Change management.... Change management!
The industry has changed inexorably, the outcome of deregulation and globalisation is yet to be completed. Were these changes needed, beneficial or detrimental to the user, the industry or the investor? With the myopia of too short a temporal scale, I would suggest at best the jury is still out on all of the "benefits' of either deregulation or globalisation.
QFA needed to change to remain competitive, and that has been to at least some extent occurred with good grace. Until now.
Now, the clumsy management efforts to blame the parent operation for the cost of establishing the sibling is bordering on bad taste, and is questionable from a corporate reporting position. Would think that activity by a management team that deliberately diminishes shareholder value (and I still am one of those) can end badly.
Of all the options available to the P.D. and his cronies, including his predecessors, entering into a deliberate parasitic structure that siphons both goodwill and traffic is hardly enlightened, nor has it ever ended well in any other rendition of this model to date.
Where management fails, blaming the staff is hardly productive. Putting lipstick on the pig is still not kosher, and hardly increases shareholder value.
QF has had fairly loyal customers, it is technically competent, and could compete in the marketplace given the opportunity. The passengers do recognise a con when it is being applied, Jet star is not the QF product that has been developed over time, it has it's own place, but not as a sham QF.
QF shareholders have some choices, allow the PD to continue the damage that has been wrought on the company or stop the rot, and establish QF again as a legitimate program, and account honestly for the Jetstar apparatus.
Jetstar has a place, it sets low standards, and there is a place for that, but it should not be as a cause of the continuing necrosis of QF while management blame QF for their decisions.
Industry standards are uniquely open to arbitrage; and management use this to boost profits to their shareholders to some extent. Such activity comes at a cost, and ultimately as always the cost of cost cutting gets paid, somewhere, by somebody sometime.
With disinterested investors and the management hellbent on perpetrating their management plans, the timeframe for resuscitating this icon is rapidly shrinking.
Whatever the personal opinion is of the competency of the staff, all parochialism and egos aside, the brand has been historically successful, and any decline is attributable to the conscious decisions of the incumbent management.
Industrial action? this is an engineered situation, be prepared to be part of the industry diaspora as a consequence of your actions. Would think that at below 155 cents, your unions would be better off with an LBO and firing the PD and his ilk.
"You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean and paltry; for whatever a man's actions are, such must be his spirit".
Demosthenes (384 BC - 322 BC), Third Olynthiac on the attack of Olynthus by Phillip II of Macedon, 349BC
"Never was there a crisis that demanded more careful handling than the present. But the difficulty lies, I think, not in proposing a plan to meet the case: what puzzles me, men of Athens, is how to put it before you. For what I have seen and heard convinces me that most of your chances have escaped us rather from a disinclination to do our duty than from a failure to understand it. I must ask you to bear with me if I speak frankly, considering only whether I am speaking the truth, and speaking with the object that things may go better in the future; for you see how the popularity-hunting of some of our orators has led us into this desperate predicament".