Originally Posted by
TBM-Legend
Propping up failing businesses is a road to nowhere. Please look at the Australian car manufacturing industry and the outcome of hundreds of millions spent on them. VA losses are gigantic by any measure. They can not keep using a credit card to survive. Sooner or later you reach the limit and then in their case demand another card...
There will be another airline in Australia. Upgrade Alliances AOC and put some B737's on it and voila..[QF sells their bit in this case]
The car industry was a little different. It provided a manufacturing base and the ENTIRE world subsidises it's car companies, the US by about 10 times what we did, Germany 3-4 times what we did. The government just made a conscious decision to stop subsidising, put them on an uneven playing field and let it collapse essentially. Being subsidiaries, they just pulled out and closed up shop. Hold and Ford building cars that no one wanted was a failure of management but in some ways, an excuse, as thousands of Ford Territories were sold and lots of Commodores and associated models.
We kind of have the reverse here now because with the airlines, we don't subsidise them (except for some regional routes that wouldn't be offered by anyone otherwise) but every other damn country that has harangued successive Australian Governments into liberalising aviation has RETAINED ownership control of its airlines so they were full of crap and before anyone declares open skies and letting SQ in, yeh, of course SQ pushes that barrow because they come from an Island the size of a postage stamp and have no domestic network to use as a base so they want to go around and cannibalise everyone else's market and cry 'free trade'. It would be a different song if they were on a large land mass with a big domestic network.