EVERYONE who lived in outback Western Australia before 2021 has a horror story about airfares.
Mine was a $4,000 ticket from Kununurra to Perth; a price that meant I was unable to attend the funeral of a close friend.
I recall writing about a Paraburdoo family who had to cancel a 2016 trip home to Tasmania for Christmas due to a $40,000-plus asking price.
That was the price when they tried booking six months in advance.
That trip was to have been the first time the grandparents back home had the opportunity to meet their grandkids.
So, when former premier Mark McGowan and his cabinet ministers Alannah MacTiernan, Rita Saffioti and Paul Papalia took it upon themselves in 2017 to strongarm Qantas and Virgin, country folk were right behind them.
That fight culminated in what was one of the best policies for regional WA: caps on regional airfares.
So, it was disappointing last month that the state government white-anted its own policy by allowing airlines to charge a higher rate for peak demand periods.
Ms Saffioti and Premier Roger Cook have argued the cost increase is minor, and fares will still be much cheaper than they were pre-2017.
That is true.
But regional voters won’t see that.
Instead, they’ll see a state government hiking their essential transport costs while cutting public transport fares in Perth.
Regional voters will see a state government no longer willing to fight the airlines on their behalf as it did in 2017.
Regional voters will see a state government taking a razor to a crucial cost-of-living policy while funneling piles of cash into pet city projects – the Perth Bears and Burswood Park redevelopment – no-one asked for.
For context, each of those two projects cost taxpayers more than the regional airfares caps.
This hurts young families eager to connect with loved ones back home during school holidays.
It hurts regional sportspeople and teams travelling to Perth for country week competitions and other representative events.
It hurts those requiring medical treatment in Perth because those services are short-staffed and booked out for months in the regions: think dentistry, physio and workplace medical assessments.
It hurts country residents in their darkest hour, bereaved by loss and now needing to fork out an extra cost to attend funerals.
And it hurts our regions’ best and brightest, whose families, schools and workplaces will now be slugged higher fares to access education and career opportunities.
Labor will lose the Pilbara seat in 2029 because of this.
It is potent fuel for a local Liberal branch which, after more than two decades in the wilderness, has finally got its act together.
Labor’s margins in the Kimberley and Kalgoorlie will be further eroded, perhaps fatally.
The fact that Labor will likely lose the Pilbara seat over regional airfares policy is ironic.
It was precisely because of Labor’s decisive action to take on the cost of airfares as a core election issue that the party won the seat from the Nationals in 2017.
It was because the government threatened to regulate regional air routes that Qantas, having argued for years it could not afford to cut fares, decided it could offer drastically reduced fares for regional residents.
That action forced Virgin’s hand to match the national carrier on price and morphed into the government-mandated $199 and $299 one-way caps come the 2021 state election.
By allowing airlines to charge higher fares for high-demand flights, the state government is turning its back on the voters who saw a policy they loved and voted for the party that brought it to life.
This change forces those in the regions to pay more for flights at times Perth people are flying up for work or travel.
There is no world in which that is fair.
This hits the people who live in the regions that allow this state government to pursue its big-ticket health and transport projects in Perth.
The same ministers who have just hiked the cost of regional airfares love to lord it over the east coast about how WA is the engine room of the nation when pressing the case to keep our fair share of GST revenue.
Those same ministers should remember where that wealth comes from.
Because it ain’t Perth.
