This is just a simple case of the smartest people in the room employing their teams of lawyers working out how to circumvent legislation that's a roadblock to their plans of making the biggest bonus possible.
Brilliant plan, making Qantas at its essence a domestic only carrier, of course it's all within the legal framework envisioned at the time the company was sold off.
The spirit of the legislation and why it was created in the first place ? That's another story. I'm sure the pollies at the time as justification as to why they would sell off a piece of Australia as it once was, was that it was always going to be a piece of Australia.
To use the aforementioned piece of Australia as a sink of cash to dip their respective hands into to go expeditioning around the Asian world offering aircraft and capital to the first person who agrees to be a Qantas proxy (like the JQ Asia setup) 51%** (**cash provided by Qantas and controlled by Qantas just like JQ Asia.. read the annual reports it's all stated as such) local owner, really you can put lipstick on it, dress it up, tell the world it isn't what it actually is, but at the end of the day its still a way of circumventing Australian legislation and workplace conditions and being able to base Qantas in an Asian centre with staff on Asian conditions yet still claiming to be Australian. I don't buy, neither does anyone else. The only asset these days Qantas has left is its Australianism, fleet/product/route structure/ethics, they're all way behind and second class.
All of this is done whilst;
A) retiring all by 6 747's
B) effectively cancelling the remaining orders of A380's they're not legally obliged to pay for - sure they're 'deferred' at the moment, wait a year or 2 when the international segment still doesn't return the cost of capital and it's punished once more. Mark my words, 6 A380's cancelled = 50 A320's for JQ:Xsia in 2014
C) engineering the conditions of lack of fleet investment which caused the Ansett downfall in the first place
D) all the while propping up half a dozen proxy airlines in the region at the expense of Qantas and its international division, its product, its capacity, its route structure.
Management at its finest!