Senator GALLACHER: Mr Joyce, in your CEO's address to the AGM, you said:
We will protect and grow Australian jobs over the long term.
We will create sustainable value for you, our shareholders.
And we will make Australians proud.
Those were your closing remarks. Can you explain to this committee how your actions on the next day achieved those stated objectives?
Mr Joyce : I can. Let me explain to you my decision-making process on this. I felt that we had three alternatives available to us as a consequence of what was taking place with the industrial action.
I could have capitulated to demands that were being asked by three of the unions. My belief—my strong belief—was that those demands were going to endanger the future of the company. This is a company I feel so passionate about. It is a company that I want to make sure is going to survive for the future. The easiest thing I could have done was probably to capitulate, but I thought those demands would have put this company at risk—severely at risk.
Secondly, I could have decided that we continue the way we were going. We had already been in dispute for months. We had already been in a dispute that cost us, as I said at that AGM, $68 million. We had already had 70,000 passengers disrupted. We had already seen hundreds of flights cancelled. We had already seen our forward bookings absolutely collapsing. In every indicator that we had, people were not travelling with us; people had decided that Qantas was not going to be reliable. We had union leaders talking about a slow bake over a year. We had union leaders say, 'Do not book with Qantas over Christmas.' We had union leaders saying this could last into the middle or end of next year. So we knew we were losing our customers rapidly, and the $15 million a week that that was costing us meant we were at the verge of a huge crisis in Qantas. We were at a crisis in Qantas and we needed to do something.
The only alternative that was left to me was to bring this to a head, to say, 'We cannot last another year.' Therefore the decision was made that we would take, as a consequence of the union action, a lockout of the employees—and it was only the employees that were taking the action and covered by those agreements. We had made it very clear to the rest of the employees that we were going to continue to pay their salaries. We felt that was the only viable way that we could get an agreement that was not going to endanger the future survival of the company.