The conversation has got back to the question that I began with. When is the service valuable to the user and when does that stop re costs. In the Canberra case I understand that the user wants to pay for the service - so be it. In the case of other areas they are mixed.
It does seem silly to have ARFF and ATC for one movement but at other locations you will see a lot of movements and no ATC/ARFF? When I'm operating the service and I see 4 jets in the space of 15 minutes, in bad weather, arriving into terminal airspace, I'm thinking that the service is useful - at least taking out some of the concern about what other aircraft are doing. But, the removal of the service is going to see these folks be given traffic and sort themselves out.
There's a lot of ATC who believe this is the way to go - pilots with traffic, ACAS, etc can help themselves. I still think that if I'm paying for a ticket on the jet then yes please "I would like fries with that". In other words, give me someone with surveillance to separate, watch what others are doing (that is separate, especially where ACAS doesn't assist), and use things like radar lowest safe to assist with approaches etc.
But as all know…we have to provide what we can afford! Again, we get back to what is the cut-off? Seems illogical to provide the full blown service to 1 Canberra flight but not to anything up to 4 jets arriving in a short space of time in another terminal area. I could suggest the same on many enroute sectors where we have bleary eyed controllers taking to a few planes that never come close to each other - but under the rules, the airspace classification means you get the 'service', Airservices gets the money, and safety is not assessed as a factor really. I'm not referring to the sectors overnight that handle huge volumes, I'm talking about the ones that have minimal traffic and Capn Bloggs rightly points out, could effective navigate,separate etc without any help from ground based ATC.
So, again, surely a more effective set of parameters needs to be found for assessing and providing services - and how the services are delivered. It may be me, but I think we are losing the basic common sense we used to have in working out what is safe and what isn't.