On 17 Nov 2021, Brisbane Airport Corporation (BAC) won two Airport Excellence Awards at the Australian Airports Association (AAA) National Airport Industry Awards 2021, including the Infrastructure Award for Brisbane’s new runway, which was officially opened on 12 July 2020. This inspired members of the Brisbane Flight Path Community Alliance to suggest this acceptance speech parody, one that most certainly was not delivered by the corporation’s CEO Gert-Jan de Graaff.
“Thank you for the awards, and I am pleased to announce that the new runway is expected to double the airport’s capacity to 110 flights an hour – on par with Hong Kong and Singapore and outperforming Melbourne and Sydney.
“Thanks to our close partnership with our friends in Canberra, no regulations or restrictions are in place to stop us. We got it all approved less than 30 days before Kevin07 got elected, and we also dodged the curfew bullet in 2013 by asking our corporate mates in the tourism industry to sit on the review board. We can’t even do this in Amsterdam! That’s why we love Australia.
“In a close partnership with Airservices Australia, we came up with clever talking points like “noise sharing” and “more flights over the bay” that the Aircraft Noise Ombudsman recently highlighted in his report as an excellent means to trick the community in believing the runway would be good for Brisbane, and it worked. How good is that?
“Together with creative noise modelling informed by our leading value statement – “We had to make things up” – BAC duped both politicians and communities, and we got away with. We are so stoked.
“Not only did we get these amazing awards but we receive all this extra attention from the community, which we just love. Thank you. I don’t know what they say, but my subordinates report it’s all no worries mate.
“Our corporate partner Airservices has also received amazing feedback from families and communities in over 130 suburbs across Greater Brisbane. For privacy reasons they can’t tell us what’s in those submissions, but I am told they are very important and are being registered, analysed, logged and filed away and archived in a secure place thus meeting all the ministerial expectations that are in place.
“How good are Airservices? We love them! Surely, as the geographic spread and impact we are having here in Brisbane tops the country, we will nominate them for a community engagement award soon, too.
“Having such broad impact again illustrates the wide appeal and impact of this once-in-a-lifetime project. But I and the whole BAC team don’t stop here and in fact we continue to deliver for the community we serve. We are very concerned about housing affordability in Brisbane and so we are very pleased to confirm that according to modelling (this time we didn’t fake the data – I promise), houses under the Brisbane flight paths will see on average a decline in value of over 10 per cent. An amazing result!
“Those are conservative estimates from 2016, and we are aggressively expanding our freight and cargo business to make sure we hit at least 20-30 per cent loss of property values because we love Brisbane, and that’s the least we can do to slow down the housing affordability crisis in Brisbane.
“As a gesture of our community spirit, we also sponsor the arts and editorial content on News Corporation’s real estate website where you can read about how great it is to live in Kilcoy.
“I am incredibly proud of the entire BAC team and the wider Brisbane Airport team for their unwavering dedication to providing world-class PR spin that turns excessive noise pollution into steady profits we send to our Amsterdam headquarters.
“These national awards are an enormous and well-deserved honour for each and every BAC team member whose unwavering fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude contributed to our success in these highly sought-after awards.”
Gert-Jan de Graaff
BAC CEO
Sources of evidence used in the above:
