Qantas chief to meet with Perth Airport amid bitter fee feud

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Qantas chief to meet with Perth Airport amid bitter fee feud

By Hamish Hastie

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce will meet with Perth Airport chairman Nev Power to discuss the airport fee dispute that has been raging publicly since December.

Mr Joyce is in Perth this week to discuss the furore around aeronautical fees, which resulted in the airport taking the airline to the WA Supreme Court to recoup more than $11 million in unpaid fees in the six months to December 2018.

Qantas chief Alan Joyce will meet with Perth Airport staff on Wednesday.

Qantas chief Alan Joyce will meet with Perth Airport staff on Wednesday.Credit: Photo: Ross Swanborough

The previous fee schedule expired on June 30, 2018. The airport started charging Qantas proposed rates and claims the airline has only paid $16.5 million of $27.8 million billed.

The dispute resulted in a public spat between the two entities with Qantas criticising the amount of profit the airport was reaping in a submission to a Productivity Commission inquiry into Australian airport fees.

Speaking to Oliver Peterson on 6PR's Perth Live show on Tuesday evening Mr Joyce doubled down on the airline's position ahead of his meeting with the airport.

"There's a dispute on how the fees are actually built up and how they're actually constructed," he said.

"We have a different mechanism in our view about what's fair, we're in dialogue about how we resolve it.

"Qantas is operating out of a very different terminals, Qantas has infrastructure that has aged over time and Qantas is by far the biggest airline that's operating (in Perth).

"I'm not here to publicly debate this, we're here to have a private chat with the airport about how we resolve it."

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Mr Joyce said the fees issue was Australia-wide.

"We have some of the most expensive airports in the world, we do believe that airports should be able to make money but when they're making 50 per cent margins that's coming from you, our customer," he said.

"We think there are ways of resolving it, but we do believe that at the end of the day we're fighting for the customers, we're fighting for the general public, we're trying to do something that's fair and ensure the airfares in this country are competitive."

Another dispute between the airport and Qantas is the location of the Qantas terminal.

Mr Joyce said they would move from the old domestic airport by 2025 but that was subject to "the right commercial deal".

"That's like you saying that I'm very happy to buy a new house, I'll move to the new house but you don't know the price, you don't know how many rooms are going to be in it, are you going to be sharing with anybody else? You can't give that absolute commitment, you have to have some of the details.

"We absolutely want to move there, we think it is the right thing for Perth, it's the right thing for Qantas.

"Of course we want the right commercial deal before we make the firm absolute 100 per cent commitment to move across the other side, I'm not going to write a blank cheque."

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