General News
25 June, 2025
Robbie Katter slams remote flight fiasco
The state MP said the system was heavily flawed and disadvantaged a lot of remote families.
Robbie Katter has slammed the new school charter flight arrangement, claiming it fosters division and fails to meet the needs of remote communities.
The Traeger MP said the model – which restricts access to government-funded flights to only Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students eligible for ABSTUDY – is fundamentally flawed.
“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.”
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,” he 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 are cut off due to flooding.”
Mr Katter said the situation was made worse by the government’s decision to hand the contract to a UK-based operator with no local experience.
Since the change, planes have shown up without passengers to collect and flights have gone unused.
“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,” Mr Katter said.