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Australia seeks air truce with Singapore

Australia will seek talks with Singapore after the city state took the unusual step of publicly rebuking Canberra for maintaining a trans-Pacific ban on Singapore Airlines.

While the main beneficiary of the decision, Qantas Airways, labeled objections to the ban "a joke," Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said yesterday his government wanted to explain a decision that has left officials in the city-state fuming.

"We look forward to sitting down with the Singapore government at the officials level fairly soon to talk about this issue," Downer told reporters.

"There are things they want from Australia, there are things we want from Singapore and we'll sit down and have a good talk about those things in an appropriate and a private setting," he said.

His comments came shortly after Singapore went public with its displeasure at Tuesday's decision to maintain a ban on SIA flying the lucrative Australia-US route dominated by Qantas, the latest twist in talks stretching back more than a decade.

In an unusually blunt statement, Singapore accused the Australian government of taking its generosity and warmth in bilateral relations for granted.

"Singapore has also been more than generous in facilitating the growth of Australian carriers to and beyond Singapore. It is disheartening to see that they have taken this and the warmth in our bilateral relationship for granted," Transport Minister Yeo Cheow Tong (姚照東) said.

Yeo's department said Singapore "has more than fulfilled its commitment to Australia" with a liberal aviation policy that allowed Qantas to grow its operations in the city-state to a size second only to the airline's home base.

But in remarks unlikely to ease the tension between Canberra and Singapore, Qantas chief executive Geoff Dixon said that many of the objections to Canberra's decision were "ill-founded.

"Protection is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?" he told public radio.

"And Singapore, for them to be speaking out about protection as a government-owned carrier with routes like they've got to Kuala Lumpur out of Singapore or to places like Jakarta, I find it a joke."

Dixon described Qantas as "the least protected airline in the world," saying it had been prevented from expanding its services to destinations such as Britain and France because of government decisions that dominate the industry.

"We live in a bilateral world, this is not just pure economic rationalism in the airline industry, all of this is played by the rules," he said.

Qantas earns as much as 20 percent of its profits from its Sydney-Los Angeles services, with US-based United Airlines the only other carrier flying the route.

It has long argued it would be disadvantaged if state-backed airlines such as SIA were allowed in, while Transport Minister Warren Truss said access would only be granted if it was in the national interest.
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