Naysayers quick in jumping to conclusions about Flying Kangaroo
Qantas chief Alan Joyce ... defends the airline
WHAT makes a company Australian? It's worth asking because, over the past few days, union leaders and some members of parliament have been queuing up to accuse Qantas of betraying its Australian roots.
These claims are misleading at best, insulting at worst.
Qantas employs more than 30,000 people in Australia, in every state and territory, across more than 250 different roles.
We do 90 per cent of our heavy maintenance in this country. No other airline does any heavy maintenance here (Virgin's heavy maintenance takes place offshore). In the small number of cases where Qantas heavy maintenance is done in overseas ports, every hour of every shift is supervised by expert Qantas staff flown from Australia. We spend over $1.4 billion on maintenance annually and invest over $50 million in engineering training. Tourism spending by Qantas passengers in 2009/10 was over $24 billion.
We work with a range of charities including UNICEF, the Fred Hollows Foundation, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, the Royal Flying Doctor Service and Clean Up Australia Day. Last financial year the Qantas Group provided nearly $20 million in support for Australian communities, including Indigenous health and education programs in outback Australia.
In times of trouble, we stand up for Australians. Earlier this year, we sent charter flights to Cairo to bring home Australians caught up in political protests. We contributed over $1.7 million to natural disaster recovery in Queensland and Victoria. In regional Queensland, we added over 300 flights to get people in and out of flood-affected areas.
Over the next few years, we will be making some major changes to turn around our loss-making international business. These will, unfortunately, result in about 1000 redundancies across a number of job types.
As always, we aim to keen compulsory redundancies to an absolute minimum.
But arguing that these jobs are being "outsourced" or "offshored" is simply incorrect. Not a single job is going overseas. The redundancies are the result of aircraft being retired and the restructure of our route network.
They have absolutely nothing to do with the creation of a new airline in Asia or the establishment of Jetstar Japan.
So despite all the union rhetoric, Qantas remains emphatically an Australian company. And despite what the unions would say, being an Australian company does not mean ignoring opportunities overseas. Their pessimism is selling this great country short. Australia's location is the envy of the developed world we are on the doorstep of the fastest-growing economies on the planet. Our political leaders urge us to take advantage of Asia's huge potential.
If Qantas is to be successful for another 90 years, it must adjust to the new realities. We need to change so that we can compete with our rivals and take advantage of the growth of Asia and other developing regions.
Doing this will not threaten our Australian employees.
Naysayers quick in jumping to conclusions about Flying Kangaroo | thetelegraph.com.au