services to points on the UK-Australia route with the end-to-end
UK-Australia services. The Australians see no place in their
revised arrangements for regular whole plane charters of the type
proposed by Laker but are prepared to review this position in
1981.
4 In practice, the proposals would mean a reduction in flights
between Australia from Europe from 43 to 16 per week each way
but an estimated increase of one-way passenger journeys of 75-100,000
in the first year to a total of about 600,000.
5
The Australians accept that the implications of their proposals
for third countries en route to London, particularly the SE Asian
countries, will face them with severe political problems. However,
the Australian Cabinet regard the internal political pressures for
lower fares as being of over-riding importance.
6
They examined the other low fare options:
(i) The introduction of a single coupon end to end
- fare at a lower level than existing fares without
disturbing other aspects of their air service
arrangements.
(ii) The introduction of whole plane charters of the
Laker type.
They rejected (i) on the grounds that it would bring with it
political odium and that without reduction of the capacity of the
present sixth freedom operators neither BA nor Qantas would be
able to attain sufficiently high levels of aircraft utilisation
to make a fare at an acceptably low level viable. They rejected (ii)
on the grounds that this would enable the charters to cream off the
low fare traffic thus increasing the problems of the scheduled
carriers in maintaining a reasonable level of all-the-year round on
2