Mr St CLAIR (7:35 PM) —I wish to continue with some comments I made the other night with regard to the importance of regional airline services in New South Wales, particularly coming out of some of the changes that have been happening. I covered a number of points the other night concerning my membership of the New South Wales air transport summit working group, and I would like to continue in the minutes that are available.

Regional airline services are important in my electorate of New England, where there are two major ports—Tamworth and Armidale—which are certainly very well serviced by various players. More particularly, they are important because of the smaller services that go into Inverell and Glen Innes, and they are of absolute importance to me and to other people in New England in providing access direct to Sydney through a properly serviced air route. One of the issues that came up during the submission that I made to the working group was that of communities supporting local businesses by buying locally—and there are a lot of `buy local' programs. The local chambers of commerce, development organisations, business enterprise centres and councils all support this concept.

Communities must support those local airline operators that work out of their communities. I draw a parallel to the XPT rail service that halts going north from Sydney to Armidale. People should support and use that service where possible. Airline services are no different. As I mentioned the other day, the load factors of some of these airlines are down as low as 30 per cent.

There is another issue that I wish to clarify tonight. Comments were made by the New South Wales transport minister in regard to his $50,000. His statement was heralded as a great thing, but I said that the $50,000 subsidy was not per airline—it was not for each route; it was not even for each airport— but was just a $50,000 subsidy to the system. While that is a step in the right direction, comments continue to be made publicly that aviation fuel excise is a major problem. This government has reduced excise on avgas in the vicinity of 16c a litre. That significant change of 16c a litre has delivered $16 million to regional airlines that use avgas. This government has removed a $16 million burden in excise. The price is 15.67c a litre lower in this term of the Howard government. The government is making a substantial change to the way that businesses operate by removing many of the taxes and the burdens that are in place.

I raised the issue of location-specific pricing and en route charges. Small regional airline operators that do not fly through the smaller routes of Albury, Tamworth and Coffs Harbour are gaining a benefit from location-specific pricing. They pay lower air traffic control charges at Sydney airport than they would if charges at regional airports were not cross-subsidised. These things need to be on the public record. The charges collected by Airservices from regional operators in New South Wales, whether tower or en route, are around $3 million per annum. Of this amount, just over $2½ million is paid by the major regional operators, all of which have an association with one or other of the domestic airlines. (Time expired)