Catherine King has had a bad week. If you missed the travails of the transport minister, she’s faced sustained pressure about her decision to block an application from Qatar Airways to add more international flights at a time when fares are incredibly expensive and Qantas seems fully intent on driving Australians bonkers.
The Qatar saga has bumped along for weeks, but the return of parliament provided the soundstage for a baying opposition to heighten the controversy. King’s answers to the inquisition inside and outside the chamber didn’t help. They were hedged (“to the best of my recollection”) and, at times, confusing. It wasn’t clear whether or not a terrible incident in Doha when female passengers were strip-searched back in October 2020 was a factor in her decision, or context for the decision.
King says she blocked the extra flights from Qatar because of the national interest. But national interest in this context has lacked clear definition. King has made a distinction between serving the national interest and protecting the commercial interest of competitors such as Qantas. But a few weeks back, the assistant treasurer, Stephen Jones, blurred that distinction. He presented the viability of Qantas as a valid national interest consideration.
After (bravely) welcoming the airline’s $2.5bn profit, Jones argued, in the context of King’s Qatar decision: “We can drive prices down but if we drive them down to a level where it’s actually unsustainable to run an airline, instead of having two carriers we will design our markets in a way which will make it unsustainable for the existing Australian-based carrier.”
If you’ve followed politics for a long time you’ll be familiar with this rationale. We can call it the Qantas Rule. As long as I’ve been in Canberra, governments of all persuasions have pursued a policy objective of ensuring Qantas remains the de-facto national carrier. That means everyone wants Qantas to be a top-tier domestic and international airline. But that is hard to sustain in an era where government-owned carriers with deep pockets seek to decimate their competitors and rule the skies.
Jones was truthful. He mouthed a long-held Canberra orthodoxy. But this transparency was considered unhelpful, because helping Qantas to help Australia is a much tougher sell when the company is making fat profits while treating its loyal customers like chumps. So the Qatar controversy rolled on.
After days of bombardment about who did what when, and who attended which Qantas soiree, with King offering up clumsy or lawyerly explanations, the transport minister attempted a pivot. She released the government’s aviation green paper on Thursday.
This document was decreed vacuous almost instantly – certainly before anyone had time to read the 224 pages. By Thursday, we had reached peak imbroglio, and the opinion cycle during imbroglios has only one rule: file your hot take quickly, and show no mercy.
The criticism was valid, to some extent. Green papers tend to contain more signposts than destinations, and this one was no exception. But the policy work shows King has been grappling with the medium term, not just the next five minutes.
The paper charts a policy trajectory. The priority now is recovery from the pandemic. The priority over the next couple of decades is set the path to net zero. A bunch of things hang off this trajectory. Strengthening consumer rights and competition when the domestic market is highly concentrated. Trying to stop misuse of market power when airports are private monopolies and airlines are in a position to gouge customers.
(October 8, 2022)
Qantas chief executive, Alan Joyce, cautions the government against granting the Qatari carrier extra capacity. Qantas claims it could "distort" the recovering market.
(July 10, 2023)
King responds to a June letter from the women behind a class action against Qatar Airways over a 2020 incident at Doha airport where they were escorted off planes at gunpoint and subjected to invasive bodily inspections. The women plead with her not to grant the extra capacity. King tells the women “your experience remains in my thoughts” and that the government “is not considering additional bilateral air rights with Qatar”.
(July 13, 2023)
Anthony Albanese speaks with the Virgin Australia boss, Jayne Hrdlicka, about Qatar Airways' request, not knowing King has made her decision.
(July 13, 2023)
King informs Albanese, as well as other ministers, about her decision. The decision was made public on 18 July, with King confirming the rejection in media reports.
(July 26, 2023)
King says she “wouldn't link the decision” with the Doha airport incident. She suggests reducing emissions was a driving factor: “I want more capacity for people to be able to enjoy travel, but equally I want to be able to decarbonise the transport sector."
(August 3, 2023)
King, having provided little insight into the decision, makes her first attempt at providing a reason for the refusal, telling Guardian Australia that allowing the Qatari request would go against Australia’s “national interest”. She provides no further detail.
(August 9, 2023)
During question time, King says that under the national interest consideration, there was a concern Qatar’s extra capacity could hurt the aviation sector’s post-Covid recovery, and that the government had also acted to protect “long-term well-paid secure jobs for Australians in the aviation sector”.
(August 15, 2023)
King suggests the issue was related to the Qatari government, saying “we determined that in the case of Qatar Airways, owned by the Qatari government, this was not in our national interest”.
At the same press conference, King suggests Qantas’ investment in aircraft was a reason: “Obviously Qantas is increasing its capacity as well as buying new planes, which are important to our system as well."
(August 28, 2023)
The assistant treasurer, Stephen Jones, links the decision to a strategy that “doesn’t destroy the [aviation] industry over the medium and long term”, in comments to the Financial Review. He later says these comments had been “misconstrued” to suggest the government was acting to protect Qantas. He says it is “completely uncontroversial” for a government to want a profitable local airline industry.
Pressure grows on the government to explain its decision and the influence of Qantas in the decision, following the Australian carrier unveiling a record $2.47bn profit days before a damning consumer watchdog investigation and legal action saw CEO Alan Joyce step down early.
(September 4, 2023)
Albanese tells question time he “received no lobbying from Qantas on this issue” and that Joyce did not speak to him about the Qatari request.
(September 5, 2023)
Albanese tells question time he had spoken with Hrdlicka on 13 July about Qatar Airways’ request, but that “during that discussion I did not know that the transport minister had made a decision on 10 July”.
(September 6, 2023)
King tells question time: “I do meet routinely with the CEOs of all of the airlines, airports and peak bodies, and from my recollection, the main people lobbying me about Qatar came from Virgin and a third party [engaged] my office on behalf of Qatar."
(September 7, 2023)
At a press conference at Canberra airport to present the aviation green paper, King says the Doha incident was “a factor” in her decision to reject Qatar’s request, but then walks this back immediately, saying it instead provided “context” for her decision. “Certainly, for context, this is the only airline that has something like that that has happened. And so I can’t say that, you know, I wasn’t aware of it but certainly it wasn’t the only factor,” King says.
Perhaps King failed to see the Qatar trapdoor at her feet because she was preoccupied with the bigger picture. As they say in the classics, huge if true. Perhaps this is a rare example in politics of the important crowding out the urgent.
King isn’t particularly forthcoming, and she certainly isn’t a political street fighter, so it was interesting watching her navigating the crucible this week. While her core reasoning on Qatar remained somewhat mysterious, other things were very clear. King failed to anticipate Peter Dutton coming at her like Judge Judy, characterising her decision as symptomatic of a government that schmoozes Alan Joyce and “woke” executives like him, while disdaining irate Qantas customers with their useless flight credits, lost luggage and delayed services.
King looked like a minister crunched in a time shift, because she is a minister crunched in a time shift. Labor is transiting from a point in the political zeitgeist when voters were more aspirational. Voters sought a new kind of politics, they voted for it in May 2022, and then they rewarded a new government for focusing on the future rather than cosplaying relentlessly on the nightly news.
But materialism trumps aspiration at the moment for entirely legitimate reasons. Voters are preoccupied with managing in the here and now. Everyone is battening down the hatches.
Skating by on the vibe of the thing is over for this government.
Underscoring the time shift, impatience visited the House of Representatives this week. A group of protesting pharmacists stopped by question time and made a scene in the visitor’s galleries. From my adjacent vantage point, their behaviour was pretty discomfiting. Some hectored. Some flipped the bird. But this performance had a context. The visitors mirrored the aggression they saw in the chamber below. They took their cue from the shit show arrayed directly below them.
Anyone who watches question time regularly knows the designated hour of glower is completely broken as an accountability mechanism. Questions are performative and the answers are a screed of talking points interspersed with opportunistic ad hominem. The former House Speaker Anna Burke said it best when she noted a couple of years ago: “When you rock in at question time, the notion of being a parliamentarian goes out the door, and you become a partisan beast.”
Dutton’s current political objectives are obvious. He wants to blank the teal independents, void the whole new politics epoch as a moment of moonstruck madness, and drag Australian politics back into a major party contest; the more zero sum, the better.
Given the government couldn’t deliver a coherent set of facts about its reasoning on the Qatar decision this week, Dutton sought to pin that evasion. His methodology was make accusations and thunder to the rooftops. Labor buttressed King and returned fire, increasing the clamour.
I suspect anyone following the Qatar saga because they are sick of paying astronomical prices to travel overseas might have been grateful for information. People might have liked King to have been compelled to explain her reasoning to the chamber, in some detail. But Dutton wasn’t really interested in information. What he sought was volume, inference and spectacle. Facts can be surplus to requirements because this is politics, a theatre where people are convicted routinely on circumstantial evidence.
It might be a tough time for aspiration, but the teals declined to be blanked.
They inserted themselves twice, running a motion with the Greens calling for an overhaul of question time. The second incursion came when Kylea Tink, the member for North Sydney, rose on Thursday to complain that conduct during question time was “aggressive and personalised, with numerous examples of condescending and offensive language designed, I believe, to intimidate others within this chamber”.
Tink mourned what felt like vanishing opportunity. “I came to this place wanting to speak for my community in what I consider to be the highest chamber in the land, and I did that because I believe this place should be a place of mutual respect, learned discussion and, dare I say it, a capacity to listen to each other. But, as evidenced in yesterday’s display, I fear we are such a distance from that reality.”
It’s a clarifying observation.
