:
The Australians accept that the implications of their proposals for third countries en route to London, particularly the S E 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.
5 They examined the other low fare options:
(i) the introduction of a single coupon end-to-end
(ii)
fare at a lower level than existing fares without
disturbing other aspects of their air service
arrangements.
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
They rejected (ii) to make a fare at an acceptably low level viable. 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- demand services. Also there were a number of widely separated important traffic centres in Australia and it was vital that the
new low fares should be available to all these traffic centres; this
could only be satisfactorily done through scheduled services.
6
The implications of these proposals.can be grouped under three
headings:
economic, political and Laker Airways.
1