While Perth has been the leading airport in this current capacity crisis there is an infrastructure problem. For whatever reasons Federal Governments have decided that Airports, airspace and airlines can operate independently of each other and that market forces will keep them aligned. This is not happening.
For reasons everyone will recognise the three have been tasked with making money for their shareholders (it's the law) while not being able to control the assets they need to control to make their businesses efficient.
The infrastructure distortions that this creates cannot be fixed by CEOs working independently, only by governments creating policy that the CEOs can then work with. At present my opinion is that they have an impossible task.
Imagine a railway system where the stations, the tracks and the trains are all owned by separate corporations and you have the Australian aviation scene.
The station owner cannot build another platform (runway) without consulting with the train owners. The train owners that run the mainline trains do not want to fund a platform that they will rarely use because the Government has allowed everyone and their dog to compete with them cutting their margins to the bone. They are happy with the number of platforms that are already built and in fact have a long term plan with the station owners to increase the number of platforms as capacity rises.
However a group of small train owners want to depart between 7:00 and 7:30 am to meet contracts they signed without any conversations about whether there was an available platform at that time of the morning. Naturally those contracts did not contain clauses about building new platforms, the train owner who did was undercut by those that did not!
Meanwhile the track owner has rules imposed by Government about how the platforms owned by the stations must be utilised which allows the small train owners to occupy platforms built with taxpayers money but leased to the station owners. This is a major problem for the track owner which is exacerbated by the fact that the track owner must also build multiple track loops between the two small stations where the trains can wait until a platform becomes available. (The track owner did ask the rail regulator if they would get all the small train operators to fit as new-fangled device that would allow more trains to use the available tracks, but the rail regulator declined because it would put all of the small train owners out of business. They did however tell all the big train owners that they must fit the new-fangled device, however made it impossible for the track owner to use amongst the small trains)
Naturally all of this is the fault of the track owner?? Give me a break....