AUGUST 20, 2011 ARTICLE 20 OF 20
Killjoyces whichever way you turn
MIKE CARLTON
Alan Joyce, the Qantas boss, sent me an email on Monday. It oozed that smarmy PRspeak that tells you that you are being right-royally schmoozed by the marketing department.
"Dear Mr Carlton," he began. "As one of our most valued customers, I want to share with you our commitment to building a stronger Qantas."
Yup. There's Mistake Number One. That very first sentence contains a dangling participle, a clunky grammatical error. Read by anyone even half-literate, Alan, it can only mean that you are one of Qantas's most valued customers, not me. If you don't believe me, try this: As a small, bespectacled Irishman, I want to share with you …
The rest of the email was more corporate drivel: "The best of what air travel can be … a pioneer that introduced flying to a young nation … state-of-the-art … best comfort, service and entertainment in the sky … spirit that will make Australians proud." And so on, blah-de-blah.
Alan, I don't particularly want to be proud of Qantas, any more than I want to be proud of wombats, say, or Lleyton Hewitt.
I just want you to get me from A to B more or less on time, at a reasonable price, better than the other guys do. I want to use my frequent flyer points when it works for me, not you, and I'm fed up with your website constantly crashing when I try to book. A smiling face at check-in would be nice, too, not a grey computer screen.
I want to be flown by properly trained Australian pilots making a fair wage, in safe aircraft serviced by Australian engineers. I'd like the drinks rolled up the aisle by Australian cabin crew, not by indentured Thai labour pulling $5 an hour. Overseas, I want to travel without you flick-passing me to another code-sharing "partner" when I get half way at Hong Kong, Bangkok or Dallas-Fort Worth.
In short, Alan, I want that ol' time Qantas service. When I flew Jakarta-Sydney on QF42 the other day, the crew worked hard. Nice people. But your Business Class lounge at Jakarta Airport was like a back-alley chew'n'spew, Salmonella Central, where we had to plead for a cold beer. On board, the overhead lockers rattled ominously when we took off. My seat was broken and the breakfast "refreshment" before the dreaded 6am arrival was a polystyrene muffin and tepid coffee that could have doubled as brake fluid.
Alan, you can sack the locals and set up re-branded Asian feeder airlines until you're black in the face. Maybe that will pacify the shareholders for a while, maybe not. But either way, you're killing off the flying kangaroo we once knew. I still call Malaysia home?
JOYCES were everywhere all week. Barnaby of that ilk looked as if he might spontaneously combust when he harangued the carbon tax protest in Canberra on Tuesday.
"This is socialism on a scale that we've never seen before in our lives,'' he bellowed, crimson-faced and sweating, eyes swivelling like the Cookie Monster. The greying mums and dads of his audience clutched their Ditch The Bitch placards and quaked in their cardigans as if Lenin himself had appeared. Next stop: the Finland Station!
It being exactly a year since Julia Gillard's no carbon tax promise, the opposition flung the levers to hyperbole. It was "the anniversary of a day of infamy", squeaked the Liberals' climate change gnome, Greg Hunt, presumably channelling Franklin Roosevelt post-Pearl Harbour. The Queensland Liberal senator George Brandis labelled it "the most infamous broken promise in Australian political history".
Up to a point, George. That honour actually goes to a South Australian Liberal and a former army minister, Dr Jim Forbes, who told an RSL conference in 1964 that "our military advisers have indicated in the clearest and most unmistakable terms that conscription is not the most effective way of creating the army we need. An army composed entirely of long-term volunteers is better than one based on a mixture of volunteers and conscripts.''
Just 16 days later the Menzies government introduced guess what. Some of us baby boomers have long memories, Senator.
YESTERDAY should have been party time at the ABC. It was the 50th anniversary of Four Corners, which arrived in the nation's lounge rooms on August 19, 1961.
Fifty years is a big deal in television. Kicking off with a staff of six and a weekly budget of £480, the program has survived the slings and arrows - both within and without the ABC - to become the longest-running show on air. Not counting the news bulletins, that is.
It is difficult to imagine Australia without it.
So a big bash had been planned, with the Four Corners faces of yesteryear turning out for cocktails and the launch of a commemorative exhibition at the Ultimo headquarters. It would have been one of those very tribal ABC affairs, cheerful and gossipy, where almost everyone seems to be married to, living with or divorced from somebody else in the room.
But then came the thunderclap: journalist Paul Lockyer, pilot Gary Ticehurst and cameraman John Bean were killed when their helicopter crashed near Lake Eyre. The ABC's managing director, Mark Scott, pulled the pin on the party.
Maybe that was the right call. Scott was clearly devastated by the tragedy. But knowing Paul Lockyer, I'm pretty damn certain he would have wanted the show to go on, with corks popping and glasses raised.
He was such a nice man. Lively, amusing, fun to be with. In the hard scrabble of television journalism, both ABC and commercial, he was universally liked for his ready charm and consummate professional skill.
As a young man, he had been a stand-out foreign correspondent. In recent years he travelled the bush, reporting the country to the city with understanding and elegance. They'll miss him out there, for sure.
It is a trope of the right-wing commentariat that the ABC is a nest of left-wing subversives who must be purged.
Only the other day, the tedious Professor Judith Sloan was banging on, yet again, about staff wickedness and the need to raze the place.
It is Paul Lockyer - and the hundreds of good men and women like him at the ABC - who make the best answer to that particular libel.
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