Joe Aston
Columnist
Australian Financial Review
The first rule of Chairman’s Lounge is you don’t talk about Chairman’s Lounge. The Qantas chief certainly broke that one on Thursday.
Four days later, and the prime minister has still said nothing about the fact that
his 23-year-old son is a card-carrying member of the exclusive Qantas Chairman’s Lounge, which entitles the young man to free flight upgrades and bottomless champagne.
Of course,
Anthony Albanese doesn’t fly Qantas himself. The sitting PM and his entourage have their own private jet operated by the Royal Australian Air Force. Plainly, Albo has called in a secret favour to ensure that in his absence, the apple of his eye always travels in the cosseted style Qantas reserves for the executives and directors of large companies.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with Qantas CEO Alan Joyce in March. Getty
One canard doing the rounds is that
Nathan Albanese’s Chairman’s Lounge membership is justifiable on security grounds. Does anyone seriously believe the AFP’s personal protection branch says the regular Qantas Club is too dangerous? What a crock. By the extension of such logic, the kid could never even go to a pub. Even if the rationale was credible, it still wouldn’t explain why the PM has never disclosed it.
The PM hasn’t deigned to explain why such a valuable benefit was quietly conferred on his child alone, and nobody in question time on Thursday, or in any of his multiple media appearances over the weekend, has forced him to.
Ask yourself why the federal Liberals and Nationals haven’t said a single thing about this. Because they’re all in there alongside Albo, of course, sucking frantically on the Qantas teat. Like the American alliance and the offshore processing of asylum seekers, undeclared airline freebies are a bipartisan article of faith.
Alan Joyce therefore maintains easy leverage over both sides.
And while Albo easily eluded scrutiny, it was Joyce who
stepped up on Thursday to confront the revelation of Albanese jnr’s lofty Frequent Flyer status.
“I don’t deny it and at the same time
don’t confirm it,” he said, as his PR flack huffed at reporters to stop asking questions on the issue. “I’ve been good mates with Albo for some time,” he added, defiantly.Typical misdirection
Joyce even insisted that Chairman’s Lounge status is “not a gift, it’s a commercial arrangement that we do. Some of the politicians are … our largest flyers and we facilitate access to our lounges if you’re in BHP, if you’re in Rio. The government has a big contract with us – it’s absolutely no different.”
Keep talking, Alan. Please, never stop.
Joyce’s comparison of federal politicians with mining executives is a typical misdirection. The quid pro quo with BHP and Rio Tinto bosses is that they direct lucrative corporate travel contracts to Qantas. Federal MPs fly Qantas but don’t themselves determine the Australian government’s travel deal with Qantas. That is (purportedly) a decision of the public service.
Chairman’s Lounge membership is absolutely different for BHP and Rio because those companies don’t regulate Qantas. BHP doesn’t hobble Qantas’ competitors or defang its supervising statutory authorities. Rio Tinto doesn’t shower Qantas with taxpayer subsidies.
The big reveal here is that Joyce sees it as a commercial arrangement. There is only one credible quid pro quo between the two counterparties: politicians get Chairman’s Lounge with all its associated trappings and, in return, Qantas gets a legal protection racket.It smells
Joyce says it’s not a gift, so what is commercial about the (secret) arrangement between the PM and Qantas?
Am I saying that Albanese is unreasonably accommodative of Qantas because Joyce put his great mate’s son in the Chairman’s Lounge? That causation is impossible to demonstrate, and by itself, a stretch.
What I am saying is that it smells, and what any mug punter understands is that you cannot accept extravagant favours from someone you regulate because that is plain as dog’s balls a conflict of interest. Indeed, the only reason Albanese kept it secret is because he knew it looked bad.
Joyce is neither confirming nor denying, like he’s the Israeli defence minister. He doesn’t seem to comprehend that nobody else denies it, everyone knows it’s true and he might just have an obligation to clear this up.
Each day, Qantas sells thousands of tickets on flights it never intends to operate (as does Virgin Australia). Each day when they are cancelled en masse, passengers and airports have zero redress (unlike in the European Union).
The Albanese government defunded the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s airline monitoring program in June with airfares at record highs and Qantas still the most complained about company in Australia. What possible justification could there be for such a decision?
When COVID-19 hit, Joyce convinced the Morrison government not to provide a $1.3 billion loan to Virgin, so his archrival collapsed into administration. Joyce then set about extracting $2.7 billion of COVID-19 subsidies, none of which were repayable.
And now the Albanese government has knocked back Qatar Airways’ application to launch 28 new weekly flights between Doha and Australia. We knew how dodgy that decision was when the government tried to blame cavity searches in Qatar three years ago, but then Transport Minister Catherine King put it down to decarbonisation. Now it’s the Australian government conducting indefensible searches – they’re searching for a plausible explanation, but there isn’t one. It’s not me saying this, it’s the entire travel industry.Tough love
Joyce produced two alternative data points. Albanese “had a go at me when we grounded the airline in 2011”. And, “if the government was doing the bidding of Qantas, then it would have not [introduced] multi-employer bargaining, which is a bigger issue [than air rights]“.
Albo was terribly cross when Joyce brought the nation to a standstill 12 years ago. Is he serious? There is actually scarce evidence Albanese did anything in 2011 beyond offering a handful of barely stern words. Albanese was transport minister for six years and incredibly, this is all Joyce can come up with.
Joyce reached into his grab bag of tough love examples and from the past decade, economy-wide industrial relations laws are literally all he’s got. They also came after Qantas illegally sacked 1700 unionised employees during COVID-19.
“This is just a nonsense that Qantas has this unbelievable influence that can dictate anything with the government,” Joyce protested. “And I don’t know how that mindset has got there because it’s just not right.”
This is almost a facsimile of his outlandish claim in May that leasing Finnair aircraft, pilots and cabin crew to operate Qantas flights was “positive for the creation of [Australian] jobs and anyone who says anything else is just completely wrong”.
Here he goes again, betraying his extraordinary perceptual deficits, dialling in from Alan’s magical world, where anyone who doesn’t agree with him simply has the incorrect mindset. I can’t cope with the idea you have a valid criticism of me, therefore I will invalidate you.
Wouldn’t it be fun, occupying an unreality where everyone else is wrong and you’re always right? It can only be the rarefied air that does it, the warping quality of power.
Joyce acts as if no one is noticing. I’ll just sprinkle a dodgy favour over here, and I can neither confirm nor deny. I really had to sell $17 million of Qantas shares in June to buy an apartment even though I sold a $20 million house in July. The world is wrong.
But in fact, a multitude of Australians has noticed. When Qantas reports its record profit on August 24, every jaded road warrior at the airport waiting for their flight to be cancelled will think of Joyce and his $24 million bonanza – his free upgrade to First Class for a Premium Economy performance.
In their minds, Joyce isn’t the great man who saved the national airline, he’s the unrivalled influence peddler screwing the travelling public to the wall, entrenching his virtual monopoly position by moving politicians on a string. Everyone can see it but him.