Leemo,
It exactly because big Australian airlines are staffed by many people with your attitude that they get as little of my money as possible. I guess I spend about US$25K of my own money each year on airfares so I am the sort of "premium" customer that BA/QF claim to be after, but too many QF/BA crew hide behind the "we're only here for your safety" line as an excuse for delivering crap service.
I'm not going to choose my airline on the basis of how good I think their cabin crew will be in the event of a crash. I'm going to exclude airlines that don't meet a certain safety threshold (i.e. have a significant number of crashes, e.g CI, KE, GA) and then pick from the remainder purely on the quality of the service.
Having said that, I have just come off a BA transatlantic where the service was unusually excellent, but that was in First with only 5 passengers and three crew... The only problem was that one of the other passengers was an infant who screamed more or less the whole way. I wish airlines would offer "infant-free" flights - I don't see why they couldn't do it on routes where they fly multiple times per day, but that's a whole other discussion.