ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel’s radio interviews this morning — about whether or by how much the major airports screw the airlines and their passengers with handling and parking charges — came close to the really tricky question, which is how to ensure the benefits of competition.

Tricky because the only certain answer is to build or expand second airports.

The five-year long privatisation of airports that ended with the $5.6 billion sale of Sydney Airport in June 2002 yielded a total $9.4 billion to the Commonwealth.

But despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, those sales included selling off the future right of passengers and air transport dependent enterprises to competitive offers from new airports.

For a collective $9.4 billion the major airport buyers bought the right to charge customers at the airline, retail and individual level anything they think they can get away with in the medium- to long-term.

Hence the annual ritual of the ACCC airport monitoring report, which it sent to the government yesterday.

The fact that Melbourne’s main airport at Tullamarine only charged an average of $7.96 per passenger for the use of its facilities in the year to June 30 last year  compared to Sydney’s average of $13.63, the highest of any major Australian gateway, makes the point about second airports.

Melbourne also has Avalon. It might be 20 kilometres further away than Tullamarine, but it is well run, and has unrealised potential to compete very fiercely should a future rise in patronage coincide with far better or more frequent surface connections to the CBD’s Southern Cross station.

(Orly or Charles de Gaulle in Paris, or even JFK would be Tullamarine’s worst nightmare, where each uses automated mini-trains to shuttle travellers between terminals and to the nearest rail/metro station, a future scenario that Lindsay Fox must cherish as the owner of Avalon.)

So Melbourne has a powerful motive, despite its outrageous car parking charges, to keep the airlines on side, a struggle it may be about to lose with Tiger, which seems very close to doing a deal to shift all or part of its traffic to Avalon.

In Sydney, the chances of a new jet airport that will be even remotely useful as an alternative facility are almost zero. Giving Sydney any sort of competitive airport in the metropolitan basin is political poison, and the city is choking on its other transport failings anyhow having just trumped its 999th metro fiasco by stuffing up the importation of new rolling stock from China for its heavy rail network.

Contrary to popular myth, the Macquarie bank-led ownership of the airport can’t actually stop another jet airport being built in Sydney. It only has first right of refusal, so if another consortium wanted to build one at Badgerys Creek, or let’s be nearly as implausible, Palm Beach, and the governments agreed, another layer of implausibility, it could only stop them doing so by building it themselves.

In an extreme response to recent provocation by the Macquarie Bank-led consortium that owns Hobart Airport, Jetstar and Tiger said they might cut all or some of their flights and send them to Launceston instead. While it is too far away from Hobart to be a serious alternative for business travellers, Launceston is already making all the running as the best airport for leisure travellers to Tasmania, and a recent proposal by Hobart to lift passenger charges by 50% to about $12 per person is a fee neither airline is likely to pay.

The sleeping giant in the second airport scenarios in major Australian cities is the Jacobs Wells site, between the Gold Coast and Brisbane. For two reasons. Brisbane Airport is so successful it will get very full by about 2025-2030, and it isn’t all that convenient to at least half of greater outer Brisbane, while Coolangatta Airport, which is competitive and also successful, really does have a looming capacity issue given its tight boundaries

An airport at or near Jacobs Wells could serve southern and western Brisbane, and the Gold Coast, and be the catalyst for future expansion of both cities.

Although not monitored by the ACCC, there are also pricing issues at Darwin, where Tiger quit the scene early, and Jetstar is now threatening to call off plans to double its presence at what is intended to be a large  cross-over hub between its Australian and Asian franchises.

Darwin is compromised by dual use by the RAAF, but there are said to be sites where either a single strip, low-cost airport reasonably near to town could be built, if not grown to a full-sized facility.