I will keep repeating it ad nauseum, from the board down, the strategy for a long time has been to operate franchise LCC operations in Asia - at the expense of the QF international. There is only so much capital to go around. It was decided at least a decade ago to direct that capital to Asia.
How do I know? Because Bruce Buchanan explicitly told us the management strategy in 2011, giving the game away.
Jetstar to invest $470m in Singapore hub Date: July 18 2011
He said that the company is aiming to maintain a 20 per cent share of the Asia Pacific low-cost carrier market and might need to have as much as 400 aircraft by 2020.
"The total (fleet size of) the low-cost carrier market (in Asia-Pacific) is about 450 aircraft today and we envisage it to grow to in excess of 2000 aircraft by the end of the decade," he said on the sideline of a media briefing in Singapore.
"To maintain 20 per cent market share by 2020, we need about 400 aircraft," Buchanan added without elaborating when the carrier will start making orders of those aircraft.
Jetstar, which operates nearly 80 aircraft in the region, mostly single-aisle A320s, has about an additional fifty A320s and around the same number of Boeing 787 Dreamliners in order.
Every move since then has been to continue this strategy, not reverse it.
The bottom line is they have long since decided to let the international side of the operation wither & abandoned any real effort to fix it. They need to find an excuse to make it someone else's fault. The AUD / Wages / Unions / Legislation / Governments inaction / Government intervention - take your pick from the menu.
Anything else except managements deliberate and calculating strategy to move the capital to Asia.
Lets face it, one can always find a reason to justify a course of action you were always going to undertake. This is a conditioning process for the Australian public, condition them for the [engineered] inevitable failure. But it must become someone else's fault - that is crucial to avoid or proper public scrutiny