Mr COX (4:15 PM) —Let the record show that the three government members whom the Chief Government Whip managed to round up to support the Minister for Sport and Tourism are now leaving the chamber.

Ms Gillard —They were just eyeing her back.

Mr COX —They were certainly eyeing her back—that is exactly right; the member for Lalor is completely accurate. In fact, last Wednesday, when she was about to get up to answer the first of that abysmal set of responses that she gave, the member for Menzies got up and took a point of order. He tried to spare her. I sent him a note, and the note said:

After the next election I think there will be a repeat of what happened after the last election. The Prime Minister rang the member for Lindsay and he said to her, `Are you sitting down? I've got a very pleasant surprise for you: you're going to be the minister for tourism.' I suggest, in the remote possibility that the Prime Minister were in a position to make a similar offer after the next election, that he might say, `Are you sitting down? I've got a very pleasant surprise for you: you're not going to be the minister for tourism.' She will go down in history as `little blip'. She described this vast disaster as a `little blip' and said that the tourism industry was running around like Henny Penny, complaining that the sky was falling in; that the problems were only coming from the commentators; and that they were just anecdotal. They were only anecdotal because they had not been enumerated. They had not been enumerated because they had only just happened. They are nonetheless real. The minister had a tourism summit listening to her abysmal performance in the House last Wednesday. They were utterly astonished.

For the minister's benefit, I will go through the obvious implications of the Ansett failure: first, the loss of a very substantial part of the capacity on Australia's major trunk routes; second, the loss of a majority of Australia's regional carriers' capacity and the only capacity to some regional areas. The implications of that for the tourist industry are quite simple. If there are no airline services or fewer than half the airline services to a region, there are fewer customers, no tourists and no tourist businesses. Hotels and resorts start laying off staff and some will close. For the minister, these are just anecdotes coming from commentators. For the tourist operators, the people who work for them, and their families, it is their business, their job and their economic security. Those are just the first-round effects. The implication of a loss of airline capacity is a loss of competition. I will quote from Alan Kohler, writing in yesterday's Financial Review:

We are already seeing those fares rise. That means that there will be fewer package deals and they will be more expensive. Fewer people will be flying to regional areas and those who do will have less money to spend when they get there.

Then there is contagion, a concept that we generally think of only in terms of financial markets, but it applies to this situation. Contagion: where the failure of one or more companies or financial institutions causes the failure of other companies that are linked to them. Most obviously, there are Ansett suppliers: fuel companies, catering companies, cleaning companies, travel agents, taxis, hire cars, hotels that look after not only Ansett's customers but their air crew, conference businesses, printers who print their tickets and magazines, and the airport terminal operators. That is just a very small list of them. I have done a little ring-around this morning and I have some examples of how the contagion is spreading. From Australian Major Events: the WA Piper Band could not get to Adelaide to participate in the International Police Tattoo and some culinary teams cannot get flights to Adelaide for Tasting Australia. At the moment, there are no events in jeopardy. Ansett sponsors Australian Major Events; therefore, Australian Major Events will lose lots of free flights. From the Adelaide Convention Centre: no conference or event has yet been cancelled, but there is a decline in the number of delegates of about 10 per cent to 15 per cent, with a significant fall in delegates from the USA, though I will concede that that might be for other reasons.

From the Australian Hotels Association in South Australia: Ansett owes Adelaide hotels $1 million in outstanding bills. South Australian hotels have recorded losses of $600,000 in cancelled bookings and 3,500 room nights in the first week since the airline collapsed. Adelaide hotels expect to lose $8 million in revenue and 50,000 room nights. From Phil Hoffman Travel: small and/or isolated cities such as Adelaide, Darwin, Perth, Alice Springs, Cairns and Hobart are adversely affected because there was already limited capacity relative to the heavy traffic of the east coast trunk routes. Those cities are heavily reliant on air transport, unlike Melbourne and Sydney where good ground transport is more feasible. Anecdotes include a Perth family, booked on Ansett and stranded since the collapse—they cannot get a flight home until 10 October—and business passengers who are flying from Perth to Adelaide and the east coast via Singapore. When you have a disaster on that sort of scale, it is going to affect the overall performance of the Australian economy. Certainly, the government has not done enough to mitigate those effects. The Labor Party, on the other hand, has published a tourism industry rescue plan.

But we should not forget the government's part in contributing to the Ansett failure. On Tuesday of last week, the Prime Minister tabled a document to explain what the government knew, and when, about the Ansett failure. What he was trying to point out was that he believed Ansett was in stronger shape than it actually was and that it was therefore all a bit of a surprise to him. The document that he tabled was this document which I have in my hand, and I will come to its provenance later. The Deputy Prime Minister described it as one of those things that they flip over. In actuality, I think it is called a chart pack—it is for one of those presentations that merchant bankers give you that leads inexorably to the simple conclusion that they want you to draw from what they are telling you. They flip them over. But it seems it was all a bit much for the Deputy Prime Minister to give it any critical analysis. He tried to play down its significance and he said:

He nevertheless followed it absolutely diligently. Later the same day, the Prime Minister told the House that on 27 June the CEO of Ansett, Mr Toomey, told him that the Air New Zealand group had $1 billion in financial reserves. He did not say whether it was New Zealand or Australian dollars.

Mr Emerson —Either way, they are not worth a lot.

Mr COX —The member for Rankin is totally right. The Prime Minister said:

We already have an airline that is Australian owned; it is called Qantas. It is our national carrier.

The Prime Minister was given a document—and the document that he tabled in the House was this document which has a Qantas logo on the bottom. The Prime Minister, and the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Transport and Regional Services took the competitor's advice about the state of Ansett. And what did Qantas tell them? They told them what was in their own commercial interest. They told them that Ansett would not fail. And what did they ask them to do? This is what it says on another page of that document:

What was the SIA proposal? That SIA was to increase its shareholding in Air New Zealand from the current 25 per cent to as much as 49 per cent if the New Zealand government would allow it. (Time expired).