Schnaus baby, I have to tell you and 403titan something.
Every manufacturing industry in Australia is competing against imports, often from China.
Every car company in the world is locked in competition with imports. GM and Fords' commercial paper (bonds) are now rated "Junk " by Wall Street.
Even our services sector is under great pressure either from call centre operators in Thailand or computer programmers in India.
Every farmer and miner is competing against farmers and miners elsewhere.
Now there are three common features of this situation.
1. This competition and resultant specialisation is driving the biggest increase in standards of living throughout the world since time began. Economic rationalism and globalisation are not new theories, they have been around for 100 years. Its only taken this long to get rid of the whiners and special pleaders who prevent change
2. If any of our local industries cannot compete, they go under. However we already know that most of them can compete very nicely thankyou.
3. Airlines, airline pilots and aircraft manufacturers are beneficiaries of these changes because the growth in Asia is being driven by globalisation.
4. The opening of borders, especialy in Europe, and fifth freedom rights have already generated a massive increase in the amount of air travel through the use of low cost carriers.
Yet in spite of the fact that globalisation has delivered all these benefits into your own industry, you still persist with the quaint and outmoded idea, that out of ALL the businesses in Australia, there is one, just one, Qantas, that must be protected like the proverbial Koala?????
Its hypocrisy, pure and simple.
To put it another way mate. Do you want to pay $300 or $100 for a power drill? Do you want to protect Qantas? If you want the benefit of the $100 drill, then you don't get to protect Qantas without being a Hypocrit.
BTW, we don't know if QF is an Australian company anymore anyway. Its largest shareholder is an American Nominee company, your maintenance is probably going offshore and you already employ large numbers of foriegn cabin crew who aren't even based in Australia, and will probably increase the numbers if management can get away with it. QF is an Australian brand name, nothing more.