MILDURA Airport is missing out on government support programs despite revenue falling by as much as 95 per cent.
The coronavirus crisis has reduced flights from 48 per week to five, but as a local government-owned entity, the airport was not eligible to claim JobKeeper payments for staff.
It has joined other regional airports in pushing for discretion with the criteria for programs or a government package specifically addressing their challenges.
Mildura Airport chair Peter O’Donnell said since the COVID-19 pandemic began passenger numbers had fallen from 20,000 per month to about 500.
But many of the costs for the business remained.
“Our revenue model is built around a per-passenger model, so our revenue is down to about 5 per cent of what it is normally,” Mr O’Donnell said.
“The impact is substantial, particularly when you note the Federal Government supported airlines to maintain the networks around Australia, but unfortunately a lot of that really hasn’t flowed through to the airport.
“Although we’re required to stay open and stay safe and maintain a standard, we are severely limited with very, very little revenue but still a reasonable cost structure.”
He said the Federal Government had underpinned the cost of airport security, which was welcomed, and Member for Mallee Anne Webster had helped set up meetings and letters to key ministers.
At this stage, the airport was “hoping for some positive answers”.
“Unfortunately, as with most regional airports in Australia, we’re owned by local government and we’re specifically excluded from JobKeeper,” he said.
“Where our intention would’ve been (to keep) all our staff, repurpose those that weren’t active in their existing roles … because JobKeeper isn’t available to us, we’ve had to stand down about 60 per cent of our staff and many of those that are still there are on less hours.”
Mr O’Donnell said the airport’s ownership structure could contribute further to a sense of “falling through to the cracks”.
“States fund local government, and local government is the owner of the airport, so the natural order of ownership should suggest the level of support should maybe be coming from states rather than the Federal Government,” he said.
“But the argument is that we’re part of a federal network and unfortunately we’re just missing out on all levels at the moment.”
Hope for Virgin void to be filled
THE path back to something resembling normalcy for domestic air travel could extend well into next year.
Mr O’Donnell said the airport was looking at different modelling from airlines to assess what the recovery might look like for passenger numbers.
“We’re working on maybe about an 80 or 90 per cent recovery of capacity by June 2021,” he said.
“And that’s a fairly gradual increase — really very little activity between now and probably August or September, and then some gradual increases in the back end of 2020 and just stepping up in 2021 — so we’re fairly modest about our projections at the moment.
“Obviously the domestic aviation market will re-emerge before the international market, so we’re really hopeful that when people are able to travel, they’ll jump on some planes and book some holidays.”
It was “hard to judge” whether Mildura would still be serviced by three airlines on the other side of the crisis, he said.
Various potential bidders are looking at Virgin Australia during its voluntary administration.
“It seems certain there will be a Virgin 2.0 of some sort,” Mr O’Donnell said.
“The Virgin route, Mildura to Melbourne, was really well looked after by the people of Mildura, so we expect when the new derivation starts we’re really hopeful they see Mildura as a positive route and support it in a new structure.”
