FYSTI:
This whole event has been a massive
PR exercise in order to provide a plausible justification for an outcome that they had already pre-determined. The use of "black box" financial accounting in order to justify why Qantas International must be reduced to a rump.
Barely mentioned anywhere in the MSN is any of the Asian Jetstar franchises and their financial performance.
You can go to Crikey and see the
PR spinners at work in the comments section of Plane Talking, continuously dragging the arguments back to the alleged inefficiencies of the frontline employees, rather than the question the enormous drain from running a dozen or so subsidiaries in multiple jurisdictions management bloat and poor decision making.
Make no mistake, we are now down the pointy end of the extortion, where there will be a moment of genuine crises (entirely engineered), and a political choice for the government and the new Senate. The object of all this is to maximise the pain and pressure on the Senate to accede to a commercial entities wish. If that wish is granted, immense wealth will be transferred to a small coterie of connected individuals, and fc#k the rest.
This is entirely a manufactured political crisis aimed at a specific end.
Never was a truer word spoken - and this business model was taken direct from the Russian Kleptocracy.
To wit: "It's broken", "its worthless!", "Government cannot do anything right"..and then whole chunks of publicly owned infrastructure and public goods are quietly sold to a private cartel at a fraction of their value. Qantas has gone by a slightly different route - from government ownership to public company and now to become a "private" entity.
Would it surprise anyone to know that the Port Augusta to Darwin rail line was sold to the U.S. Carlyle group for peppercorns? Is it a surprise that Tony ******* Abbot wants to sell medibank private, Australia Post and anything else he can parcel up? This is the strategy kings used to finance their wars - the sale of government monoplolies and the fortunes and the huge country estates of some of the English upper class were bult on such activities. The saddets part is that the Labor Party is composed to a man of equally corrupt individuals who will do exactly the same. Someone remind me, how many former politicians does James Packer employ? How about the Macquarie group?
To put it another way anything Government owned that is potentially profitable is a takeover target.