PETER STEFANOVIC, HOST: The Australian government wants passengers to have their say on the design of a new aviation consumer protection if flights are delayed or cancelled. Joining us live is the Transport Minister, Catherine King. Minister, it’s good to have you with us this morning. So the airlines have had their say. How do customers make their thoughts heard?

CATHERINE KING: Well, they can go to my department’s website, infrastructure.gov.au, have your say, and there’s a consultation paper out they can have a look at, and they can have their say about these new Australian consumer protection rights for aviation. 

PETER STEFANOVIC: If this policy leads to extra costs for airlines, won’t those just be passed on to customers through higher ticket prices? 

CATHERINE KING: Well certainly we know that in other jurisdictions that in terms of consumer protection regimes what we’ve actually seen, from people, from passengers is they really want to have quick access to refunds they don’t want to see delays in being able to get some form of redress to be able to get on flights quickly or if they need to have accommodation or meals. That’s what passengers have been asking us for. We want to see a lift in standards for passengers across the aviation sector. There have been some improvements but we know there’s a long way to go and really this is what this protection scheme is designed to do. Certainly there will be some costs involved in the administration of the scheme. We’ve tried to really balance those against making sure we’ve got the best protections in place that we can, in a market that is a smaller market in Australia. 

PETER STEFANOVIC: So you believe though that if the policy leads to extra costs, ticket prices would go up? 

CATHERINE KING: Certainly our view is that there needs to be a balance and that’s why we’ve designed the scheme in the way in which we have, that focuses really closely on making sure that there is immediate redress for people. Not long delays before you get a rebooking, not long delays before you get a refund. If you don’t want a flight credit, which is often what’s offered, you actually get a refund immediately, and that you get access to accommodation, food or other transport to assist you in when an event is occurring. And that’s really the focus that we’ve had of these protection schemes. We’ve had calls for a bigger European-style compensation scheme. We haven’t gone down that route because we do know that would be a very costly scheme to administer, so we think we’ve got the balance right here in trying to make sure we’ve got good access to rights, a charter of rights that passengers can expect that standard for when they’re actually flying, but trying to get that balance right so that we don’t add a lot of money into the tickets because we know that is also something that people are concerned about.

PETER STEFANOVIC: OK, how complicated does it get though when you bring in international airlines and then there’s booking agents overseas and then there’s code sharing problems here in Australia? Is that when it gets complicated? 

CATHERINE KING: Well there are three sort of things that underpin this scheme. The first is an ombudsman who, if there is a complex issue that you just cannot get resolved directly with your airline or with the airport, if it does bring in, if there’s an issue being with the airport itself then you can go and have an actual complaint mechanism to the Ombudsman. There’s also a regulator whose job it is to ensure that the airlines and the airports actually meet really what are important consumer protection standards for passengers as they travel. What we’re trying to do is really lift the standard of the aviation experience for passengers here in Australia and when they travel from Australia overseas. 

PETER STEFANOVIC: So it comes down, when there’s a delay or a cancellation, it really comes down to fault. So I’ll break this question up into two. If it is the airline’s fault, if it’s staffing or whatever, and you may have already answered this anyway, but aren’t remedies already in place? What more would you be expecting? 

CATHERINE KING: They can be be really mixed, and I think not a lot of us, when you’re booking an airfare, you don’t always look at the terms and conditions of carriage. You’re basically entering into a contract. Often they are really varied, depending on the type of ticket you’ve booked, who you’ve booked with, the time you’ve booked, and then people, when you’ve actually had something occur, you go back and you look at that and you think, oh, actually, I can’t do anything about it, or the airline’s only offering a credit, or I don’t want that, I actually want to get on to the next available flight, and they’ve said there’s nothing available. How do I deal with that? I might have to book with another airline. How do I actually manage that? And really what this scheme is trying to do is get a minimum set of standards that consumers, you know, and say to consumers they’ll be publicly available, that this is what you can expect as a minimum when something occurs, whether it’s a delay or whether your baggage has been lost, and this is really then what the remedies the airline must provide to you under this now legislated scheme. 

PETER STEFANOVIC: What if it’s not the airline’s fault? What if it’s a weather event or an IT outage? So they argue, why should they have to pick up the tab for that? 

CATHERINE KING: Well, it’s really about the passenger’s experience. Now, we’ve done a lot of work to try and deal with some of the blockages in the system that do sometimes cause delays. Sydney in particular can cause real problems throughout the entire network. So we have significantly reformed the slot management system at Sydney airport and introduced a recovery hour when there’s weather events there. So we’ve done a lot of work to try and do what we can to help airlines recover, particularly as you know, Sydney has a cap and curfew system in place. So that makes it hard to catch up when there’s been a weather event. So we’ve done our bit. And basically what we’re saying, this is really about the passenger’s experience and lifting the passenger’s experience in aviation. 

PETER STEFANOVIC: We will have to leave it there. Catherine King, thanks for your time. We’ll talk to you again soon.