What is AIPA's REAL motive?
To reduce Dixon/Oldmeadow's ability to use divide and conquer tactics.
Industrially, each pilot group will negotiate for their terms and conditions but will have the full industrial experience of AIPA to assist them in their negotiations so you won'r get mainline interfering with J*,Eastern, Sunstate negotiations. They'll just have more support than they have had in the past.
In the AO takeover AIPA sought to marginalise the AO pilots onto the 737, to the point that when the AO A300's were retired they were replaced by B767's crewed by Q list pilots. At one stage this threatened redundancies from the A list. Many A list F/O's did over 10 years in the 737 before command whilst Q list crewed 767's took over more and more domestic flying, with many rapid promotions for Q listers (many are the current AIPA leadership). Eventually the A330's provided for some A list movement.
I don't know who the source for this crap was but it couldn't be further from the truth. AO was Australian Airlines based in Cairns which was formed many years after Qantas bought (at a hugely inflated price) the domestic Australian Airlines (TN). You were obviously talking about TN but your source was totally wrong. The integration agreement gave each group of pilots "grandfather rights" on each fleet in their original airline. Qantas invested huge amounts of money into the domestic airline as evidenced by turning the "igloo" into the current world standard Terminal 3 in Sydney as well as terminal improvements at other ports such as Melbourne. Some of this investment went into expansion of the B737 fleet. This expansion throughout the 1990's saw virtually all "A" list First Officers gain their command whilst "Q" list pilots with many more years service had to wait for their chance - the exact opposite of what you said. This situation is easy to confirm - both AIPA and QF have records confirming this process. Sure the A300s were sold in 1998 (would have been sold in 1993 except for the fact that the previous TN board had artificially inflated the value of every asset and a one-off correction would have caused problems in the privatisation of Qantas) but it had to happen as a fleet of four aircraft was extremely inefficent in terms of spares, engineering support and training costs. Also the pitiful range (inability in some WX conditions of flying SYD-PER) and high fuel flow (approx 1.7t/hr more) compared to the B767 meant that they had to go. The huge expansion of the domestic operation did enable the B767 fleet to be increased in size which gave the "Q" pilots some of the promotion opportunities that their "A" pilot colleages were enjoying. You refer to the marginalisation of A300 pilots onto the B737, but in effect, their was no choice because of "grandfather rights" which is something that the "A" pilots were happy to agree to in 1992 as the alternative of datal seniority was unacceptable to them because of the subject we're not allowed to mention on this forum. Overall, the Integration Agreement has served the majority of "A" pilots very well with many who joined TN in 1991 achieving their command before 2000.
AIPA did not shaft the TN pilots and only has respect for the J8, Eastern and Sunstate pilots. They will only end up with better T's & C's as well as career prospects if they join forces against Dixon & Oldmeadow.