Because they have to deal with GA pilots.
And there we have it.
GA pilots are an inconvenience. That is the message sent. Pure and simple.
It may well be that everyone’s a nice bloke and PPR has never been refused, but having to ask for permission in the first place, and then having to pay a fee for the privilege, sends a message.
The airport operator’s preference, and the preference of many other airport operators, is that we just stay away. Then the inconvenience to them of having to “deal with GA” doesn’t arise. But I’d suggest that if you contacted the motels in the area, the pubs in the area and the tourist venues in the area, the preference would be different; especially if the ‘gas field construction boom’ is now bust.
It seems to me that YMLS was built/upgraded with only one thing in mind, and that’s not surprising in Australia, where narrow, short-sighted goals are the priority. But as I said earlier, if they’d just added a gravel taxiway off the runway to a gravel/grass parking area to the north of the apron, us GA nobodies would be little-to-no inconvenience. Or the gas field companies should have bought the lot and shut it off to all ‘outsiders’ except in emergencies. But ERSA says the operator is the regional council. It’s a council-provided public facility.
(A lot of hard work was done by a lot of people to restore Warnervale to some semblance of sanity. The sacking of the entire local Council helped.)
(Yes, Sunfish, methinks Wentworth has plans of attracting lots of activity away from Mildura. Unfortunately, Wentworth has started out with a usage fee, but it will eventually learn, as other councils have learnt, that it will cost more to collect the fees than the fees collected, and local businesses would prefer that council make landing and staying at Wentworth as attractive as practicable.)