"Destruction Of The Qantas Culture"
Why yes, don't you understand this?
The Board and senior management of the airline are operating to what I call " a script". This became obvious and alarm bells began ringing the instant I heard Dixon (or was it Jackson?) using the phrase legacy airline to describe Qantas International.
It is quite simple; Jetstar is the new Qantas. The Board want to kill the old Qantas. When "Stubby Jumbo" and others here state that they are leaving after 20+ years with Qantas, this is music to the Boards ears - they want you to leave.
I will try and explain the mindset because I have seen it before. I apologise if I get the description slightly wrong.
....A mainline pilot:
What you believe you are:
A highly skilled professional who started in GA, worked hard and through long experience and devotion to professionalism, now sit at the pinnacle of aviation achievement as a Qantas B747 Captain.
What the Board believes you are:
A balding, ancient and overpaid Prima Donna who refuses even simple requests for operational economies on account of mythical "safety' concerns, justifying them on the basis of their so called "experience" - which is irrelevant in today's dynamic business environment.
A Flight Attendant:
What you believe you are:
A consummate professional who has learned through long practice and training how to manage passengers so as to afford them a pleasant travel experience consistent with operational safety.
What the Board believes you are:
An ugly old fat hag who is totally resistant to change, paid far too much, and is far too vocal in demanding a totally unreasonable and uneconomic level of creature comforts on behalf of "her" customers.
An Engineer:
What you believe you are:
A professional of many years experience who with hard acquired skills and experience has dedicated themselves to making every Qantas aircraft as safe as it is humanly possible to be made on every flight.
What the Board believes you are:
A greasy jumped up car mechanic that is paid far too much money by virtue of an insidious system of blackmail and extortion managed by their union....and of course is totally resistant to any change in their archaic work environment.
Anyway, that is how I've seen this play out in another industry. The common factor is that experience is seen as a handicap because it is perceived as making people resistant to change. Of course management doesn't go the extra step of determining exactly why the change is being resisted. They only did one unit of organisational behaviour in their MBA and they were taught that resistance to change is natural - and therefore make the false assumption that there are no concrete reasons why the changes they propose are dangerous and should be resisted.
They therefore ignore advice and press ahead....until there is a smoking hole in the ground.
I watched an IT company decide in 1992 that some Forty or so COBOL programmers should be made redundant because COBOL was a "Legacy programming environment" and that the programmers were old, ugly and impossible to retrain. All of those programmers made lots of money thereafter as consultants dealing with Y2K. The Board of the IT company had forgotten that the eternal verities of computing don't change, and neither do the laws of aviation. Gravity always wins, no matter how "dynamic" you think your "Business environment" is, and no management technique is going to replace training and experience when the proverbial hits the fan, at night, in bad weather, a long way from land.