This anti-competitive arrangement ensured that they carried approximately the same number of passengers, charged the same fares and had similar fleet sizes and equipment.

East-West had earlier attempted to break the duopoly of Ansett and Australian Airlines by offering cheap fares but in the regulated environment of the time was not allowed to operate directly between major cities so was forced to detour via regional centres.

[7] The Federal Government made it extremely difficult for the new airline to succeed, as evidenced by the lack of suitable facilities provided to Compass.

[8] In the major cities, the fledgling carrier was forced to accept what were the least accessible aircraft parking bays inside the terminal of one of their competitors, an impediment to successful trade also noted by the government's own Australian Competition & Consumer Commission study.

[10] As the official findings of the Australian Taxation Office detail,[11] the federal government set in place legal proceedings that inevitably led to the repossession of the leased aircraft and the effective grounding of the airline, with the subsequent direct and indirect loss of thousands of jobs.

It was argued, had the airline been allowed to continue trading over the Christmas period, the peak travel season in Australia, it would have had more of a chance meeting its disputed financial obligations than being shut down at this point in time.