I posted the following on the Rumours & News forum & is probably as appropriate here.
The Guvnor says that both governments f**ked up which is a surprising comment when you consider that this mess stems from commercial decisions made by private companies. Where there was a government mistake was back in 1989 when the low-life PM (the "Honorable" R J Hawke) used tax payer funds to assist Ansett CEO Peter Abeles to fight the domestic pilots in a major dispute. This access to additional funds meant that the airline kept fighting (in lieu of negotiating) causing the airline's finances to get into a precarious state. This was confirmed in 1991 when the same government pulled the AOC on Compass Airlines (Mark 1) because Ansett was within 2 weeks of being placed in receivership and couldn't sustain the competition from the low cost upstart. Subsequent Ansett management failed to improve the Airlines financial position with significant evidence that assett stripping was being conducted by its parent companies (News Corp & TNT). When Rod Eddington was CEO of AN he was actually an employee of New Corp - makes you wonder whose interests he was looking after. The parent companies were only too pleased when the AirNZ board came along with "Mega Airline" ego ideas and bought AN (in two stages) for $1.2 billion dollars. AirNZ must have been unaware that Moody's had done an assessment on Ansett in 1995 which concluded that AN had nett assetts of A$150 million ($2.65B assetts & $2.5B debt) and by throwing in $100 million in goodwill it then concluded that the total value of Ansett was $250 million. Of course the AN management hotly disputed this figure.
There are a lot of people to blame but the current governments have basically let the airlines do what they wanted to do & therefore should not use tax payer funds to replace money taken from Ansett over many years.
