Qantas are not going down the tubes anytime soon. The current management have totally mismanaged the airline over the past five years and have taken it into a capacity war of its own making! The outcome of this may be that the QSA gets repealed. This is actually a total bonus for the current board, nothing like getting rewarded for bad performance.
Qantas has plenty of cash, lots of assets, a brand that can be recovered and plently of loss making areas that can still be cut (Jetstar Vietnam, Japan, Hongkong etc). Also imagine the savings when they finally replace the 747's, 767's and some of the A380s with twinjets.
In the overall scheme of things a $250 million loss considering the money they have thrown away is actually better than I expected. I remember pre-restructure at British Airways they were posting losses in excess of 1 BILLION pounds along with a 4.5 billion pound pension hole.
Things at Qantas just are not that bad.