Our monopolistic economy

Posted by Nicholas Gruen on Saturday, August 28, 2010

Here’s the breakdown of a Canb-Melb flight I just booked on the to be avoided at (almost) any cost Tiger Airlines.

Ticket Fare AU 12.85 23%
Airport Charges, AU 31.65 56%
GST (if applicable) AU 4.45 8%
Service Fees inclusive of Tax AU 7.2 13%
Total Cost AU 56.15 100%

Now ‘airport charges’ are not all airport charges. Some of it is presumably tax. The ‘service fees’ are for a Mastercard payment (which the Tiger website told me would cost nothing – but the incompetence of Tiger is only an aside here, not my point).   But it’s quite a table nevertheless. The service provider gets 23%, the government gets 10% (allowing for tax on the service fees) and at least on the face of it the rest goes to the monopolies running our airport and financial services (though Tiger takes a juicy cut of the financial services cost).



This entry was posted on Saturday, August 28th, 2010 at 10:16 AM and filed under Economics and public policy. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

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