On 6 August, the Australian Government released its first-ever draft Aviation Disability
Standards, opening consultation on enforceable rules covering the whole air travel journey:
booking, navigating the terminal, and boarding. 

It is a genuinely new undertaking for Australia, and it lands at an interesting moment, because roughly 10,500 miles away the UK is in the middle of its own aviation accessibility reckoning, just from a very different starting point. The UK has had binding protection for disabled air passengers since 2006, under Regulation (EC) No 1107/2006, enforced by the Civil Aviation Authority. Since 2014, the CAA has gone further, running an Airport Accessibility Performance Framework that scores every major UK airport annually and publishes the results. Its most recent report, covering 2025/26, recorded 5.9 million passengers using assistance services at UK airports, a record, with 19 of the 28 airports assessed rated “Very Good” and the remaining 9 “Good.”

Meanwhile, Parliament has just finished pushing through further reform. The Civil Aviation
(Consumer Protection and Regulatory Reform) Bill, which includes the accessibility provisions
campaigners have been calling the Aviation (Accessibility) Bill, cleared its Lords committee and
report stages in June and July 2026 and now moves to the Commons. Its most significant
change is removing the compensation cap on damaged wheelchairs for domestic flights, a cap
that international rules had fixed at roughly £1,300 regardless of what the chair actually cost to
replace. Disabled peers who campaigned for the change called it a step forward, while also
making clear there is, in their words, far more to do.

So while Australia is drafting its first whole-journey standard, the UK is amending a twenty-
year-old one, and both countries have real lessons to offer each other.

What Australia can learn from the UK is the value of measuring outcomes publicly, not just
setting rules. A standard that says airports must provide accessible booking and boarding is only
as good as the accountability behind it, and the CAA’s approach, ranking every airport by name
every year, has created a visible, comparable incentive that pushes the worst performers to
catch up rather than quietly explaining away complaints. Australia's draft, strong as its co-
design process has been, does not yet describe anything like a public, airport-by-airport
scorecard. Adding one before the standard is finalised would give it teeth that a set of written
requirements alone cannot.

What the UK can learn from Australia is arguably the harder lesson: that age and reach are not
the same thing. The UK’s framework is mature, but it grew regulation by regulation, bill by bill,

patch by patch, over two decades, and it is still being patched now. Australia, starting from
nothing, built its draft standard around co-design workshops held through July and August 2025
with disabled travellers themselves, and structured it around the whole passenger journey from
the outset rather than adding pieces on as problems surfaced. There is also a less comfortable
lesson in the UK's own numbers: a mature, well-regarded system can still leave its own
complaints team, the Passenger Advice and Complaints Team, taking longer than it should to
respond, simply because demand for assistance keeps rising faster than resourcing does.
Regulation on paper and service on the ground are not automatically the same thing, whichever
country you are in.

For us, the practical read is simple. Australia is a destination we book often for clients wanting a
genuinely accessible long-haul holiday, and a binding, whole-journey standard, if it survives
consultation intact, would be a meaningful improvement on the current patchwork of airline-
by-airline goodwill. But the UK's experience is a useful caution alongside the optimism: a good
standard on paper still needs staffing, resourcing, and public accountability behind it, year after
year, to actually change what happens at the gate.

Consultation on Australia’s draft closes on 2 October 2026. We will be watching to see whether
the final version includes anything resembling the UK’s public reporting, and whether the UK’s
own bill, once through the Commons, closes the gaps its own campaigners say remain.