While there may be many things to criticize about the way Qantas is being run, I don't think "Power by the Hour" qualifies. Large parts of the industry are moving to Power by the Hour - and the engine companies are encouraging it for a number of reasons. First of all, it greatly simplifies spares - when the engine company owns the spares it can locate them strategically all over the world, so that when you need an engine in a hurry there is likely one close by, instead of at the operators home base which may be halfway across the globe. Plus if an operator has a run of bad luck, they won't run out of engines while another operator has three or four sitting unused. The current generation of on-board engine monitoring equipment downloads real time (or at worse at the end of every flight) - and the engine companies process that with fancy computer algorithms that can predict failures before they happen and alert the operator they need to get an engine off-wing before it actually fails. Preventive maintenance is nearly always cheaper than waiting until failure, and getting an engine off-wing prior to failure is an obvious benefit for ETOPS.
If just scratching the surface of why Power by the Hour makes good sense for many operators - especially those with smaller fleets.