Although I am a full time employee of an international operator, I have a small business in Aus' which "touch wood" is doing very well on the black ink side of the line employing a small number of good people. Now if things go wrong, what are my options?
Government support? - I think not.
My options are quite straight forward, break up the business and sell for the best price I can get.
Other BIG Australian business names with large employee numbers have gone under without Government bail out so why a foreign owned Ansett. Now it is never nice to get the pink slip but I have great difficulty in accepting a sudden change of Government policy to use Australian tax payers money to prop up a 100% foreign Company when there are much more important Australian options like hospitals in which to use the funds. More specificantly, past precedence with other fully Australian owned airlines with significant employee numbers were allowed to fail, so why now.
If the Company is allowed to fail, all of the Company would not be lost. Parts of it would be taken over and therefore the job loss numbers would be reduced and I would think that the other two entities would probably absord more as they would expand to fill the void so the overall jobloss number could be quite small. (By the way, 15,000 employees for that number of aircraft when compared to other successful similar sized companies is drasticly over-staffed anyway e.g. The international operation I work for operates worldwide with about the same number of aircraft and has less than 10,000 staff).
Another benefit which has not been mentioned yet is the availability of all the Ansett terminal space for the likes of Virgin and others who might now make a move to fill the void. The result could be more positive because more efficient and therefore less costly operators could now appear.
There are so many benefits that could result that they may in time benefit us more that proping up a failing operation. Therefore I would be very much against and Australian Taxpayers money being used. If the Kiwi's want to use their money well that's up to them but my feeling is they wont because they still see Ansett as Australian and they will not use their money to protect Australian jobs. Let market forces run their course, if a solution can be found then good but I don't think they will as the hole Ansett is now in is very deep.
Have a nice day