Heathrow Airport

... a lot of the group...

So I let, I met a lot of the players at Sydney Airport, flew on the plane to Abu Dhabi and then to Heathrow.

Met some of the other players at Heathrow.

Had a night in London.

It's the first time I'd been back to England since, since I left in 2007, so I kissed the tarmac when I got off the plane.

Really?

Do you know what? I think even in business as well, like, on the flights that I used to do was, like, a lot of American flights or some, uh, Heathrow.

It was all, like, regular flyers.

They know what they're getting.

Um, my first week in the gilt-edged market was the week that, um, uh, Britain entered a crisis and, uh, Denis Healey had to go to the IMF to beg for some money to bail us out.

Unfortunately, he only got to Heathrow Airport before he had to turn round, come back to Downing Street to manage the foreign exchange crisis.

So that was my first week in the market, 50 years ago.

I was at that point working for Mullins & Co, who were a gilt-edged stockbroker, but their main client was the Bank of England, and we used to execute all the Bank of England's business in-

They were one of the initial investors in the UK.

Um, you know, Heathrow's been private for 40 years.

Um, so Manchester, Le- Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, um, are all doing this, this, this privatization stint on, on long-term concessions.

Uh, Australia's moved to long-term concessions.

The underlying assets, the underlying airport retained by the government.

Um, our pension funds, uh, operate these concessions around the world, uh, from Heathrow to a series in Asia as, uh, airports, okay? And they have that expertise, and we're bringing that expertise back home, I think, and you should ask them directly.

Obviously, we...

I'm sure you will.

Sometimes talks start even further back than that.

I actually had a talk that began with a picture I took waiting for the Heathrow express to take me into downtown London.

And I love the mind, the gap that they have stenciled on, on the floor.

And so I took a picture of that and just love the color and the texture.

The underlying assets, the underlying airport retained by the government are pension funds.

operate these concessions around the world from Heathrow to a series in Asia as airports okay and they have that expertise and we're bringing that expertise back home I think and you should ask them directly obviously I'm sure you will that they are very interested in the possibility of this happening is by the way this is something that we announced in our first budget that we intended to examine so we have been examining for a while and we will do consultations in the coming weeks as well.

The experience is that customer service has improved, efficiencies are found.

We as a government will be able to get tens of billions of dollars proceeds from this process that we, as I said earlier, will reinvest in our regional airports.

Yeah, so there's an interesting word they used a lot that probably Canadians haven't heard a lot, Shane, and the word is airport concessions.

What happens if you fly through Heathrow or if anybody's been through some of the European airports, even in Asia and Australia, the government started out as 100% owners of those businesses, and then they sell the rights to serve the food, or they sell the rights to run the bars or run the retail.

They sell those as concessions to outsiders, including pension plans.

So a lot of the and then they keep the things where there's a monopoly and we need prices to be low, like on baggage handling, something like that.

The Sweeney's doing nightly cause they've got the word to go.

They get a gang of villains in a shed up at Heathrow.

They're counting out the fivers when the handcuffs lock again.

In and out of ones with the numbers on their names.