Good post fdr, I have been saying it for quite some time, Qantas is being destroyed by management to justify its destruction.
Management have systematically & deliberately destroyed the longhaul business, in order to justify it moving the capital offshore to become the "Ryanair of Asia". This strategy appears to go back at least a decade. Note, managers are chasing growth, not profitability. They see somewhere near a 20% CAGR, which would see a doubling in size of the Asia operations every 3.5~ 4 years. The "paper profits" won't be returned to shareholders as dividends, rather re-invested in the business. This is an attempt to make it a growth story, straight out of the dot com playbook. They never have to actually payout the cash, the illusory profits are paper. In this way things can be hidden until the expansion stops. By that stage, the managers will have been long gone with their billions.