Comedy Act by Ben Sandilands
Qantas Group CEO Alan Joyce is only a few words short of calling on his pilots to wear red ties and lead passengers in a rousing chorus of “I still call Australia Home” before push back given his mobilisation call to employees yesterday to make Virgin Australia give back its grubby unfair foreign money from predatory government owned airlines.
But is this the same Alan Joyce that replaced Qantas jets to London with billions of dollars worth of Emirates A380s and Boeing 777s when he gave away Qantas services from Perth, Brisbane, and Adelaide on the kangaroo route to the sovereign owned Dubai carrier earlier this year?
Which is worse if we want to be judgemental about this, Mr Joyce. Using a state owned Middle East carrier to reduce the need for Qantas services (and those pesky unionised Qantas workers) to London and Frankfurt, or using foreign carriers like those which have invested money in Virgin Australia to make it grow even faster?
If using foreign money to grow Australian jobs in an Australian controlled airline is bad, how much worse is using similarly foreign money to avoid Qantas employing Australians to continue its presence on the kangaroo routes? And please, stop talking about Qantas continually operating for 93 years. You grounded it for several days in 2011 for a nasty ambush pulled on tens of thousands of your customers, scattered all over the world, to browbeat a confused government into supporting a court order to end court approved industrial action which was yours for the asking anyhow?
Qantas has no claim to being the world’s oldest continuously operating carrier, because you discontinued it. You attacked in the basest of terms the people you are now imploring to mobilise, to cover your own sorry record of mismanagement which has seen the airline share price trashed and dividends vanish.
Remember. You woke up one morning late in October 2011, and said “I’ll ground the airline”. And lo, miraculously, there was a courier army, loitering with intent for the word to be made flesh, and cycled forth, delivering letters and notices that appeared out thin air, while passengers suddenly prevented from attending weddings, funerals, christenings, graduations, and the odd multi-million dollar business contract signings abroad, were all directed by shafts of divine light to hundreds of hotel rooms that had been fortuitously booked for no apparent reason days in advance.
Forgetting this tragic comedy for a moment, this is a borderless world when it comes to capital. Qantas should in fairness be allowed to access that capital under the same rules that apply to Virgin Australia.
Repealing the Qantas Sale Act is something long overdue. But on current indications giving Qantas equality of access to foreign capital alongside Virgin Australia won’t save it from the Virgin menace. That requires comprehensive changes in the management culture at Qantas, and in its board room, and we all know where that begins Mr Joyce. It begins with you.
Source:
Qantas dilemma. Which Alan Joyce is talking? | Plane Talking