Australia, it's time to deregulate the skies

But the doomsayers never acknowledge that unnecessarily high airfares Australians - both north and south of the Tropic of Capricorn - currently pay is in effect a tax or a tariff, which sees the many (the flying public) being robbed to enrich the few (QF and VA).

Any student of economics knows that greater competition yields better products and services for consumers at more affordable prices. Think flat screen televisions. Think cars. Heck, think elections!

If foreigners can provide the same service at a cheaper price (than QF and VA) or a better service at the same price, why should Australians be denied the right to board their planes?

Is it the job of northern Australians to underwrite jobs of those who choose to work in the airline industry if such underwriting hits their wallets hard?

But what is most significant when anti-consumer advocates like QF, VA and their entourages crudely wave the flag in an effort to stop competition is not their claim that "Middle Eastern carriers" (this is a pejorative for EH, EK and QR) are competing "unfairly" or are "subsidised", it is their false assumption that Gulf Arab carriers are, like western carriers, motivated by profit.

This may not be so.

Gulf Arab carriers may have other strategic goals that to them are far, far more important than profit. Goals that demand high volumes of traffic passing through the mega airports of Abu Dhabi, Dubai or Doha, and world leading customer service offered by these airlines coupled with highly competitive airfares is, to their way of thinking, the best way to secure this.

Let's suppose that two of the three, Etihad and Qatar are indeed subsidised. In fact, let's go one further and say they operate as not for profit businesses.

Say they lose money flying Australians. For all I know they are damned chipper about that!

Why? Because Etihad and Qatar Airways are cogs in their governments' wheels where the objective may not be to make money, but instead may be to promote their desert sheikhdoms to the world as up-and-coming nation states.

Think Abu Dhabi's Guggenheim Museum.

Think Qatar's success at winning the right to host the FIFA World Cup 2022. For those who missed the news, Qatar is not a football crazed state, but a nation that lobbied hard for the right to host the World Cup merely to showcase to the world what a modernising nation it is fast becoming.