The Wall Street Journal article you link to is about limits on foreign ownership of Qantas. The same laws apply to all large Australian-owned companies, and mean that government approval is required before a publicly-listed company majority-owned by Australians is sold to foreign interests. It doesn’t mean the government owns the companies, any more than Filipino limits on foreign ownership of property mean that land in the Philippines is ‘nationalised’.

The government in Australia regulates airline ownership undoubtedly, wether or not more so or less so than in the US I can not say.

To be more clear the deregulation I am talking about in the USA refers to the alsmot complete relaxing of any rules on competition by US airlines (foreign carriers are still very much regulated). This has resulted in a windfall to consumers as prices dropped to nargain basement rates, but may be coming home to roost in that there is less and less choice for the consumer every year. In short, RIP, Northwest, ni matter how actually pulled the trigger.

When the industry was deregulated, fares plummeted. One of the two airlines that had enjoyed cosy duopoly benefits went broke, which was a shame for the employees. However most of them soon got jobs with the new airlines that came in to compete with Qantas (the second biggest carrier is now Richard Branson’s Virgin Blue, although he sold a lot of it to an Australian company).

The most important result is that fares have stayed down and made air travel economically feasible for ordinary Australians. The only people who really suffered were the small number of employees (especially pilots) who could no longer extort ridiculously high salaries from the public courtesy of guaranteed jobs for life. I’m not a mindlessly ideological supporter of free markets come what may, but in the case of aviation I think the benefits of competition have been unquestionable and substantial.

However, disgreement fuels the world … what’s sad about my USA today is so many ‘believers’ who jump on some political bandwagon or another without a thought as to what it really means.

Pretty telling, though, that every airline on that list has foundered since Ronald Reagan’s time, when he removed commerce regulation. Some love the man and say his ideas are right … I allow anyone to hold their own beliefs, but just look at that list and tell me that deregulation was good for US airlines. I’ll disagree there for sure.

Also as a man from a country where in general the government protects workers .. remember that virtually every person on that list … those airlines were all people, mind you … lost all or most of their pension, becuase another thing the ‘great communicator’ did for Americans was to relieve corporations from honoring their pension comitments. Oh well …

Also, given the number of recent airline accidents that are caused by just plain lack of interest in safety and “lowest common denominator” flight crews, this may be of some interest:

We’ve deregulated, cut the number of inspectors and regulators, then cut the budgets of the regulators we do have and — if there was anyone left that still didn’t get The Flick we tried to fire them. Is any of this sounding familiar, Senator(s) ?

Just to prove that I’m not the only one that sees this — and that this problem is pervasive throughout the entire U.S. Government, read this from Marketplace:

Why gov’t regulators seem unprepared

Aviation is pretty much a textbook example of the benefits of market competition to customers, in my book. And IMHO your description of the horrors of a nationalised airline are way off beam; for comfort, safety and efficiency my carrier of choice is Singapore Airlines, a wholly owned subsidiary of the government of Singapore.