Under fire Catherine King now says Qatar decision influenced by invasive strip search

Catherine King was deeply disturbed by the conduct of Qatar Airways and its treatment of women at the time she blocked its bid for more flights into the country.

The invasive physical examinations of Australian women at Hamad International Airport in Doha were at the front of the Transport Minister’s mind when she made the call on July 10.

If there was any lingering doubt on this question, King extinguished it at her press conference at Canberra Airport on Thursday when she released the aviation green paper.

King has now sent a contradictory message to the assurance she gave in July that the October 2020 incident in Doha was not linked to her rejection of the Qatari application.

She is understandably unhappy with and concerned by the treatment of 26 Australian women who were escorted at gun point from their Qatar Airways plane and subjected to invasive physical searches after a newborn baby was found abandoned in a bin.

“If you remember we had multiple media requests on behalf of the women who had been escorted at gun point off the Qatar airlines flight and had been subject on the tarmac in ambulances to invasive body searches,” she said on Thursday. “Certainly, for context, this is the only airline that has something like that that has happened. And so I can’t say I wasn’t aware of it. But it certainly wasn’t the only factor.”

King later downgraded this from being a “factor” to providing the “context” for her decision.

However, reflecting on the June 28 letter she received from five women who are now suing Qatar Airways, King was clearly affected by their story.

“I received a letter from Marque Lawyers on behalf of these women detailing their experiences which are pretty awful,” she said. “They are frankly not anything we would expect anyone and certainly not Australians travelling on an international airline to experience.”

“I would say really clearly that these are Australian citizens. Something really terrible happened to them.”

Several weeks ago, on July 26, King was sending a very different message. She suggested the October 2020 incident was not a factor in her decision to reject the Qatar Airways bid and discouraged people from making the connection.

This assurance now rings hollow and King in her press conference on Thursday has elevated the physical searches as the leading reason for the rejection – whether she meant to achieve this or not.

Officially, no new reason has been provided for blocking the Qatari application other than resorting to the blanket claim it was in the “national interest.”

“There was no one factor that I will point to that swayed my decision one way or the other,” King said.

Conveniently, she stressed that one of the factors which did not feature in her thinking was the commercial interest of Qantas – despite the airline being the key beneficiary of the decision.

After a full week of sound and fury in parliament over the Qatar decision, the public have been left with nothing in terms of coherent answers.

The government has still failed to provide a coherent justification for its actions or explain how extra competition aimed at driving down airfares for travellers would have threatened Australia’s national interest.

However, the public now knows that the Transport Minister was disturbed and concerned by the conduct of Qatar Airways when she knocked back its bid for more flights.

So much so that she told the women suing Qatar Airways of her decision a full week before the Prime Minister himself.