Senator BOB COLLINS(4.58 p.m.) —I thank Senator Harradine for raising this important issue. If the public were to divest its interest in a Commonwealth airport; that is the entire airport, including the runways—and in respect of Darwin, for example, the situation would be different from Townsville and Alice Springs because Darwin is a joint facility which is used for defence purposes—and a private operator took over to run the airport as a normal commercial concern, I have no doubt that local councils would expect to treat that commercial operator in exactly the same way as any other landholder of leased land or otherwise in the council's area.

It not being a commercial operation of the Commonwealth of which the taxpayers are getting the benefit, as we currently are—and I might add, and I have made this point in debate before, that the Federal Airports Corporation currently is an extremely efficient operator of those airports; its landing charges and costs are among the lowest in the world for the users and at the same time operating most of them profitably—I am sure it would be the expectation of local councils, as it would in Tasmania, that if we divest ourselves as the Commonwealth of those operations then local councils would get the benefit of imposing taxes and charges on the entire operation. Perhaps you could help us all, Senator Tambling, by clarifying what the commercial operation means. Is it the terminal only or only the bits of the terminal that would be commercially operated and not the runways at all?