Newsroom

June 19, 2025

Katter’s Australian Party (KAP) Leader and Member for Traeger, Robbie Katter has condemned the new school charter flight arrangement as a system that fosters division and fails to meet the needs of remote communities.

 

Mr Katter said the model – which restricts access to government-funded flights to only Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students eligible for ABSTUDY – is fundamentally flawed and unfair.

 

“This is not an Indigenous problem. It’s a remote living problem,” Mr Katter said.

 

“When you’ve got families living in the same town, sending their kids to the same school, but being treated differently – that’s wrong. It risks creating division in communities where it doesn’t exist.”

 

Normanton resident Derek Lord knows this frustration all too well. As the Air Traffic Services Reporting Officer at Normanton airport, Mr Lord regularly sees 20-seat government-chartered planes arriving with fewer than half the seats occupied. Yet his two sons, who board at school in Charters Towers, have been turned away from those same flights because they’re not ABSTUDY recipients.

 

“My boys have been left sitting at the airport, bags packed, because they weren’t allowed on a plane with empty seats,” Mr Lord said. “We’d gladly pay for those seats – anything to avoid the six-day ordeal we have to go through with commercial flights to get them home for the holidays when roads were cut off due to flooding.”

 

Mr Katter said the situation is made worse by the Government’s decision to hand the contract to a UK-based operator with no local experience, replacing long-time provider Volantair.

 

“We had a capable, locally based operator with 20 years’ experience and regional knowledge. Now we’ve got a foreign company charging up to $1,781 per ABSTUDY seat – almost triple what a regular flight costs – and delivering a shambolic service,” he said.

 

Since the change, planes have shown up without passengers to collect, flights have gone unused, and single-engine aircraft without weather radar have been deployed into some of Queensland’s toughest flying conditions.

 

“This isn’t just a case of inefficiency, it’s a costly rort,” Mr Katter said.

 

”Kids are being left stranded, rural and remote families are being ignored and taxpayers are being gouged. It’s time these services were made available to any child living remotely - not just those eligible under a narrow government program – and returned to experienced local operators who know the land, know the people, and care about the outcomes.”