Airline Leader Interview, Fiji Airways CEO Paul Scurrah

Transcript

Paul Scurrah:I'm traumatized by this venue, by the way.

Adrian Schofield:Traumatized?

Paul Scurrah:Traumatized, yeah. I'll explain that in a minute.

Adrian Schofield:Oh, okay.

Paul Scurrah:Well, I can do it now. 13 years on the board of the Gold Coast Suns, traveling here, and never won a game here.

Adrian Schofield:Oh, really?

Paul Scurrah:So I'm a bit wounded, so I feel like I'm on the back foot already.

Adrian Schofield:Well, you'll be pleased to know that New Zealand has beaten Australia in cricket here, so—

Paul Scurrah:That doesn't make me feel much better either, I've got to say. Anyway.

Adrian Schofield:Well, thanks for the introduction, Claudia, and good morning, everyone.

Paul Scurrah:Good morning.

Adrian Schofield:As you can see, we're very fortunate to be joined today by Fiji Airways CEO Paul Scurrah, who's agreed to give us some insights into how things are going at the airline and a little bit about what the future holds. I think for this audience, Paul's probably most familiar to you from his time as CEO of Virgin Australia, and since then he's also been CEO of major rail carrier Pacific National before taking the reins at Fiji Airways in November. So his career has been about planes, cranes, and trains, right?

Paul Scurrah:Correct.

Adrian Schofield:At a very high level. So once again, welcome, Paul, and thanks for joining us.

Paul Scurrah:Thanks, and thanks everybody. Good to see some old faces. Not old faces, some familiar faces. Sorry.

Adrian Schofield:So just to start off with, I wonder if you can talk about, now that you've been at Fiji Airways for a while, what sort of differences have you experienced versus your airline experiences in Australia? So I mean, how are the challenges different with Fiji Airways?

Paul Scurrah:Yeah, it's a good question, and there's some obvious differences which I can talk about. My experience as the CEO of Virgin was obviously predominantly in a crisis. And since joining Fiji Airways in November, we've now seen the biggest fuel spike in 50 years. So it's me, guys. I think I'm the jinx. So if you want to succeed in the airline game, hope that I leave it again soon so you can recover. The differences are pretty obvious, apart from the similarities of, you know, the way you operate an airline. And that's very standard. And there's reasons for that. We're very indexed to the Fijian economy and Fiji as a country. We're very reliant on Nandi as pretty much our single point of coordination. We are 97%— although we're bringing that down a bit for good reason— 97% leisure. We are gaining share in transit packs in the business and corporate side because of how good our product is at the moment. So there's a little bit of a shift there. But it's very different. And being so indexed to leisure and so indexed to Fiji and to Fiji as a country, there's a higher level of purpose that comes with that for us as we are effectively— and it's our purpose as a company— the economic heartbeat of Fiji. Fiji. So if we're not successful, Fiji's economy pretty much goes into recession. So, and I know we can talk a bit more about that later. So there is a lot of differences. You know, these jobs come with attention and profile that sometimes you'd rather not get. And when you're the biggest employer by some margin in Fiji, you don't have to do much to end up in the newspaper for good or bad reasons. So But I got quite used to that during my time at Virgin.

Adrian Schofield:Right, okay. And that kind of leads into the next question. I was going to ask you about, you know, the importance of Fiji Airways to the tourism industry because there's a real sort of, you know, linkage there more so than almost any other country, isn't there?

Paul Scurrah:Yeah, I think there's a couple of examples around, and we see Maldives are starting to fly directly here as well, and, you know, Mauritius and, you know, islands states that are heavily reliant on tourism. There's a few similar setups. But it was surprising to me, despite having been in the industry, surprising to me just how important aviation is to the tourism industry in Fiji and how big the tourism industry is. That's 40% of the GDP directly. And indirectly, some measures say it's 70%. So it's pretty much everything about Fiji. You know, I was pleasantly surprised actually. I had only ever been there once before I took the job. It's a very easy place to get to. You know, with the tailwind, it's 3.5 hours from Sydney or 4 hours normally. In many ways, it's closer than Perth. I don't think we promote that enough. It's a very easy way to get there. You can have lunch in Sydney and dinner in Fiji. You can't say that about, you know, a lot of the other destinations north of here.

Adrian Schofield:Yeah.

Paul Scurrah:And so knowing that importance and knowing that there's still some communication and some profile we can build, I think there's a really bright future for us. But like everybody at the moment, you know, we're adjusting because of the fuel price. But we're incredibly important to the industry. The industry itself has had a little bit of a flatlining. It came out of COVID incredibly well. We were stuck with quite a bit of debt as a result of that, which we're still working our way through. Because the airline led everyone out of COVID There was one great year that people refer to as the revenge travel year where everyone, you know, sort of clawed back the experiences they'd missed out on. So, you know, going forward, we're working— we also own 50% of a company that owns a number of hotels there, and we're about to open, you know, a 6-star hotel, a 3.5-star hotel, a 4-star hotel. So there's a lot more room stock coming. to help us grow. So that's, that's something we're working on. So we know our importance, we don't take that for granted. We know that everything we do gets watched, and we know that we can have a really positive impact on the Fijian community, and that's something we take seriously.

Adrian Schofield:And you mentioned the fuel cost crisis, something that's pretty front of mind for all airlines. How has that affected Fiji Airways, and how have you responded to that?

Paul Scurrah:It's affected us, and I just note this morning, and people in the room might have seen it, that Singapore Airlines just posted a quarterly loss for the first time since coming out of COVID And that just shows the scale of this. And when you're not in the industry, it's easy to sort of say, well, you know, just manage your costs better. This is the highest fuel spike in 50 years. And if Singapore is making a loss when they actually benefited by the hub of Middle East being shut and getting a lot of that traffic being diverted through them, and they're still making a loss, it shows how impactful the fuel crisis is. So like every other airline, we, we've seen the profit line become harder to reach on many of our, our routes. So what we did, we went to the government, and I know there's potentially a question about the tax and the hotel levy. We went to the government and said ordinarily what we would do is do what I'm required to do as the CEO, and that's fiscally responsible leadership. And right now there's certain lines of flying that don't make sense where the fuel line is, and we would normally park them up. But that has a really detrimental impact to the tourism industry in Fiji, particularly now where it's our peak. And we are benefiting as a country right now because of our family-friendly reputation, our relative isolation from the, from the, the war, and our proximity to our key source markets, Australia and New Zealand, particularly when, you know, it's becoming more expensive to go further. And so it would be sort of shooting ourselves in the foot to not try and find a way to keep flying. So we did that with the government, and they've helped us out to get through the spike of fuel. We were paying— we are paying up to $50 million a month more in fuel this year than last year. And, you know, lots of airlines hedge, but hedging has been a lot less effective because of the difference in the crack spreads. I won't go into detail. But it's hurt us a lot. So the government sensibly, understanding our importance to the economy in Fiji, has allowed us to assure people, because confidence is everything in an airline. I learnt that through Virgin the hard way. The minute there's a loss of confidence, then there's a drop-off in bookings and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So their backing of us has allowed us to stay strong and confident and show people when we're in the system and you book us, you're going to fly with us. And that's super, super important. And so right now we're— we did 2.3 million passengers last year and we're going to shatter that record this year in a time of fuel crisis. So I think it was really bold of the government, really sensible of the government. There was some backlash from the hoteliers because part of it was a 12-month tax on their turnover, and that'll be about $70 million over a 12-month period. So it'll cover 1.5 months of extra fuel. So we just wanted to make sure that we were sharing the pain, it wasn't disproportionately falling on us. And so we'll get through it and we can go forward with confidence.

Adrian Schofield:So a pretty unique approach, that tourism tax linked directly to the airline.

Paul Scurrah:Is it—

Adrian Schofield:have you heard of that happening elsewhere before, or is it pretty unique?

Paul Scurrah:I can't say I can cite an exact precedent, but I do know that, you know, in times like this governments find ways And, you know, it's well documented the support I asked for and didn't get by the Australian government through, through COVID. But governments are well known for understanding the economic benefit of airlines and keeping them going. So government support is not unusual. Whether it's— whether that tax is unique or not, I don't really know. I haven't heard of it, but it wouldn't surprise me if similar things have happened.

Andrew:Right.

Adrian Schofield:Okay. Is the fuel crisis particularly tough on the Pacific Island carriers, do you think?

Paul Scurrah:Including us and the others in the Pacific?

Andrew:Yeah.

Adrian Schofield:Logistically—

Paul Scurrah:I think it's tough on everybody, you know, because airlines are very high fixed-cost businesses. And so you can't pull the levers down on too many other things. And so I do think that airlines that don't have the scale of a Qantas and Air New Zealand, you know, Singapore Airlines, for example, I do think it disproportionately hits you. I think the, the one thing that should have been learned through COVID that most airlines have learned, not all, is that what used to be considered a weak or lazy, sorry, balance sheet is now the right thing to do. Lazy balance sheet being, you know, having a lot more cash reserves, carrying less debt, preparing for shocks. Nobody could prepare for the shock that— and I honestly say that I don't think anyone expected COVID to have the impact it did. But you still should still be ready for shock. So I think it would disproportionately affect the Pacific carriers. And the phrase that Warren Buffett used is a phrase I used many times through the Virgin crisis, through the COVID crisis. You know, you don't know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out. And the tide's gone out a bit. And, you know, you saw it with Spirit Airlines. So if you've got a weak balance sheet, you're going to be found out.

Adrian Schofield:Right, okay. And in a similar vein, as you say, you have been involved in a couple of pretty major shocks to the airline industry— COVID with Virgin Australia and now the Middle East crisis. What sort of management philosophy do you have to, do you have to have to be able to deal with external shocks like that?

Paul Scurrah:Well, there's a lot of commentary about it right now because of Alan's new book, so it's sort of dredged up a lot of the stuff that we had to do. Look, I'm on the record of saying through COVID We were forced to make decisions that no one ever signed up to thinking they'd ever have to make. It was horrendous, you know, asking— for me, asking 8,000 staff to stay at home and have no certainty over their future. This is before JobKeeper came in. But what, what happens in, in these circumstances is you do necessarily have to narrow the timeframe. So when you're running a company, Pretty much every CEO would have some sort of view of what success looks like, and that's, you know, your vision, your 5-year plan, whatever it is. So you have— you frame what that success looks like and you communicate that, and hopefully everyone's on the journey. You have to really truncate or shorten the timeframe that you're working in, and you have to redefine in that timeframe what success looks like. So in the Virgin crisis, success for us And the vision that we were telling people is, get another week, just keep surviving, just keep surviving. So the timeframe comes in a lot. You've got to shorten your actions and add a lot more urgency. You can't be as collaborative as you— as I would naturally want to be. You've got to take the reins and just make decisions and know that you're going to make some good and some bad, but ultimately it's done for the survival. And because I sat through— I didn't sit through, I was a part of Ansett. when it collapsed. The lessons I learnt in Ansett served me incredibly well when I was running Virgin through a crisis. So was anyone here that worked at Ansett when it went broke? Actually, I've got my hand up, so that's 3 airlines in a crisis— Ansett, Virgin, and now Fiji Airways. Goddamn. So what I learnt through that process at Ansett is I was a general manager. I was affected like everyone else. And we were being told nothing, and that uncertainty and stress was really, really terrible to have to experience. Emails were just starting as a thing. I know it seems like a long time ago. I would watch for the postman to come every day and see if they were going to drop a letter in my letterbox so I'd learn something, and then it wouldn't happen. I go, I've got to wait another day. So I learnt that in crisis Communication is absolutely key. And so with the tools we've got now, you can do live videos 3 or 4 times a day if you need to. We certainly at the moment don't do it. We do, you know, we've got Viva Engage where we put a lot of updates on, but communication is key. So take the uncertainty out of it, jump on and tell people even if you haven't got an answer, just jump on and say this is my regular update, there's no update, I'm just telling you that so you don't stress about things that are out of your control. So there's that. There's also, you know, stakeholder management, and in an airline sense, you've really got to manage the PR well. And during my time at Qantas, we were up against an incredibly powerful— and all credit to them, they did their jobs very well— powerful PR machine in Qantas.

Adrian Schofield:Yeah, okay. And turning to markets, something we did talk to Russell about yesterday, but be interested to hear your perspective on the Australian market. You know, what's demand like? And do you have any capacity growth plans here, capacity or routes?

Paul Scurrah:Yeah, so Australia and New Zealand are our 2 biggest source markets. We get just, just south of 70% of all of our traffic come from there. North America is our biggest growth market, and I can come to that. There's real potential for Australia. So I think there was sort of an artificial belief that we capped out a bit because there is a cap on the 4 major airports here in terms of capacity under the Air Services Agreement. But there's enormous growth potential out of Australia, and we're doing that through secondary airports as well. Last year, Australia's outbound tourism numbers grew by 1 million versus the year before, so it went from 11.5 to 12.5. And for various reasons, and maybe driven by that belief that we capped out, Fiji got none of them, so we flatlined. And so we've rethought that and we're opening up in many ways and different ways of flying. We launched the Gold Coast recently, which has been beyond our expectations as to how successful it's been. So we're seeing really healthy growth come out of Australia now. So we need more hotel rooms to help that happen as well. We need more seats. We're getting more creative about how we can sort of stay under the cap and still get better load factors, which is working well. Russell's doing a great job. He's here on that. So we do see growth out of Australia for sure.

Adrian Schofield:OK. I should also mention that we hope to have time at the end for a couple of questions. So if you do want to submit those via Slido, that'd be fantastic. So turning to the US market, can you talk about demand and growth prospects there? I mean, you tried Dallas and then you pulled out of Dallas. But just generally, what's demand like in that market?

Paul Scurrah:So demand's holding up really well. Direct point-to-point that's coming out of the US is holding up really well. Everything else around it is affected by what we call the Trump slump. So there's just a wait and see for various reasons of people who would normally have a discretionary trip to go to the US. So business traffic we know is holding up okay, but leisure is not. Through another board I sit on, I see the hotel data of international inbound into the US and international outbound. So inbound has collapsed and outbound has collapsed as well, because are fearful of leaving the US. So the hotel business in the US and tourism is flatlining because one's offsetting the other. But it just shows in those numbers just how, how much of a drop-off there is in inbound tourism to the US. And so that's affecting us. But the, the US as a source market is going very well for us. And so Fiji is doing quite well out of that. We've got a lot of really high-end product and beautiful product in Fiji that's really attractive to the American market. We were probably over-indexed capacity-wise given the circumstances that I've just outlined.

Adrian Schofield:In Dallas, you mean?

Paul Scurrah:In Dallas, yeah. So Dallas, we were 3 times a week. Our load factors weren't near where we wanted them to be, and it actually had the effect of us sort of spreading our resources a bit too thinly. So we saw San Francisco and LA being a bit affected by it as well. And 20%, only 20% of the traffic that was on that flight originated out of the Dallas catchment market. The other 80 was prepared to do a one-stop hub to Fiji. And so we can do that actually through San Francisco and Los Angeles. And since we made the call, you know, we take the entire cost base of Dallas out of our system, but our bookings are slightly below where they were last year with Dallas in the system. But considering that that was a lot of capacity, that's a fantastic outcome.

Adrian Schofield:Right. But you were saying your flows, your transit flows from, I guess, Australia and New Zealand via Fiji to the US are down at the moment?

Paul Scurrah:Definitely down. Australia and New Zealand, from a transit point of view, for those destined just to go to the US, are down on the discretionary side. I think it's slightly different for business traffic, and I think the business traffic market is more resilient. But from a leisure perspective, there's definitely an element— not everyone, there's still people going there for holidays— but an element of people who have been cautious about going. I mean, you hear— and I've been there recently, and I didn't have this experience. It was a very smooth path through the US and all of the systems that you have to go through. But you do see the news about people having their phones checked, their social media checked. And companies now, in their risk management advice for their business travellers, are saying, take a burner phone and take a clean-skinned computer. That's what we used to get told about China.

Andrew:Mm-hmm.

Paul Scurrah:And so that's what our companies are telling their executives when they fly to the US right now. It might be overcautious, I don't know, but that's having an impact.

Adrian Schofield:Right, okay. And just quickly on Asia, I think you serve 3 points in Asia?

Paul Scurrah:Singapore, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.

Adrian Schofield:So what's the importance of those Asian routes to your network?

Paul Scurrah:It's super important to us. Our Chinese numbers haven't yet got back to pre-COVID, but they're growing really, really well. So Hong Kong, we do— we're just about to go to 4 times a week and then 5 times early next year. So Hong Kong, because it's a Cathay hub as well, and Cathay are such a good one-world partner of ours, it's a crucial hub into Fiji. So that's going very well, and China is a big source market for growing tourism for us as well. Japan is good for both ways, good source of tourists, and they're growing as well, and Tokyo is growing. But we launched our SkiG product, which is wedging ourselves into the equation of the insatiable appetite for Aussies to go off in the Australian summer to ski in Vancouver and ski in Tokyo, both destinations which we serve. And, you know, we know that we're a price point below because it's really expensive to fly direct at that time of year because of the demand. So Ski Fiji is now saying, hey, listen, we fly to Tokyo, we fly to Vancouver, and guess what? You can stop off for 2 or 3 days and get a bit of sun on the bod before you go. And that campaign was really, really popular, and next year we're going to enhance it for a bit longer and go a bit earlier.

Adrian Schofield:Okay, and I would like to spend a couple of minutes on fleet if possible. You've just completed a major fleet overhaul with the, the A350s and the 737 MAXs. What advantages has that given to the airline in terms of capability and product?

Paul Scurrah:Well, Russell will probably tell you you've never completed your fleet overhaul.

Adrian Schofield:He did touch on it.

Paul Scurrah:He did, yeah, so it's a constant thing, you know, it's like painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge. So the advantages are, you know, first of all customers love them. The A350 product we've got has got a brilliant, you know, business class flatbed experience. We get lots of kudos for that, and we're seeing a lot of growth at the front end. And the MAXs as well, we've got a really generous leg pitch in our MAXs and all, you know, IFE in all of the back of the seats. So it's really, really state-of-the-art, modern, you know, it's just got that new car feel about it, which is what I think people really like. But from a sustainability point of view, you know, our fleet, new fleet is a 25% reduction in fuel burn, which also has the sustainability benefits that are so important to us. As a part of Corsia, of course, you know, we've committed, and a part of Oneworld, we've committed to be net zero by 2050. That's a really hard thing to do. And I think, you know, Donald Trump in a way has probably allowed people to take their foot off the gas.

Adrian Schofield:Right.

Paul Scurrah:Pardon the pun, and maybe lost some of the urgency around this, but we certainly haven't. And so the benefits are there, you know, they're very reliable aircraft, customers love them, and they're very fuel efficient and sustainable.

Adrian Schofield:Right, okay. And one more on fleet. All your orders have now been delivered, so what would your next fleet replacement or acquisition priorities be, do you think? And when might you need to get to them?

Paul Scurrah:Yeah, so we're looking at something, you know, to 2 to 4 years down the track in terms of what we do in addition to our current fleet. But, you know, not having Russell's performance review in public here right now, but I've asked him to— where are you, Russ? There he is. I've asked him to get more out of the current fleet. So how can we, you know, our utilisation has a bit of upside to it. So it's not— it's a challenging task for Russell and his team to make sure, because we're so reliant on the hub, to get the sort of utilisation rates that a Virgin or a Qantas would get. I think that's hard when you're not hauling trunk routes backwards and forwards between Melbourne and Sydney. Gives you higher utilisation. We've got a little ways to go. So we want to grow our ASKs without necessarily bringing new aircraft in. So that spreads our cost base a lot more. We've also got ATRs and Twin Otters in our fleet for the very important sort of domestic and other Pacific nations we serve within the Pacific Island region, and so we can also get a lot more out of those. And Russell's got plans, or we have plans to— we just announced Nouméa as well, so we're back in Nouméa. We've got 2 or 3 other destinations that we're re-entering to serve from a tourism point of view and an essential service point of view.

Adrian Schofield:With the turboprops?

Paul Scurrah:With the turboprops.

Adrian Schofield:Okay, right. So you mentioned that potentially in 2 to 4 years you might be looking at new orders or Well, just a sort of— I knew you'd consider that.

Paul Scurrah:You have to. I mean, we've just come back from IATA, and anyone that was there would tell you that the big challenge for all of us is you are miles away from getting a new aircraft if you haven't already ordered it. And so everything's moved to the right. So it's like 2033, 2034 now if you order it today. And if you don't order it today and you wait a year, it might be 3 years at the other end as well. So what we have to look at is— and we're talking to lessors— is who's got some slots that are already in the system who might, you know, be shuffling those and how we can jump in and benefit from that. If we were just waiting on ordering a new plane, we would be waiting for a long, long time. So, but, you know, we've all— we've got a mix of A330s in our fleet as well. So we're working through getting them refurbished to be the A350 standards as soon as we can. But even seat manufacturers right now, I mean, it's a seller's market if you're a plane OEM or if you're a anything to do with the in-flight product, 2-year waiting list to get just the seats to refurbish. So nothing's quick at the moment.

Adrian Schofield:Right, okay, but you do want to get some more lift coming in in that sort of 2 to 4 year timeframe?

Paul Scurrah:Yeah, we, I mean, we see sensibly we want to grow, but you see predictions that the Asia-Pacific market will grow at 5% for the next 30 years, which is incredible growth, and it's a great It's great knowing that, but of course it comes with all the ups and downs and shocks. We don't necessarily see that we have to keep pace with that growth because we think we have to index our growth with the growth and the capacity for Fiji to handle it. And so we think something slightly below that is where we will go.

Adrian Schofield:OK. We do have one question that's come in on Slido. I think you may have kind of tackled that, but we also have a microphone that we can circulate if anyone Here's a question. I think we have one down here.

Andrew:Hi, Paul. Andrew from AirAsia South Pacific. You get a lot of, um, unsolicited advice in the Fiji papers about how you should better run the airline and what you're doing wrong. I always enjoy reading it, but given you're a majority state-owned airline, Fiji is a relatively sort of small fishbowl to swim in. How do you manage those stakeholder relationships, not just with the politicians but the industry figures. You know, you've got to keep them on side, but you can't take all the thought bubbles on. So it's a question you could ask any sort of state-owned airline CEO, but you're there. So yeah, thanks, Andrew. Thank you.

Paul Scurrah:I mean, one thing you get used to as an airline CEO is everyone knows how to do your job. So it's not, it's not just a Fiji thing. So you get so much free advice. I learnt from my Virgin days that I have to do an unpredictable email address at Fiji Airways because of all the free advice I got at Virgin. So it's harder to email me. So we are 51% owned by the Fijian government and the other 49% is other shareholders. So, you know, we are effectively an unlisted public company. But we are obviously in the news a lot and people have an opinion and that's because they're passionate about us in our role, and it was the same at Virgin. The real trick to it is, and without, you know, I don't like to be the one that looks backwards and criticises a decision I didn't make, but one thing I think we have worked on since I've been there is transparency. And I think that there's just been a lot of myths and misbeliefs about Fiji Airways. Fiji Airways is a beautifully well-run airline. We pitch ourselves as the World's happiest airline for a reason, because Fiji is such a naturally happy country, and that shows in our crew. And I can honestly say we do have the most naturally non-forced happy crew in the world. But what we haven't done well is manage the local rhetoric or commentary as well as we should have, and we're changing that as we speak. And so we're looking at more open forums. If you go back through the annual reports of Fiji Airways for the last 10 years, You'd struggle to see any negative even in the years where there was a number of loss-making years. So we focused on promoting top-line numbers and top-line passenger growth, which sort of masked that a little bit. So for us, we just want to make sure that we tell the truth. That's the best way to do it. And the government's always going to have a key stake. We're a big employer. And so for me, it's just making sure you've got regular forums, that you're actually keeping them updated. But we do that with every shareholder as well.

Adrian Schofield:Anyone else want to take the opportunity to ask something of Paul? Nope, not seeing anyone. So, well, in that case, a kind of a more Pacific Island sort of question.

Paul Scurrah:Sure.

Adrian Schofield:Fiji Airways is the strongest of the Pacific Island carriers, you know, financially and size-wise, but, you know, many of the other ones are struggling a bit. So in what ways could the Pacific Island carriers cooperate more? It's something that's been talked about over the years, but what could they be doing more?

Paul Scurrah:Yeah, I think there's a, there's a lot of national pride that may slightly get in the way of what's the right thing to do. And, you know, when you're subscale and you don't have, you know, the ability to have operational spares sitting around and, you know, your cost base is spread over 2 or 3 or 4 aircraft, it's always going to be a challenge. So I know that there's been There's been a lot of commentary in the past about coordinating a lot more of that together. Probably still hasn't caught on as much as it should. I'd like to think that as a region, the Pacific could find a way where Qantas and New Zealand Fiji Airways in particular come together in a way that actually helps the smaller carriers. But now obviously we have to go through competition laws to get that right. But I think as an economic region and how important it is to Australia and New Zealand in particular, I think there is a way where we can lean on the 2 big national carriers. We can work with them. And I don't know exactly how that would play out, but it would be better that there's more cooperation and coordination to do that.

Adrian Schofield:Right. Thank you very much. That is all the time we have, and I'd like to invite David Wills from InvestGlobal up to the stage. But just before that, please join me in thanking Paul very much for some fantastic comments. Really appreciate it.

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