It will end with smoking holes my friend. It always does.
Then there will be a belated realisation that Qantas has lost engineering control of its fleet. There will be a lot of hand waving about worlds best practice contractors and so on, but a simple audit will demonstrate "gaps" in the maintenance records of most if not all of the fleet.
This is what destroyed Ansett - the inability to determine the maintenance state of its fleet, leaving CASA with no choice but to pull its operators certificate.
To put that another way and in case a journo might be reading: An Aircraft is just a pile of scrap metal unless the entire operation and maintenance history of virtually every part of it is both certified and recorded and available at all times for scrutiny.
To put that another way, you don't get to declare an aircraft is airworthy, you have to be able to PROVE it is airworthy. If you have insufficient proof, then its just junk. That is why Ansetts B767 aircraft were broken up for scrap on the tarmac.