I just don’t get it!
Australia’s domestic airlines have already landed buckets of cash throughout the COVID pandemic, then they recently secured even more cash though the 50% flight deal.
Hang on though! What about SMEs in travel and tourism throughout Australia including travel agents, tour operators and others? What do they get?
It appears not very much.
It gets worse!
The indignity and inequity of all this were elevated to a shocking new level last week when payments to aviation workers of $500 a week in support under last week’s $1.2 billion aviation and tourism package, until the expected late October dropping of restrictions, were revealed.
I have no issue with aviation workers getting this subsidy, but why have they been singled out and what about all the other workers in the travel and tourism industry – they do not get anything and not even after AFTA’s valiant but failed attempts to get JobKeeper extended for travel agents!
This massive financial support which is effectively the government shoring up the balance sheets of airlines does not seem right, when one considers that they are all massively cashed-up, one signing off on what has been described as the largest sports sponsorship deal in Australia and with airline management receiving some of the highest salaries. bonuses and share benefits.
Am I missing something here, but it appears that the airlines could themselves afford to pay their workers the $500 support rather than the government and then the $500 could be given to other struggling and desperate workers in travel and tourism?
AFTA CEO Darren Rudd said to members that AFTA was continuing to “squeeze out as much support as quickly as possible to keep you and your business and our sector alive”, adding, “If aviation workers deserve ‘direct support payments’, given we work in the same sector and have been even harder hit than the airlines, then so do we.”
He added, “You, our members, just like aviation workers, need and deserve proportionate, timely, scalable and targeted assistance too…we have been arguing this for some time.”
I have to say while it appears Mr Rudd has done his best to secure assistance for the dire circumstances of travel agents, I think he has missed the boat as it were and it must be very frustrating for him that his efforts appear to have fallen on deaf ears, whereas it appears that the airline cohort seems to have been able to walk straight into the citadels of power in Canberra and get what they want!
How frustrating and very disappointing indeed.
An opinion by John Alwyn-Jones