Queensland, WA border closures un-Australian: Sydney Airport CEO

Sydney Airport’s CEO takes aim at state premiers, saying ‘self interest has swallowed national interest’.

Marvel Wijaya, 19, a university student from Indonesia at Canberra Airport awaiting a flight to Sydney. Fewer than 100 people a day are using the terminal in Australia’s national capital as travel restrictions continue. Picture: Sean Davey.

Sydney Airport chief executive Geoff Culbert has taken aim at premiers for keeping borders closed, claiming “self-interest has swallowed national interest”.

Speaking at the Infrastructure Partnerships Australia virtual summit, Mr Culbert said in the brief period state borders reopened in July, passengers through Sydney Airport swelled by 400 per cent.

Figures released on Friday showed Sydney Airport passenger traffic nosedived to 129,000 in August, compared to 317,000 the previous month, and 3.6 million the same time last year. Domestic passengers totalled 91,000, down from 276,000 in July.

Mr Culbert called again for a consistent nationwide set of metrics to determine what constituted a “COVID hotspot” and what were the triggers for opening and closing borders.

“These can’t be too conservative. They need to be realistic and achievable,” he said. “What we have now is a fragmented and inconsistent approach.”

He said the behaviour they were seeing from “certain states was inconsistent with what it meant to be Australian”.

Queensland borders remained closed to NSW as well as Victoria, while Western Australia and Tasmania were both closed to the rest of the country.

“This is a moment where we should be banding together. We should have each other’s back. That’s what Australians do,” Mr Culbert said.

“Unfortunately, self-interest has swallowed national interest, so we need to get state borders down. There’s a huge amount of pent-up demand.”

Mr Culbert said Australia had achieved the “unique double” of having one of the lowest rate of COVID infection in the world, and one of the worst-performing domestic aviation markets. “That has to change,” he said.

Queensland will reopen its borders to the ACT, which hasn’t had a COVID case in close to three months, on September 25.

On international travel, Melbourne Airport chief executive Lyell Strambi and Brisbane Airport CEO Gert-Jan de Graaff agreed with Mr Culbert, that the aviation industry could not afford to wait for a COVID vaccine to become available to resume overseas flights.

“We have to develop alternative safe ways to travel,” Mr de Graaff said. Auckland International Airport chief executive Adrian Littlewood said he believed “effective, rapid and large scale testing regimes” would be the path to restart overseas travel.

“It will be lumpy and bumpy,” he said. Mr Strambi said it was likely travellers would face higher airfares when flying resume.

“That will be a barrier and then we have to remember that people will have had some pretty nasty experiences (during the COVID crisis); they have had bookings cancelled and have had real trouble getting refunds,” he said.

Airports, like airlines, have suffered significant hardship as a result of travel restrictions imposed by governments to try to contain the spread of COVID-19.

Sydney and Brisbane Airports have taken sizeable loans to help steer them through the pandemic, and Melbourne Airport continued to borrow to pay its bills, Mr Strambi revealed on Monday. Mr Culbert said he had given Prime Minister Scott Morrison an undertaking Sydney Airport would stay open as an “essential service” despite the fact it was operating at a loss.

Outside of the major airports, Canberra Airport had seen numbers dwindle to double figures with as few as 43 people passing through the terminal in a day.