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Transport Minister Catherine King has contradicted comments she made six weeks ago, when she denied the strip-searching of a group of Australian women at Doha Airport weighed into her decision to reject Qatar Airways\u2019 bid to double its Australian flights.<\/p>\n
King told a press conference on Thursday morning that the invasive searches of the women in October 2022 were a factor in her decision, before denying that she had pointed to it as a factor, then eventually admitting that the decision was made in the \u201ccontext\u201d of the fallout over the pandemic-era incident.<\/p>\n
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Transport Minister Catherine King told a press conference that the invasive searches of the women in October 2022 were a factor in her decision.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Alex Ellinghausen<\/cite><\/p>\n \u201cCertainly, for context, this is the only airline that has had something like that happen, and so I can\u2019t say that I wasn\u2019t aware of it, but certainly it wasn\u2019t the only factor \u2013 it was a factor,\u201d King said at a 7am press conference at Canberra Airport.<\/p>\n Under repeated questioning, she then said she had not pointed to the incident as a factor, adding: \u201cWhat I have said is that\u2019s a fact, that is context that is there.\u201d Later, she confirmed her decision was made in the context of the incident.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you remember, we had multiple … requests on behalf of the women who had been escorted at gunpoint after a Qatar Airlines flight and had then been subject on the tarmac in ambulances to invasive body searches,\u201d she said at an event held to launch a green paper on aviation.<\/p>\n She said she had received a letter from the women\u2019s lawyers detailing their experiences, \u201cwhich are, pretty frankly, not anything we would expect anyone, and certainly not Australians travelling on an international airline, to experience\u201d.<\/p>\n She signed a letter to the women informing them of her decision to reject Qatar\u2019s application in July on the same day the decision was made, as revealed by the ABC on Wednesday.<\/p>\n \u201cRead what you will into that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The Sydney Morning Herald <\/em>and The Age<\/em> reported on July 26 that King denied the reason for blocking Qatar having greater access to Australia\u2019s aviation market was related to the treatment of women.<\/p>\n \u201cI wouldn\u2019t link the decision not to continue to engage with Qatar,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m sure Qatar will continue to come to Australia and continue to ask for air rights, and we don\u2019t want to consider that at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n King said the decision to refuse Qatar was made in the national interest, but added that it did not include the commercial interests of Qantas or any other airline, and said it was \u201cabsolute nonsense\u201d that competition in Australia\u2019s international aviation market relied solely on Qatar.<\/p>\n \u201cI mean, really, that is an absolute nonsense, and somehow seems to be tied up with people\u2019s anger about Qantas, and I get that, I get why people are angry about Qantas,\u201d she said of the airline.<\/p>\n This week, the Coalition secured the numbers in the Senate to launch an inquiry into the Qatar decision, which Liberal frontbencher James Paterson said would not have been needed if King had provided \u201chonest answers\u201d when asked.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s been asked in the parliament, she\u2019s been asked in the media and still today \u2013 weeks on from the scandal first emerging \u2013 she has failed to give a simple, clear explanation for why she made the decision … to refuse this request from Qatar to have extra flights into Australian airports,\u201d he said on Thursday.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is an explanation which just frankly defies credibility. None of the explanations she\u2019s given are convincing, none of them are trustworthy. And that\u2019s why we have to have this inquiry to get to the bottom of it.\u201d<\/p>\n