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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (30 March) . . Page.. 1174 ..

MS CARNELL (continuing):

The business of an airline is primarily the carriage of passengers, with some high-value freight. We know that there is an unmet demand for air services that will bring more regional people to Canberra if flights are provided. The same is probably true for capital cities if more flights are available and the costs are reduced. These additional passengers may be tourists, but they are equally likely to be coming here to access specialised services unavailable in their local communities, such as medical, dental, legal, financial, education, entertainment, sporting, commercial and retail services - a huge list of service delivery possibilities. All of them would contribute jobs, and highly skilled jobs at that, and income to the local economy.

ACIL Consulting, a respected ACT economic consultant, was commissioned by the Canberra International Airport to examine the Impulse proposal. ACIL concluded that if flights were available we would get around 80,000 new regional visitors and around 20,000 new eastern state capital visitors each year. The new visitors' spending would be about $73m per year and would inject a further $130m into the local economy.

I have mentioned freight. Aircraft carry high-value freight and the more flights you have to more destinations, the more opportunities you have to develop high-value industries, whether they are in high technology or in specialised agriculture. But the real payoff, the real reason why an airport is such a strategic asset to a community, is in the way that it opens up that community to new business opportunities, ones that perhaps we had not even envisaged up until now. An airport increases the opportunity to trade - to discover, explore and develop new commercial and business opportunities, something I would have thought that everyone in this Assembly would support.

Telecommunications, an area in which we have assets as good as or better than anywhere else in Australia, may increasingly underpin our community's ability to find and do business, but that needs to be backed up by good physical accessibility if we are to be able to capitalise on our communications assets. That is the background against which we need to consider the proposal to bring Impulse Airlines to Canberra.

The Impulse opportunity provides us with a major aircraft-servicing base and the opportunity to establish a growing aerospace industry. Impulse plans to have 31 staff by the end of the first year, growing to 65 by the fourth year, including 20 apprentices. It provides us with an operational airline headquarters and base, an airline with a track record of very successful development of regional routes and, more to the point, an airline with the incentive to develop the regional air routes based on Canberra that we know are attainable and are available to be developed. Impulse plans to have 32 staff in this operation by the third year. The proposal provides us with the opportunity to build up our own capital city routes as Impulse develops new jet routes - again, something I am sure that every member of this Assembly would be very pleased about.

These developments involve a capital expenditure of over $10m and together will provide a strong base for developing Canberra as the regional transport hub that we need. Indeed, it may not be too much to say that bringing Impulse here will in itself establish us as a regional air hub, the foundation on which we can continue to build.

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