Joyce's comments, if reported correctly, are bizarre and inexplicable.
There is no fukcing way Qantas would even have ordered the A380, let alone Twenty of them, without the most detailed financial analysis of their return on investment it was possible to make - and that includes their cost of capital.
That analysis would have included a number of assumptions regarding fuel, maintenance and crewing costs and there would have been figures for inflation of costs as well.
That analysis would absolutely not contain an assumption that crewing costs would be reduced in constant dollar terms by a sustained campaign of workforce restructuring. That would be madness. Furthermore to make the statement that Joyce appears to have made, that the viability of the operation hangs on whether or not pilots maintain the purchasing power of their wages is simply lunacy!
Furthermore, judging by repeated accounts on Pprune, if Jetstar is profitable, it's because of massive cross subsidies from the mainline operations, there is no way the could have created the infrastructure themselves.
As I said before, what needs to be seen is the contribution analysis of the various segments of the corporation. Please note that Joyce and Chairman Clifford never say that that international is not profitable, they instead hide behind euphemisms such as "not making an acceptable return". This is just sophistry.