Qantas lawyer Andrew Finch makes his mark

Only three weeks ago, Richard Goyder promised humility. Finch didn’t get his chairman’s memo.
Joe AstonColumnistSep 28, 2023 – 5.57pm
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Wednesday evening’s appearance before a Senate inquiry by Qantas chairman Richard Goyder and new chief executive Vanessa Hudsonwas a golden opportunity squandered.
Sitting side by side, the logical discrepancy between their individual positions was dazzling.
Goyder said, “I think Alan Joyce did an excellent job as CEO” only moments after Hudson conceded that “we have let the wider Australian public down, and we understand why people are frustrated and why some have lost faith in us.”
But if Joyce did such an excellent job, why is Hudson apologising? That’s what no senator asked Goyder to explain.
Only 24 hours earlier, the Australian and International Pilots Association called on Goyder to resign. Goyder even told the inquiry that “We’ve got amazing pilots [at Qantas].” Yet no senator asked Goyder the shattering question: The people who you trust to keep your customers alive have lost confidence in your leadership. How can you possibly continue?
Goyder said, yet again, that “there’s a significant sum of money” in Joyce’s long-term bonus “that is subject to malus and clawback depending on how various things unfold in terms of Qantas’ reputation.” Yet no senator asked him to reconcile that assertion with the Qantas annual report saying that clawback is only available “in the event of serious misconduct, breach of obligations to [Qantas] or material misstatements in Qantas’ financial statements.” He would’ve frozen like Mitch McConnell.
No senator asked Goyder if reputational damage really is a clawback trigger, and given Hudson says Australians have lost faith in Qantas, why he hasn’t clawed Joyce’s bonus back already.
Goyder wasn’t even asked about letting Joyce sell $17 million of Qantas shares at the top of the market on June 1, with five months remaining in his CEO tenure and when Qantas had already received multiple compulsory information notices from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

Qantas general counsel Andrew Finch. Alex Ellinghausen As it happened, the star witness of the session wasn’t Goyder or Hudson, but Qantas’ general counsel, Andrew Finch.
Only three weeks ago, Goyder promised humility. Finch didn’t get his chairman’s memo. Finch’s every interjection oozed contempt for the proceedings. His animosity and semantics prompted inquiry chairwoman Bridget McKenzie to retort, “We can play LA Law all you like.”
Even Goyder and Hudson were respectful of the proceedings, no matter how cringeworthy the senators’ hectoring. Not Finch, oh no. He swaggered in, mistaking himself for Kerry Packer, not an undistinguished salaryman. Speaking as if a plum were lodged in his mouth and looking for all the world like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, Finch was the personification of everything that has gone wrong at Qantas.
This is the guy advising Goyder’s board on its avalanche of legal issues. He’s even responsible for industrial relations, and hasn’t that been going swimmingly?
Finch was covering for Qantas’ equally appalling PR chief Andrew McGinnes, who chose this week of all weeks to holiday in Tasmania. What chance does Hudson really have of repairing Qantas’ culture of arrogance surrounded by lieutenants such as these?
Goyder and Hudson were in unison on one point.
“Any suggestion we took fees for no service is just wrong,” the chairman told ABC Radio last week.
“The notion that we took fees for no service is just wrong,” Hudson told the committee on Wednesday.
She made that assertion, as Goyder did, in relation to the ghost flights Qantas is being sued over by the ACCC.
Yet, Hudson was then unable (or unwilling) to assure Senator Simon Birmingham – who brought the most effective line of questioning all day – that every customer booked on a ghost flight between May and July 2022 ultimately received an alternative seat or a refund, as opposed to a flight credit.
Flight credits issued after October 2021 still expire after 12 months.
The ACCC may have already sued over the ghost flights, but the regulator is still investigating the company’s flight credits. And remember, it was in relation to COVID-19 flight credits, not the ghost flights, that the analogy of fees for no service was first raised. That’s because the COVID-19 flight credits are in a system so unworkable as to be virtually irredeemable. That’s why the balance is falling so slowly.
Right up until the ACCC forced Qantas to cancel the expiry date on the COVID-19 credits last month, this was absolutely an attempt to confiscate more than $500 million of Qantas customers’ money. It was the mother of all fees for no service and Qantas, under Goyder’s supervision, was going for gold!
Even with the cancellation of the expiry date, this is still an attempted systemic heist unless Qantas makes the credits usable; it is merely an open-ended theft, a theft in abeyance – and one on which Qantas continues to earn tidy interest.
To use a flight credit, Qantas also forces customers into a custom booking engine, where they are often offered higher fares than in the regular booking engine.
I experienced this personally this week. A reasonable argument could be made – and hopefully the ACCC will ultimately make it – that this is another example of Qantas engaging in deceptive conduct.
Goyder and Hudson should be thankful this isn’t the US, where Qantas might’ve been done for racketeering.