Joyce’s parmesan waft trumps Goyder’s humility cologne

Joe AstonColumnistSep 5, 2023 – 6.55pm
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On Tuesday, veteran Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce threw himself under the Airbus, departing the airline’s Mascot bunker two months early in richly deserved ignominy.
It turns out a little microdosing can go a long way.
Qantas chairman Richard Goyder emphasised that it wasn’t the Qantas board’s decision for Joyce to leave early: it was Joyce’s own decision, even though “it goes against every one of his instincts”.

The highlight of Richard Goyder’s stewardship of Coles was its Queensland pubs allowing children in its poker machine rooms. Rhett Wyman What about your instincts, Uncle Rich? Do you even have any? Oh, that’s right – you said Joyce shouldn’t leave early, that you weren’t one for “knee-jerk reactions”.
What Goyder does have, it turns out, is chutzpah. “I think it’s a time for humility, and I think you’ll see plenty of that as well,” he said. Humility – that will be new, won’t it Australia? That sure will be terrific. But where was Goyder’s humility when Qantas was force-feeding its customers innovative new forms of physical and financial torture and his haughty response was to insist that Joyce is “the best CEO in Australia by the length of a straight”?
Goyder wasted no time on Tuesday flicking the switch to the burnishing of his own credentials, citing his success turning around Coles as the CEO of Wesfarmers when Coles and Woolworths were “the two most hated businesses in Australia”.
“I will get to work on these things, and we’ll do what we need to do. And I think my role in that is pretty important.”
This is a little advertisement, entitled: please keep me. Uncle Rich has the experience for this kind of adversity, see? He’s the turnaround guy. He’s virtually indispensable. “I allowed this peat fire to burn out of control but now you need me because I bring the humility.” He can reach into his shaving cabinet to find the bottle of humility cologne he’s been saving for just this occasion. A couple of splashes will make everything right.
Yet Qantas is only in this dire mess today precisely because Goyder has utterly failed to step up and do what needed to be done.
Coles is actually a great analogy. Goyder massively overpaid for the supermarket giant in 2007 and Wesfarmers’ return on equity over the cycle never recovered. You sure as **** know the price is too high when Solomon Lew is an enthusiastic seller. Wesfarmers’ stock then collapsed in the GFC and Goyder had to raise equity – reaming retail shareholders who couldn’t stump up – to keep the whole show afloat.
It is true that Coles had totally lost the confidence of its customers under chairman Rick Allert and CEO John Fletcher (who admitted when he arrived at Coles that he hadn’t set foot in a supermarket in 25 years). But Goyder didn’t turn around Coles. UK grocery gun Ian McLeod did. And did Goyder ask Allert, the chairman who presided over Coles’ descent, to stay on and offer classes in humility? Dumb question.
The highlight of Goyder’s stewardship of Coles was its Queensland pubs allowing children in its poker machine rooms and luring punters to those pokies with advertising for their free kids’ clubs.
In 2009, anti-pokies campaigner Paul Bendat took out a full-page ad in the Cambridge Post, the community newspaper in Goyder’s leafy suburb of Peppermint Grove, with a photo of Goyder and the headline “Have you seen this man?” Coles overhauled its practices within days.

A July 2009 full-page advertisement in the Cambridge Post, the community newspaper in Richard Goyder’s Perth suburb of Peppermint Grove. Bendat understood perfectly what is most important to Richard Goyder, and that’s the myth of Richard Goyder, the professional good bloke. Nothing’s changed. He breathes at a higher altitude. He is literally the chairman of the Chairman’s Lounge, the pope of Australia’s power clique. He is grand poobah of the AFL. He is chairman of Woodside – basically a sheikh in Western Australia.
And who is he, really? He is every man to everybody, whoever you want him to be. He’s usually unflappable, but his feathers are plainly ruffled now that he’s spruiking his turnaround bona fides.
Goyder hasn’t disclosed the only thing we all want to know, which is the price he paid – with shareholders’ money – for Alan’s early departure. Remember, the best lies are by omission. The only reason the board hasn’t told us what they’re doing in relation to Joyce’s bonuses is that telling us would cause a furore.
We’ll know Joyce’s bonus outcomes when Qantas releases its annual report this month – probably at 7pm on a Friday night. Uncle Rich may have to bring forward the AFL grand final by a couple of weeks to bury the story.
Joyce has had some ups and downs, you just have to take a 22-year horizon. Now he’s moving on in the best interests of Qantas – that’s just Alan to a ‘t’! – but at what price? Where is the asterisk?
We know the price for shareholders: $15 billion of delayed fleet capex starting this year. We know ACCC chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb’s price of at least $250 million; that hypothetical fine only double what shareholders paid the f---er over the past 15 years. The price is the triple whammy of having ****ful old planes in the sky, the huge bill to replace them and the increased political scrutiny translating to greater competition.
Cass-Gottlieb hit Joyce between the eyes with her stun gun on Thursday, and he’s been stumbling around in the kill pen ever since. That’s how it goes before they slit your throat. But even in his compromised state, he would’ve been negotiating. Everything’s a transaction in Alan’s world. “I’ll go quietly, I’ll go early, but give me one last $4.3 million sweetener and my free First Class golden tickets for life.”
Sitting in Vanessa Hudson’s in-tray on Wednesday morning will be the world’s largest, overflowing sick bag. The parmesan waft of Joyce will haunt the Qantas headquarters. It will long linger in the nose of every customer sitting in every soiled seat on every senescent 737. Uncle Rich will be running up and down the aisles spraying his scent of humility.
Goyder was re-elected at Qantas’ annual meeting last year when very little of the company’s appalling conduct had come to light. Yet he’s now adamant that shareholders need him to stay and preside over the airline’s brand turnaround. If he had any balls at all, he would voluntarily put himself up for election at the AGM on November 3.
He could stand on his record and own his decisions – Joyce’s early departure not being one of them! Uncle Rich could defend his customary decision, which is to make no decision. He might be advocating humility but not shame, because he clearly doesn’t have any.
All of these years hanging tight with Alan Joyce, the man with the enchanted spectacles, seems to have blessed Uncle Rich with a vivid imagination of his own. He’s now the only person in Australia who sees himself as part of the solution, not part of the problem.
Customers, regulators and major shareholders could take out a billboard in Mosman Park asking his neighbours, “Have you seen this man?” It wouldn’t make a whiff of difference.