, I do love a good co-op and it doesn’t always have to be about the dairy farmers, but the structure of co-ops I think is just so beneficial when you’ve got to push against big corporate powers, you can join together and get more bang for your buck. So I really congratulate you and it’s great to see my old friend Dean Long as well, from the Australian Federation of Travel Agents.
Australians are obviously the best travellers in the world, which is why what you do is such an important job, bringing joy and excitement and wonder and sating curiosity, all the wonderful experiences and connections by helping Australians travel to distant lands. And that’s why the last couple of years for you as an industry has been so tough. To reinforce this, I just want to insert on a serious note, the very recent appalling terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas, resulting in turmoil in the Middle East. Australians will be relying on their travel agents to get them home safe and sound and their loved ones. Just overnight, the United States has issued a general warning for American travellers travelling overseas. We know that often Australians can be mistaken for Americans in some overseas countries. So all of your businesses will be important pipelines of information to your clients helping them stay aware of those official advisory notes. Thank you sincerely in advance for the work you’re all going to be doing on behalf of your clients and their families over the coming weeks and hopefully not months, getting them safely where they need to go.
COVID was a once in a century event that took us all by surprise and your sector was one of the few that bore brunt of that chaos, the heartbreak and the challenges that cut our nation off from the rest of the world. But when we reflect on years past, there remains a few lessons for us all and a newfound appreciation of the freedom we enjoy. From having to deal with distressed customers stranded across the globe, seeing new businesses all but evaporate overnight, to wrestling funds out of Qantas. As I had more recently discovered, that’s no mean feat, getting a few bucks that your owed out of both men and women. I promise Qantas will get a bit of a mention a bit further on in my speech.
Pre-COVID tourism was a key driver of growth for the Australian economy with domestic and international tourism spending totaling over $122 billion in the financial year 18-19. While I understand most of you here are focused on assisting your clients to travel overseas and gained global experiences, as a representative of regional Australia I celebrate the major contribution the wider inbound and domestic tourism provides to our regions with 44 cents in every tourism dollar being spent out and about in rural and regional Australia. In 2018-19 Australia generated $60.8 billion in direct tourism GDP, representing a growth of three and a half per cent over the previous year, faster than our national GDP growth. So we would say Australians like to travel, that they really like to travel more than doing most other things. Tourism remains our fourth largest export industry and it directly employs 666,000 Australians, that’s five per cent of our total workforce. We also know tourism is a major contributor to our global brand. In fact, Australian families travelling overseas are positive ambassadors for our country, in the main. Everyone overseas that has met an Australian, we’ve all had to answer the question where the kangaroos do actually hop up and down suburban streets, why we eat our national emblems.
I’ve actually been personally overwhelmed by the response of the Aviation Inquiry. The Senate and Senators do inquiries into a range of things all the time, everyday there’s an inquiry going on some issue or another. But in the effort of just actually doing my job we got some pretty amazing evidence and had some pretty arrogant witnesses appear before us, which just beggars belief and I guess you’ve had to deal with that culture of arrogance, day in and day out for years. So I just want to thank all of you who also thought that some senior executives at Qantas need to go to a bit of a re-education camp.
So a lot of focus has been on the tourism industry of late, not just the Parliament and the Senate but obviously the press gallery has all of a sudden gotten very, very interested in the price of flights, customer service, the experience of the 12 million frequent flyer members of Qantas. 12 million Australians are members of frequent flyers and had their points devalued by a board decision overnight. Very, very frustrated, angry group of customers, and the frustration of your clients forced to pay sky high prices to travel overseas, particularly through the Middle East into Europe, and it all just kind of smashed into that parliamentary inquiry. Your association provided evidence to this inquiry that international airfares from Sydney were up to ninety-nine per cent higher than pre the pandemic. That was just an incredible piece of evidence but I think there was sort of a sharp intake of breath when those stats were actually read out to Senators. These high fares have been in place because of a lack of competition in our aviation market. No matter how much the Prime Minister wants to say we have the most competitive aviation market in the world, you know that’s not true. Because your clients are paying too much money for their airfares. And when you see additional airlines enter into a particular route, guess what? Prices go down, it’s not rocket science, but anyway. Etihad is barely providing services these days and Emirates is operating well below capacity. So for anyone wanting to get to Europe through the Middle East the capacity constraints are quite enormous and that is leading to significantly higher fees and less choice of destination for Aussies who just can’t wait to get to Europe. I mean, one of my sons has just gotten home, they just can’t wait our young people to get out and about in Europe.
In this context and recognising Australia is geographically at the end of the line of the travel system, we’re not a country you fly through to get somewhere. Maybe New Zealand, but let’s face it that’s a very small proportion of the international tourism dollar. And that’s why Australians have been scratching their heads about why the Government would make a decision that deliberately keeps airfares high. Now if there was a good reason, tell us the good reason and most Australians would accept that. I think the frustration was that there were twelve different reasons, changing everyday depending who was asked. And when you’re in Government, you can’t do that, you’ve got to be upfront with Australian people. Even if you make a decision they don’t like they respect the fact that you’re going to tell them why you did it and be upfront with them.
So the Qatar Airways decision by Catherine King obviously, has left Australians scratching their heads and the evidence we received through the Committee was that the Department of Transport consulted widely with the airline and gave Minister King advice to say here are your list of airlines for negotiating a mandate, let’s go and get these bilateral arrangements done. Qatar Airways was right up the top. Catherine King over January this year, then said to Jayne Hrdlicka, this is all evidence, I’ll save you reading the Hansard, Jane said that the Minister gave her the strong impression in January that she was going to sign off on this and start to open up those flights. The Minister had heard that Alan Joyce wasn’t happy on the grapevine but hadn’t had a meeting with him at that stage. Fast forward six months and suddenly the Qatar Airways application is rejected. What’s happened in between then to change the Minister’s mind. What happened to make sure the Treasurer Jim Chalmers didn’t include aviation in his competition review until he backflipped a couple of days later? Why did they stop the ACCC monitoring of cancellations and delays? Guess what, there was only one stakeholder, one witness to the inquiry that didn’t want the ACCC cancellation and delay monitoring reinstated, that didn’t want Qatar Airways extra flights approved and that didn’t want aviation in the competition review. That was, guess, have a guess.
AUDIENCE MEMBERS
Qantas.
BRIDGET MCKENZIE
Absolutely, up the back yes, table nine, Qantas. Because it wasn’t just Virgin saying this, it was competition experts, like the former Commissioners of the ACCC, Rod Sims, Professor Allan Fels, the current ACCC, we had academics, we had aviation experts and of course airports and airlines, all have the same evidence. So that then beggars belief why the government decided to block flights, was it because the Prime Minister has a very close personal and political relationship with the former CEO, we’ve all seen the bromance, the red carpet, was it for the painted planes, the fact that Qantas was going to help the Government with their Yes campaign? Irrespective of where you voted on that, they just needed to disclose that, they need to be upfront about that, because that was a great assistance to the referendum Yes campaign. But at every step the Government has run this protection racket. They won’t tell us the reason, they won’t let Ministers answer questions, they gagged their departments and so we got very, very frustrated. And this week… my team is going to be really angry because I’ve really gone off script. They spent all this time in a busy sitting week writing me a great speech and I’ve put it in the trash.
Okay, so we wanted to get Alan Joyce in front of the Senate because there’s only three people that know what really happened in that six month period, and why Australians are paying more: the Prime Minister, Minister King and Alan Joyce. And Alan Joyce, thanks to the Daily Telegraph, they found him hiding in Ireland, but this week we wanted to set the Committee up so when he does eventually return, we can get him in front of the Committee and ask those questions. And the Labor Party, the Greens and David Pocock voted to not do that and I think Australians are rightfully very angry because it’s a disrespect to the genuine questions that the 12 million frequent flyer clients have about, why did you devalue my points? Why did you think you could pocket over half a billion dollars of COVID flight credits at the end of this year? They backflipped on it, but it was the Senators that made Joyce do that. Why did you think it was okay to sell ghost flights? This is an incredibly powerful corporate entity in this country, they’ve got too much market share. We all know it, you know better than most and something needs to be done about it. So I would like to know from you guys what questions you would like to have answered.
ENDS