Qantas will weather turbulence coming out of Canberra
The attacks on Qantas over who got told what when about the group's decision to ground its aircraft on Saturday is a confection.
To borrrow from Sherlock Holmes, the dog hasn't barked - there is no evidence that the Qantas chief executive, Alan Joyce, has terminally damaged his group's relations with the government.
He's dented Qantas's reputation, and is pedaling hard now to repair it.
But the restructuring of Qantas that Joyce has begun is unlikely to be fatally undermined by what happened on the weekend. The government understands what Joyce is trying to achieve and it supports it.
Senior Labor figures including the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, the Assistant Treasurer, Bill Shorten,
and the Transport Minister, Anthony Albanese, have criticised Qantas for not informing the government of the shutdown sooner.
But even as he said again yesterday that Qantas had not told the government that a full grounding was imminent, Albanese acknowledged that Qantas had been talking ''very clearly and publicly'' that if industrial action continued there would be groundings.
The ''logical extension'' was that ''it would reach a point whereby the airline would make a decision because of the proportion of the fleet that was grounded, that it was time to ground the entire fleet,'' he said.
Translation: Alan Joyce didn't tell government ministers several weeks ago to set their phone alarms to remind them at 5pm on Saturday, October 29, that Qantas would be announcing a decision to lock out its pilots, engineers and ground crew and, as a consequence, immediately grounding its fleet.