Dick
Regardless of any reports etc (which may have been used to justify political decisions) I am sure the decision to impose user pays across the aviation industry was made by the Hawke Labour Government in 1983 or 1984, concurrently with the decision to create the Federal Airports Corporation (FAC).
I seem to recall en-route and terminal navigation charges were introduced by the Hawke Government in 1987, the same year the FAC was established. At that time a small airline I worked for was paying 10% of the ticket revenue in navigation charges as the routes we operated were Queensland rural attracting charges for every mile flown, whilst intercity air services were not charged whilst within a certain radius of City airports.
The FAC prospered and I suspect Government rapidly recovered their airport capital cost before April 1994, when the Keating Labor Government decided to "double dip" and announced that all airports operated by FAC would be privatised in several phases.
Memory is a bit rusty but I think that was the sequence and time periods.
The big cash cow was created and exploited to the maximum!!
I think your terms in the Halls of Doom as Chairman of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority Board was 1990–1992 & 1997–1999, thus you were not responsible for the official economic pillage of the aviation industry.