There has been concern about Cathay Pacific terminating the direct Cairns route from October 2019. Missing from some of that has been the significance of Hong Kong as an air freight destination from Cairns.
BITRE provide data on this in their monstrously large and error prone excel files. This is most recent data year to May 2019 for international freight out (tonnes) share from Cairns by destination:
There would also appear to be some politics happening in the background here. No we wont link to it. They don’t deserve it.