51% only applies for an airline to secure international rights -...

51% only applies for an airline to secure international rights - so if there was no V-Australia foreign investors could knock themselves out (remember it was all owned by Richard once upon a time). But the Pacific rights are what potential partners are after. For Emirates and Etihad it would fill in the gaps and make them a round the world carrier. For Singapore it would realise a long held ambition to compete with QF on this route.

VBA now has a decent network that could feed traffic into any of these guy's long haul routes too.

The REX thing is an outlier...a reverse takeover really but the routes are reasonably complimentary (basically Rex pulls out of any route on which they compete). The Singapore connection is interesting....maybe they know something about Tiger that we don't.