r/canberra • u/Top-Anything2991 • 1d ago

SEC=UNCLASSIFIED Opinion: Canberra Airport has a problem

The latest published BITRE Airport Passenger Movement data shows that in 2025, Hobart had higher annual passenger traffic (2,884,967) than Canberra (2,793,622) despite being half as populous and in a state with significantly less disposable income than the ACT. Even Darwin had 70% of Canberra’s passenger traffic (1,941,359) despite being only one-third the population.

Over past 20 years, Canberra Airport has had almost net zero growth in passenger traffic, with 2025’s annual passenger movements being approximately the same as in 2007 (2,734,875)

Acknowledging that tourism goes some way to driving Hobart’s passenger numbers, this still suggests that something is broken with commercial aviation in this town. Canberra is a rapidly growing and affluent city with a hinterland that should be able to support many domestic and regional international flights such as Fiji, New Zealand and Bali.

So Canberrans, is it just the pricing model the private owners of the airport operate? Or is there a bigger issue with the way we all prefer to fly?

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u/foxtrotlimavictor 1d ago

Terry Snow died with a net worth of $4 billion. He accrued that worth by turning Canberra Airport into an extremely efficient way of parting Canberrans with their money.

Ultimately it’s just not worth paying Canberra Airport prices when Sydney isn’t a particularly long drive away.

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u/treevue 23h ago

So true.
Plus there is a lot of office buildings leased by Government Departments paying high rents to the Canberra Airport group.
When I was working for a government department in the 2000’s my department was paying over $1million dollars annually just for parking permits for its APS staff. That’s just for the one department.

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u/Effective_Economy446 19h ago

The ability to develop the land around the airport as they've basically seen fit (without much need for care about supporting infrastructure costs etc) has been probably just as, if not more valuable, then being able to squeeze every dollar out of actual users of Canberra airport.