...it will sway the remaining institutional shareholders...
I don't think they give a toss any more than the board does. If they did they wouldn't have supported the board's actions over the past twelve months.
...and it will/can sway our elected representatives, and although no longer Gov owned, pressure from Canberra still matters.
They didn't do much about the grounding of the fleet
. Why would they care what the staff do now? The current federal government know little about aviation and care even less. Maybe if Qantas manufactured unprofitable cars it would be a different story...
The debate needs to be taken out of the gutter.
If Purvinas (or the TWU for that matter) were out slagging off Alliance and Virgin on a daily basis I'd agree with you, but they aren't. There are rarely any aviation related IR issues mentioned in the press, except at Qantas. The other major carriers largely manage to keep their staff engaged and sort out their EBA biffos in private, and the unions correctly have very little to say about them.
The continuous bad publicity for Qantas is not an ALAEA creation. It is a Qantas management creation as they lurch from one stuff up to the next. All the ALAEA has done is draw public attention to the stuff ups, and good for them. Otherwise the stuff ups would still be occurring, but behind closed doors, or only documented by Ben Sandilands. Why should the unions pretend everything in the Qantas garden is rosy when it so obviously isn't?