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Piecummary DoT draft prepoved

Not

with FCC collaboration yet agained by tilties Deportimant.

UK/AUSTRALIA AIR SERVICE NEGOTIATIONS

The negotiations with an Australian Government delegation, about

which I minuted you on 9 June, have taken place all this week. In addition to the DOT, the FCO and the CAA have participated in the UK delegation. Representatives of British Airways and

Qantas have been brought in.

2 The objectives of the Australians, which have been approved by their Cabinet, are lower fares on their major trunk route to the

UK and a continuation of on-demand scheduled services which

serve all the main cities of Australia.

3 The Australians have elected to go for the most extreme of the various options which they said they were commencing when tackled at Canberra at the beginning of March, viz. to maintain air services agreements only with those countries to and from which there is a sufficient volume of true origin and destination traffic to justify end-to-end services. They intend to

re-negotiate all their ASAS under those countries restricting exchanges of rights to third/fourth freedom rights only. Coupled

to with this is the intention of pre-determine capacity to what is

needed to meet the demands of end-to-end traffic.

So far as

their arrangements with us are concerned they intend that there should be a new low fare (lower even than the suggested Laker fare at certain periods of the year) which will be available only to Qantas and British Airways. Also there would be no fifth freedom rights available to either BA or Cantas nor would either be able to combine end-to-end services to points on the UK-Australia

The Australians route with the end-to-end UK-Australia services.

see no place in their revised arrangements for regular hole plane chapters of the time nopored by Laker but are orepared to renew

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