Six weeks after Narelle, a fare cheap enough to argue with

The fare appeared on a Friday night in Hobart, the kind where the wind off the Derwent made me close the kitchen window twice. I was meant to be writing about something else. Instead I sat at the table watching one-way Perth-to-Broome creep down the Virgin Australia booking page from the usual five-something, then four, then to a number that made me stop chewing. One hundred and seventy-nine dollars. I read it twice. I checked I hadn’t accidentally clicked redeye-via-Adelaide or some five-stop horror. I hadn’t. It was a direct fare in late June, on sale that week, and it was cheaper than my taxi from the airport last time I went home for Christmas.

The fare is part of the WA government’s Affordable Airfares Program, which the Cook Government re-announced on May 6. They put $1.45 million into a Tourism Business Support Package after Severe Tropical Cyclone Narelle tore through the north-west in late March. Perth to Broome from $179 on Virgin. Perth to Exmouth from $199 on Qantas. Perth to Kununurra from $259 on Virgin. Broome to Kununurra is also in the package. Airnorth picks up some of the regional connectors. I started a spreadsheet, which is something I do when a trip is about to get serious.

The week the cyclone walked across half a state

Narelle was, as one meteorologist told The Conversation, compact and dangerous and unusually predictable. It made its first landfall as a tropical low on the Kimberley coast on March 23, then spent two days travelling overland and dumping rain. It walked back out over the Indian Ocean, redeveloped into a cyclone northwest of Broome on the 25th, intensified into a severe Category 3 north of Port Hedland, and hit the Pilbara coast as a Category 4 on Friday March 27, passing within 35 kilometres west of Exmouth. Roofs went. Wind-driven rain pushed in around the windows of houses that were nowhere near the coast. The footage I watched was not the howling-trees-bending-over kind. It was the morning-after kind. People walking carefully through their own front yards in shorts and high-vis, picking up bits of corrugated iron and looking up at where their patio used to be.

Tourism is one of the things that does not just bounce. Broome had its dry season starting. The 4WDs were already booked. Whale shark season at Ningaloo was three weeks out. And then for ten days nobody booked anything, because nobody books a holiday into a destination that is on the news for the wrong reason. The cancellations kept coming after the headlines stopped. WA Regional Development Minister Stephen Dawson, in his statement, said it cleanly: “Following the impact of Cyclone Narelle, we know businesses and communities need practical support to recover and rebuild.” Translated out of press-release: the Kimberley needed people on planes by June or there were going to be operators who didn’t make it through to next dry.

So the fares came back. The program isn’t new. It started under the McGowan government in 2018 and has, as of this round, sold roughly 178,000 discounted tickets across its life, with about 28,000 going in the 2025 round alone. What’s new is the timing. The 2026 round was always going to happen. Pulling it forward and pointing it at the cyclone-affected end of the state, that’s the actual move. Tourism Minister Reece Whitby framed it as part of “the Cook Government’s economic diversification strategy”, which is a reasonable line if you think regional WA is too dependent on iron ore, which it is.

What’s actually on offer

The fare floor sits at $179 one-way Perth-Broome on Virgin, $199-$209 Perth-Exmouth on Qantas, $259 Perth-Kununurra on Virgin, with Airnorth handling some of the inter-regional legs, including the Broome-Kununurra link that is otherwise so eye-watering people drive instead. Travel windows are mid-June through October, which is the dry season. The only time most southerners actually want to go up there.

Sitting next to the fare is a separate $4,000 one-off relief grant for cyclone-affected businesses. That part isn’t aimed at me, sitting in Hobart. It’s aimed at the family running an eight-room motel in Broome who lost a roof and a fortnight’s bookings in the same week.

The marketing line is “fares from $260”, which is the easy, round, headline-friendly number. The actual cheapest tier is well below that. I might be wrong about the strategic reason for rounding up the headline price, but the fares I’ve been pricing are real, and they’re as low as the press release implies and sometimes lower.

The slow-traveller’s problem with cheap fares

Here is the part I’ve been working out. I have, on this site, made the case for tiny, off-grid, two nights max as the way Aussies are travelling now. I have argued that the regional boom is more complicated than it looks, that towns get reshaped by visitor numbers in ways the visitors never see, that fast tourism is sometimes worse than no tourism. Ngaire Brennan said the same thing more directly in her column on the regional boom. I read it twice when it ran.

So when a state government dangles a $179 fare in front of me, the sensible response is not to immediately book it.

And yet.

Right now the Kimberley needs people who will stay a while. The helicopter-and-out crowd, the twenty-hour stopover that lets someone say they’ve been to Broome, that’s not who’s going to keep the operators open through July. It’s the week-plus stays that matter. Three nights at Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm, out on the Dampier Peninsula, where the Brown family has been seeding pearls for 75 years and four generations, and where someone will, if you stand still long enough, explain to you what a nucleus is and why an oyster does or doesn’t accept one. A guided day with Bardi Jawi rangers at the One Arm Point trochus hatchery. The 1,000-kilometre drive from Broome up through Fitzroy Crossing and across to Kununurra, with the Bungle Bungles in Purnululu somewhere in the middle, and Lake Argyle, twenty-one times Sydney Harbour, sitting at the end of it like the country has decided to show off.

None of that is a fast trip. A $179 fare gets you to the front door. What happens after that costs you in fuel and time and bookings and probably a swag, and the only way you ever break even on it is in your head, six months from now, when something specific comes back unbidden. The light at Cape Leveque on the second evening. The sound of the trochus hatchery generator clicking off at 9pm. The way the road shimmers between Halls Creek and Wyndham at three in the afternoon.

What I’m watching for

The Ord Valley Muster runs from 15 to 24 May. It’s the festival’s twenty-fifth year, which is a sentence that surprised me when I checked, because I remember when it was a couple of bands in a paddock. Tina Arena is doing the Kimberley Moon Experience this year, with Boy & Bear and Budjerah on the same bill. Ten days of Kununurra at full noise. Usually that works out for everybody. Except the cheap-fare window opens just before the Muster does, and what’s about to land is a planeload of southerners with discount tickets walking into a town already at the seams. Maybe it goes well. Maybe it looks like one of those Victorian country pubs in autumn where you just give up and eat at home.

What I keep returning to is the $4,000 grant. A roof isn’t a $4,000 problem. A roof might be a deposit on the tradesperson, if you can find one who will drive up. Bodies in beds and money in tills, that’s what the fare program delivers, and it will. Whether the small operators are still trading next April will depend more on the relief side than on the airline side, and that’s where I’d want the next round of attention to land.

What I’m still working out

I suspect there are two things happening here and only one is in the press release. The fare is the visible part. Underneath it, the WA government is using a tourism subsidy to do disaster recovery, which is a fairly elegant way to move public money without putting up new bureaucratic plumbing. The carrier gets paid because the tourist flies. The operator gets paid because the tourist books. The tradesperson gets paid because the operator now has cash to put a deposit down. Trace the $1.45 million through and it has touched a lot of small businesses in the Kimberley and Pilbara, and none of those businesses had to fill in a single stimulus form. I find that quietly clever in a way that I suspect Treasury would prefer not to be too loud about.

What I haven’t worked out is whether I am being talked into something by a cheap ticket. The booking page keeps reopening on my laptop. The Hobart wind has not let up since Tuesday. As I write this, the fare is still $179, and last I checked Virgin had seats left in late June.

I have until October.