Agreed, but why does that foreign-owned decayed ZL deserve special treatment/consideration? Why can’t the government have some guts and do a subsidy deal with QantasLink for those routes and let the corpse die out of good?
Thing is right now Rex has no ownership, it is under administration. EY is currently in control of running the company, but most likely what is left will be sold to whoever bids for it or it is liquidated, therefore current shareholders will be wiped as whatever cash proceeds from the sale will go to creditors.
Secondly, Qantaslink is not interested in Rex routes, it will probably pull out of half a dozen routes it entered just to stick the boot in, but don't make commercial sense with Q400s. It's possible they will pull out of SA all together again without having the need to compete with Rex. The government would have to offer QLink criminal amounts to get their interest in the routes, they probably already have asked that question and don't like the figure QLink answered, hence $80mil to Rex was the cheaper option. The last tender for the WA routes, Rex was the sole tender, and similar for a lot of the QLD routes. So not only is Rex the only operator on those routes, but also the only one that wanted to bid on them, which probably says if they were deregulated, Rex would still be the sole operator.