Avalon Airport this morning drove a dagger into the heart of any ambition Sydney might have to retain its claimed status as the business and tourism capital of Australia.

It locked up a deal for major expansion by Tiger Airways, and will become Tiger’s second Melbourne Airport from the second half of this year. The Singapore Airlines controlled low cost carrier this morning said it would expand its fleet by 25% in a matter of months to exploit Melbourne’s geographical advantages and get in on the ground floor of its future leisure and business travel expansion.

Avalon might be a pain in the posterior for some travellers as it is 20 kilometres further away from the CBD than Melbourne International at Tullamarine. But it gives Melbourne some telling advantages over Sydney as the harbour city continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on consultants drawing up yet more public transport plans it is incapable of building, and locks itself into a situation where it has only one hopelessly inadequate airport.

With the two rapidly growing low cost competitors, Jetstar and Tiger, now splitting their flights between two competing Melbourne airports, other airlines are already favouring Melbourne over Sydney for future services because the monopolistic fees charged by Macquarie Bank controlled Sydney Airport are nearly twice as high as those at Tullamarine.

Avalon’s impact on monopoly airports changes the very future of Melbourne as a city.

Emirates is understood to have look seriously at its future options to fly to Avalon, although there is nothing official about this at the moment. And Virgin Blue has also scoped the opportunities.

The contrast with Sydney is painful for Sydneysiders. Avalon is now the focus of commercially useful traffic growth in an existing airport which has ample room for expansion, and occupies the prime location to serve the future westward expansion of housing and business activity in greater Melbourne.

But western Sydney has an airport site at Badgerys Creek which no government is game to build, in a similar expansion zone to that of western Melbourne which is already crippled by disastrous infrastructure failings. People in eastern Sydney can fly to Canberra faster than they can drive to their western suburbs. Sydney’s only answer so far consists of failed efforts to identify a site for a second airport away from the city, which would solve nothing.

It looks like game, set and match for Melbourne when it comes to taking the title of the growth centre for Australia, no matter how bad Melbournians might think things are in their own city.