Quote:
"Remember, it was during Albo's nearly six years as the minster responsible for the federally owned airports that the worst of the gouging, bullying and threatening was bleeding the GA tenants dry while the leaseholders made millions from developing the land and chucking people out of the premises they had built."
Clare one could say, "never truer words were spoken"
There is however a legal "precedent". Not in an explicit aviation sense, rather against the powers leasing public infrastructure.
A little known court case against a Chinese company who leased Newcastle's port facilities and set about gouging their tenants using remarkably similar tactics the Mc Banks of this world and their development shark mates employed against the users of airports. They lost, in a legal judgement that could so easily be used against airport owners.
There are the "Facts" that the intent of the "Airports Act" has been neatly circumvented. There are the "fact" that the terms of the head leases for secondary airports have been circumvented. There are the "fact" that billions of dollars gouged from hapless users have somehow been disappeared to foreign climes with no benefit at all to the users, or the taxpayers who once upon a time owned those pieces of infrastructure.
When secondary airports were managed by the Federal Airports Commission they made a profit. A modest one perhaps, if you valued the land at todays prices, but the land was owned by the public and the Act reserved it for special purpose use in much the same way as National Parks are reserved for special purpose use. Not as a cash cow for greedy banks and property developers.
There is also the considerable returns a viable GA industry was making and could again make to the national economy if the monkeys could be removed from its back.