The City of Greater Bendigo’s inability to secure federal funding to upgrade the Bendigo Airport terminal should not impact its push to host the Qantas Pilot Group Academy, its chief executive officer believes.
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Bendigo was last month shortlisted as one of nine regional Australian cities – and the only one in Victoria – to house the academy, which will train 500 pilots per year.
Academy executives visited Bendigo earlier this month to hold talks with the council, where the idea of a co-located terminal for commercial airlines and a training school was raised, council CEO Craig Niemann said.
“We talked about whether a jointly-located building would work and they were very clear they'd prefer it to be separated,” he said.
The facility, if successful, would be on a separate piece of land and the lack of a terminal building would be irrelevant to the Qantas decision, he said.
The successful host of the pilot academy is expected to be announced early next month.
The COGB had applied for $4.4 million from the federal government’s Building Better Regions fund to upgrade the terminal at Bendigo Airport.
However on Monday all successful applicants for the second round of the BBR fund were announced, with the airport absent from the list.
Mr Niemann in January said “a bigger, improved terminal would add to the likelihood of securing a larger transport operator”.
On Tuesday he said it “would have been nice to go to commercial carriers” with the carrot of a improved terminal building, but suggested the airlines would make a decision based on their business models.
“They (carriers) are more interested in will the business work from their perspective regardless of the terminal building. Our analysis says yes - but they're the ones who have to make that decision,” he said.
The airport decision completed a difficult few days for the council after the state government backflipped on the Marong Business Park, rejecting its plan to compulsory acquire a section of the Carter family farm.
Mr Niemann suggested the council still had good working relationships with both tiers of government, but suggested securing government funding was a difficult task.
“It’s going to get harder for us to fund our share of major projects so we want to get more investment out of state government and federal government,” he said.
Despite the latest round of disappointments, Mr Niemann said a business park and expanded airport terminal were still priorities and neither project was “dead in the water”.
