Canberra Airport has pulled back from a face-off with the ACT government in court after federal authorities removed the insistence on masks in terminals across Australia.
It's understood court action would have begun this Thursday or Friday. Legal papers had been prepared and a top barrister engaged by the airport owners.
But the federal health authorities have now changed their advice on masks at airports and that opens the way for the ACT government to remove its mandate.
Airport chief executive Stephen Byron said that the federal decision by the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee meant that there was no legal basis for the mandate. It should have been removed months ago, he said.
"There's been no change to health situation or the vaccination situation from what it was eight to ten weeks ago," he told The Canberra Times.
The ACT government has not said it would remove the mask mandate but the chief minister, Andrew Barr, has indicated in the past that it would be removed once the federal ruling changed.
The airport's lawyers would have argued that insisting on a measure which health experts say is unnecessary, and which has been removed in other crowded areas of Canberra, breaks the ACT's Human Rights Act.
The airport's argument was that it is only legal to infringe people's freedom through emergency measures if the government explains fully why the measures are necessary - which, the airport argues, the government hasn't done.
That argument is strengthened by the federal change of policy.
The airport's lawyers cited the ACT Human Rights Act which they said says that citizens' behaviour can be restricted only to the extent that any limitations "can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society".
"To date," the airport's lawyers wrote to the ACT government, "you have never explained - publicly at least - why a mandatory face mask requirement at Canberra Airport is 'demonstrably justifiable' and 'necessary to protect the ACT community'".
Sydney and Melbourne airports also have compulsory mask-wearing. The legal action does not relate to mask-wearing in flight.
Canberra Airport's argument was that the mask mandate was brought in when the pandemic was rampant but that is clearly not the case now.
The airport's chief executive Stephen Byron had grown increasingly frustrated by the mask mandate at the airport.
Passengers were increasingly disobeying the law, and he questioned why armed anti-terrorism police at the airport were expected to enforce it. He reckoned a fifth of passengers and visitors didn't wear masks in the terminal.
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