The Price of Living Regionally
Article by Alys Marshall Photography by Jess Buchan
It’s news to no one living in the bush, regional airfares are flying at unsustainably high prices. So high, in fact, that reporter Alys Marshall says it’s cheaper to opt for the four-day drive from Western Australia to her parent’s home in rural New South Wales for a holiday.
Alys breaks down the costs associated with air travel when it isn’t to and from a capital city, and the toll a lack of air services takes on the communities of small towns. As her friends jet around Europe with ludicrously cheap tickets, Alys takes a look at just some of the many challenges any emerging airline is up against if they dare to service regional Australia.
It costs less for my coworker to fly to Italy than it does for me to fly home to Burren Junction, in regional NSW. And by home, I mean my parent’s place – the property I grew up on and the place I will always refer to as my grounding point. Although ‘home’, technically as per my current residential address, is Kununurra in Western Australia’s Kimberley region. The two are a long way away from each other, yes, but nothing like the distance to Europe.
My colleague, a lovely girl from northern Italy – whose story of finding herself in Kununurra working for the national broadcaster deserves its own page in a separate edition – has no trouble booking her flights. A bit under $2000 is what it costs her for her trip from Kununurra to Perth and Perth to Milan. From Milan, she can hop on a train and she is home. The whole ordeal will chew approximately twenty-five hours into her precious holiday leave and no doubt is completely exhausting, but I am green with envy thinking about it.
Instead, I am servicing my car preparing for a thirty-seven hour drive. The four-day journey will take me through the guts of the Northern Territory, jumping the border at Camooweal – where I have to forcibly ease my foot off the accelerator and set my cruise control back to 110km/h – and skirting my way down through Cloncurry, Longreach, Tambo, Mitchell, St George and Dirranbandi. Down I keep going, flitting through Hebel and into the familiar watercourse country of Angledool, Lightning Ridge and Walgett before, blessedly, hitting the Kamilaroi Highway. Home.
This is clearly not my first rodeo. It’s a journey I have now made three times. I know which caravan parks I feel safe to pull into at night, which servos stock apples and oranges alongside their hotboxes and where the best public toilets lie [Morven].
Each time the end of the year rolls around and I outline my plan to again drive the 4,000 kilometres across the country by myself to my [Perth-based] executive producer, he is shocked anew. Each time I wheel out the same explanation: to fly would cost me more than $2500, not including the two nights of accommodation I would need to book due to layovers in both Darwin and Sydney. By the time you factor in hotel costs, I’ve paid $3000 before my Christmas holiday has even begun.
This hypothetical aerial trip hopping from Kununurra to Moree [plus the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Moree to my parent’s home] takes almost as long as the drive time. It deters me from flying home to see my family and friends and, heartbreakingly, it deters my friends from coming over to visit me.
It’s not like they don’t want to. Come dry season [May through September], the calls and messages start rolling in. Friends throw around potential leave dates they could request from their corporate roles in Sydney. The weather down there is cold and miserable and they’ve seen my Instagram stories, the somewhat intentional siren calls of the Kimberley. Waterfalls and red rock gorges, helicopters and palm tree oases. I tell them I have four-wheel-drive to tour them around in and a spare room with the bed made up – bring your partner too! Then, a few days later, I’ll receive the inevitable “Oh-it’s- cheaper-to-fly-to-Europe” message. They are incredulous and apologetic. They stay in Sydney, or some of them indeed go to Europe instead.
The thing that gets to me is this: Kununurra is remote in location, but it can in no way be classified as a small town. With 7,000 residents, Kununurra has services many regional towns beg for. We have an airport with two regional carriers, a hospital you can give birth at [an unfortunate luxury outside major cities these days], waterfront bars you can sip cocktails from, a Coles and an IGA for crying out loud. It shouldn’t be this difficult to get to.
Plus, Western Australia’s tourism industry has pumped millions of dollars into advertising campaigns highlighting the natural beauty of the region. They dangle the carrot to those people pent up in capital cities longing to hike through the domes of the World Heritage-listed Purnululu National Park [the Bungle Bungles] or swim in the magnificent Emma Gorge. And yet, despite all of this, it is still just so, so hard [read: expensive] to get here.
What hope is there, then, for those regional centres that don’t have this weight of tourism funding behind them? As I write this, Rex Airlines has been handed an $80 million lifeline by the federal government. It only goes as far as to extend the embattled carrier’s administration period, to allow them to limp onwards and continue servicing its regional routes. But for how long can this last?
Data from the state government here in WA is already indicating that Rex is regularly failing to meet its required service standards to the regional towns where it is the only option. It also owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid airport bills to the towns of Esperance and Albany. But it is better than nothing, we who live in the regions tell ourselves. And nothing is the very real alternative.
The case study of Rex is a positively glowing one in comparison to the dashed hopes of Bonza. Marking their first flight in January 2023, Bonza was, at the time, the first new airline to launch in Australia in fifteen years. The carrier promised low-cost flights to regional areas, including Cairns, Rockhampton, the Sunshine Coast, Toowoomba and Mildura. Just over twelve months later, it was belly up.
The reports later came out revealing the grim picture from behind the scenes. The airline never turned a profit, haemorrhaged ninety million dollars over the two financial years it was operating and owed the tax office two million dollars.
This is the operating environment any brave new regional airline is to step into if it dares to open. To offer a lower- price alternative to the duopoly that is Qantas and Virgin, an airline immediately puts a target on its back. Here in The North, it was a lesson infant regional airline Nexus learnt quickly.
Opening in June 2023, Nexus Airlines is the brainchild of long-term Kununurra resident and businessman Michael McConachy, who passionately advocates for access to services in remote areas. Nexus injected itself into the Broome, Kununurra, Darwin flight run which was previously held in a monopoly by Qantas codeshare business Airnorth. Before Nexus entered the scene, Airnorth was charging six hundred dollars for a one-way ticket from Broome to Darwin, via Kununurra. The same week Nexus began flying, Airnorth tickets dropped to four hundred dollars, conveniently the same price as Nexus.
Still, to Nexus’s credit, they have stuck it out. And the community has hailed them for it. It’s not abnormal to see a post, seemingly out of the blue, on the Kununurra community noticeboard praising the airline’s homemade scone and tea service that the crew manage to provide within the 45-minute flight to Darwin. “Aren’t we lucky?!” the posters will exclaim.
Disconcertingly – for this is a small community Facebook page we are talking about – there is not a sarcastic swipe or a bad-tempered grievance to be seen in these posts. Simply locals appreciating the company for what they see it doing: providing a crucial service without screwing over the customer in the process. And their scones are very good.
Should the availability of competitively priced regional airfares come down to luck, though? Here in Kununurra, we thank our lucky stars that a company like Nexus got off the ground [both literally and physically] and that a company like this wanted to service a remote region in the first place. And with this gratitude comes a looming cloud of concern. How long can a small, fledgling company offering relatively low prices hold out against the chokehold that Qantas- backed Airnorth has on the regional routes? Each time Airnorth drops their prices to directly coincide with a Nexus flight sale, are we watching a game of aviation chicken play out? It’s a handicapped race to the bottom I fear.
In the meantime, I feel lucky to nab a four hundred dollar return flight to Darwin to spend a long-awaited weekend drinking cocktails by the pool with a mate who lives there. That this feels like an unbelievable privilege, one I should be grateful for, stumps me. Have we been gaslit for so long in regional Australia that simply having access to these services – which we pay good money for – is something of a privilege?
While I am in no position to criticise the federal government’s cash handout to Rex Airlines, I often find myself wanting to grab a bureaucrat by the shoulders and shake them. “Do you think this is sustainable?” I want to ask them. “Do you think this is enough?”
This is the time of year, here in Kununurra, when people leave for good. Because while this is a town that certainly attracts new people with its waterfalls, crocodiles and general allure of the north, it can’t keep them. As the wet season rolls in, teachers, nurses, hospitality staff, labourers, mechanics and builders all roll out. Many have done a season, some have done two or three. But almost all reach the point where they have had enough. They are too far away from friends and family and they are tired of the expense and physical toll of the travel needed to visit them.
And so the town of Kununurra – so desperately in need of these people and their skills – watches them pack their cars and leave, one after the other.
This is not to say regional airfares are the sole reason towns like Kununurra struggle to retain long-term residents. Of course, in any scenario there are a plethora of gripes any individual will have with the place they call home. But I will say, it is a very persistent thorn in the backside to know a trip to visit a new niece or nephew, celebrate a loved one’s engagement, or console a grieving parent will set you back thousands of dollars. If there was a way – say decent corporate regulation of duopolies, or sustainable, long- lasting government funding schemes – to ease this cost, regional communities would be the beneficiary.
For now, I load up my car and prepare to drive.
The four-day journey is something I have come to respect. I will go home and gorge myself on time spent with friends and family. I will fill my cup, and then I’ll hop back in the car and do it all in reverse. Back to another season in the isolated north. For the summer waterfalls will be flowing and, with no visitors game to make the journey, they will be all mine to enjoy.
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