[Peetwo]

Not wanting to distract too much from the caption comp, but I thought it would be fair to balance the ledger somewhat, with one of Gobbledock's favourite polly pics...


   

Err.."Hands up! Your busted for spraying saliva through your teeth.."

While on the subject of Albo & airports, a couple of highlights from the Hansard for yesterday's 2nd reading of the Airports Amendment Bill 2015.

Albo:

..I am somewhat disappointed, if not surprised, that the Greens political party in New South Wales have a formal policy that Sydney should not have a second airport. What is more, they also have a position that says they do not support Sydney's first airport, Kingsford Smith—that is, the Greens political party argue that a global city such as Sydney should not have an aviation facility. It is an absurd proposition, in which people could get into Sydney by parachuting out of planes as they fly over, but it is unclear how they could actually leave Sydney...

...Constituents in my electorate are adversely affected by Kingsford Smith airport, but I accept that that is a by-product of a piece of infrastructure that is vital for not just Sydney but New South Wales and Australia, as a generator of economic activity and jobs. The Greens political party, of course, say that you can have no airport in Sydney or in Western Sydney but a high-speed rail line to a mythical location somewhere else. The problem with that is, of course, that a high-speed rail line would include 67 kilometres of tunnel through Sydney, which the study that I commissioned as minister showed would also in practice be likely to be opposed by the Greens political party, just like the Greens in the UK opposed the high-speed rail proposals that had the support at the last election in Britain of the UK Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party. The fact is that they should not be allowed to have this absurd proposition whereby in inner Sydney they argue that they want to close Kingsford Smith, but they also argue against any location for a second airport...

 
And for Ben's benefit - Plane Talking: Does Labor really want a jet curfew at Sydney’s new airport?...

...While the opposition will be supporting this legislation as a means to ensure that we get the planning right, I do want to raise the fact that the rail connection needs to be built just as the roads need to be built. It makes no sense to go back after an airport is built and a runway is in place to build a railway line.


As much as an airport is a piece of economic infrastructure, it is also a public asset. To facilitate its efficient use, it should be connected to the existing public transport network. A rail link that connects the existing south-west line—that has been extended thanks to the decision of the former Rees government in New South Wales—to the western line should be part of the initial development. That would ensure it was built into the price when the airport is leased as well.

This would mean benefit for the people of Western and south-western Sydney regardless of whether they are going to airport or not. That is an example of what can drive public support for this proposal. I think very strongly that this should occur. During the New South Wales election, I did a press conference with the New South Wales Labor leader Luke Foley to express our view there. I would urge the government to have a close look at the propositions that we have put forward in a constructive way and get on with ensuring that this occurs.

The fact is that no airport, without public transport access, operates as well as an airport once it has that public transport access. Look at Melbourne: decades after the new airport was opened, they still do not have rail access, and it is still an issue. It is far harder once the airport has been built to go back and deal with those issues...

...the part in bold still does not make it clear whether Federal Labor is in support of a curfew at Badgery's or not - typical, hedging his bets again...FCOL
After Albo we got another excellent speech from the member for Hughes Craig Kelly, which included the following informative passage on Airports & competition..  

...I can give an example of how this can apply to airports and why it is very important. In July 2000, there was a decision by the European Commission called the Spanish airports decision. What happened in that case was that they found that the airports in Spain were operating what they called a discount structure, or charging smaller airlines a higher price. If you were an airline and you made one to 50 landings a month, you paid the rack price; if you made 51 to 100 landings, you got a nine per cent discount; with 101 to 150 landings per month, you got a 17 per cent discount; with 151 to 200 landings, you got a 26 per cent discount; and with more than 200 you got a 35 per cent discount. So, if you were a large airline operator with a lot of flights and a lot of planes, you were able to get a 35 per cent discount on your landing fees in airports in Spain against a smaller operator. This had the potential to destroy competition. It prevented new operators that were coming into the airline industry in Europe and landing in Spain from being able to compete on a level playing field. What the EU found was that that structure of charging those smaller competitors a higher price was anticompetitive, and they banned it. They said:

The existence of economies of scale, the aim of reducing air traffic noise or air congestion, for example, could be regarded as objective reasons—

for such discrimination.

However, in the case of landing and take-off services such economies of scale do not exist. The services provided do not depend on the individual owner of the aircraft or whether they are rendered to the first or the tenth aircraft of the same airline.

They found that the fact that an airport:

… has applied dissimilar conditions to its commercial customers for the provision of equivalent services, thereby placing some of them at a competitive disadvantage, constitutes an abuse of a dominant position within the meaning of … Article 82.

We have no such provisions in our competition laws, and that threatens effective competition in our airline industry...

  
Mr Kelly then went onto have another crack at the proposed Moorebank Intermodal project:

...The other issue I would like to talk about quickly is that I fear that we are making a terrible mistake involving the Moorebank Intermodal. By having an intermodal at Moorebank instead of at Badgerys Creek, we are losing one of our abilities to fund the railway line into Badgerys Creek. The member for Grayndler emphasised the importance of building that railway line, but our funding is not unlimited. By investing in Moorebank—by pouring Commonwealth money down the toilet in Moorebank—we are simply making it harder and harder. That money should have been put into the rail link to get it set up at Badgerys Creek...

...This is exactly what we have at Moorebank. It goes on, and it cites examples of how forecasts for rail projects have failed. It does a study across different continents, and for rail transportation infrastructure projects it finds the cost overruns, averaged across more than 50 projects, are 44.7 per cent measured in prices. It finds not only that the cost is more than 40 per cent higher but that the actual passage of traffic is 51 per cent lower than predicted. We have seen this in Sydney with our planning debacles: the Cross City Tunnel and the Lane Cove Tunnel...

...That is again the problem that we have with Moorebank. There is simply no answering of the critical questions. There are three completely failed premises: it takes trucks off the road, it reduces air pollution and it saves costs. Any critical analysis of those three premises shows that they are completely faulty. In the Moorebank Intermodal, we have another complete planning fallacy. This should be combined with the airport at Badgerys Creek...

Ahh enough of that, back to the caption comp, it is much more fun...

MTF..P2