Popgun.
I see you are from/in Australia. Your point may very well be valid in an Australian aviation context. Of that I do not know a thing. Never been there, although I have understood from others that Australia is a great place overall.
What I wanted to state was that Qantas has a very good reputation in Europe - and here I can speak for Sweden in particular - for being safe and polite. These are "soft" values that I believe Qantas should be proud of and that goes back to how all Qantas pilots and staff have expressed themselves over the years.
So, fighting and turning amongst EACH OTHER when the blame lies elsewhere from the beginning is bad for business. I would like to emphazise that this reputation Qantas has at least in most European countries may very well be a result from paying properly to ensure keeping the best pilots within the company.
My belief is that a pilot who knows his/her income and knows he/she has a steady job will feel more secure. Job security means less stress to bring to the cockpit which leads to better decisions in the pointy end. Just take a look at those poor commuter codeshares in the US, they lost a planeload of people to stress and fatigue just a few years ago.
Yes, there are competition from low cost carriers. But, as I said, the first infatuation rush seem to have slowed down. Ryanair may never have crashed a plane but the sheer number of incidents are alarming. One night during stormy weather they had three fuel emergencies at the same airport. On at least two occasions flight crew have literally fallen off the plane - out of the door, down on the tarmac. I kid you not. One of these occasions was in Sweden - the FA was so stressed out she didn't notice the flight stairs were missing.
Now, people remember these things. And they remember that Qantas never made a fool of themselves - at least not in Europe. The trend is slowly turning around again. Sure, low costs are here to stay, for teenagers, students and people in crocs and sweatpants. But any reasonably intelligent person would not use low costs that I know of. As one person said to me "if it costs less it means they maintain less", comparing it to a well maintained car. It is a reasonable comparison, I think.
So bickering over who's earning the most and blaming senior pilots who helped build this great reputation is NOT the way to solve any airline crisis. Seeing low costs as a standard for future airline business is not necessarily the way to go either.
I would suggest you whiny people with or without "balls" take a step back and see the whole picture - what is the brand Qantas representing. Maybe not for you who are involved but for the general flying public. Fwiw I think Qantas reputation is a gold standard and I would hate to see it dwindle into some low cost wannabee just because pilots turn on eachother instead of coming together to fix the problem.
If the problem is bad management then just fix that. It is not that hard. Forcing out bad management has been done before. Just as long as you don't turn on each other. Caesar said something like "divide and conquer" and in this thread I see exactly how that is achieved. You dig out some questionable comparisons between Australian and US salaries and use that against each other when you could unite and do something to get rid of the management that is annoying in the first place.
The real questions are: who would you like to be in charge in the future? What would you like the future to look like? How will you achieve that?