I've been told by a Q skipper that they are carrying the equivalent of roughly 500 surplus pilots with the reduction in flying and retired aircraft.?
Nope. Not that many. Maybe 250. 300 max. Of that we have a couple of hundred on LWOP. That's based on the known forecasts. End of this month may change the numbers and perhaps the 500 may well be right.
If so, is it because Q cant afford to make them redundant or some other left field reason?
Given its last on, first off, redundancy is relatively cheap. The retraining costs on the other hand..... As one of our managers said not so long ago, our total crew numbers are close to right- or a manageable surplus at least. The issue we have is that we have bodies in the wrong places and wrong ranks. Not enough S/Os on the dugong, too many F/Os on the 767, etc.
Not sure there's ever been an airline that cut back its way to profitability so I can't see that further cuts is going to do anything significant.