Goeing Boeing, you are absolutely right when you said that the government had no role in AN's demise. They just stood back and watched nature take its course.
Contrast that behaviour with their efforts to keep Mitsubishi afloat in Adelaide, and that was for a lousy 3000 jobs compared to 10000+ in AN!!!! There are plenty of other examples where Government has bailed out industry for all sorts of reasons.
My point is that if Qantas was in AN's situation any government would come running with its chequebook.
I got the drift way back in the days of Compass One when as a consultant, I asked the ACCC what they would do if an accusation of predatory pricing was made against Qantas by Compass.
The answer was that it might take them a month to decide to investigate and about six months to reach some determination. As anyone who has been involved with an airline knows, the huge cash flows involved in this behaviour would easily bankrupt a fledgling airline in six weeks let alone six months.
There are **** all people who know anything about airline costing and pricing in this country and none of them work for government. Qantas gets what it wants from the Government and the rest get ****all.