Funny that, I was having lunch with a few people at the yacht club yesterday and the subject of QF came up. Without any prompting from me two of them used the exact same term "third world airline" to describe the standard of service.
They left the table even less impressed after I told them that the people responsible in part for QF's safety record - the maintenance engineeers - were all being sacked and their jobs outsourced, or replaced with unqualified AME's.