OK, permFO, I’ll give it a try.
It’s undeniable that the Airline Dispute was the coup de grace for many businesses that did go under in 89-90, but nothing is as simple as it seems. Many people in the tourist industry, particularly in North Queensland, blame ‘the pilots’ for their businesses’ demise, but a closer look will show that many were in serious trouble long before the Dispute, not because of anything the pilots did, but because of poor reading of the tourist market. All too many of the hoteliers had aimed for the top end of the market, providing four and five star accommodation to what turned out to be a majority back packer/economy tourist clientele. In the months before August 89, I heard of average occupancy rates of 30% and some as low as 10% in some of the resort hotels in Cairns (not to forget “the pilots’ good friend”, Keith Williams’ Hamilton Island Resort and other resorts in the Whitsundays).
Many proprietors and businessmen were on very slim operating margins, (like many are at the best of times, but 89 before the Dispute was much worse than usual for many if not most), and even had it lasted only a week or two, the Dispute would have undeniably been the straw that broke the camel’s back for those already hanging on by a thread.
So what would have happened if the Prime Monster had not quite literally thrown the law of the land out the window at the behest of his corpulent mate by ILLEGALY using the military and overseas aircraft and crews? If the RAAF, and later on, the overseas charter companies had not provided a vestige of an air service for those first four months, (for that’s all it was), a conclusion would have been reached within weeks if not days, and many of the businesses that suffered closure would have survived, even many of those already close to the brink.
Would that have meant that the pilots had ‘won’? Probably not. The pilots’ demand was not, as so many insist, a 30% pay rise – it was to be able to negotiate directly with their employers. The 29.47% pay rise was an ambit claim, and anyone with an even passing knowledge of the Australian industrial arbitration system would recognise that.
But the corpulent one didn’t want that. Mindful that deregulation was coming the very next year and rightly concerned because of the overall high AN staff costs (not just pilots) that would give a great advantage to any of the new start airlines sure to come into the Australian market post-deregulation, he’d been planning this ambush for too long to let the chance slip. It’s rightly been pointed out that the catalyst for the Dispute was the TN contract renegotiation and not AN’s, but TN negotiators had been instructed not to even open the file the AFAP presented to them one the first day of the ‘lock in’ at Lorne. They also admitted later in the Dispute that they had been told by senior TN management that “it was Ansett’s show” – that AN were calling the shots right from the start.
The whole idea of the contract negotiations being a ‘lock in’ affair was to force both parties into a quick result. The pilots may well have got their 29.47% pay rise, (although it’s highly doubtful), but they would have had to concede r quite substantial trade-offs, some of which were already in the document the AFAP put on the table – that remained unread by the TN negotiators.
There’s no way the AFAP can evade some of the blame for the events of 1989. Probably their biggest mistake was in not understanding that the people they were negotiating with came to the table in total bad faith, with no intention of reaching a negotiated settlement. Ansett had been planning the confrontation for some years and they had been advised by their highly paid advisors from overseas that, going on their experience in the US with Eastern and Continental, they could achieve total victory in a matter of days. I believe the figure they quoted was four days. And this might well have proven to be true had the companies managed to deliver the personal writs to each and every pilot.
To add to the confusion was the threat any catch up pay rise would have been to Hawke’s precious ‘Accord’. (And ‘catch up’ it was, for those who pillory the pilots conveniently forget that it wasn’t everyone whose pay had been tied to Hawke’s Accord over the years leading up to 1989, but just ‘the ordinary folks’. Those outside the Accord were giving themselves large, some would say enormous, pay rises – and before someone leaps on me for the pilots putting themselves above ‘the ordinary people’, let me remind them that, rightly or wrongly, the pilots’ salaries had for many years been tied to those of High Court Judges - who were not tied to the Accord.)
Yes, the Dispute put very many good, hard-working businessmen out of business and salary earners out of jobs, but lay the blame where it deserves to be laid, squarely at the feet of those who caused the Dispute to drag on so unnecessarily and for so long – Peter Abeles and Robert James Lee Hawke.
What so many forget in then heat of the argument is that only twelve months later, the ‘Accord’ was assigned to the scrapheap and ‘enterprise bargaining’ became the holy mantra of the Hawke Government. And enterprise bargaining is? –employees negotiating directly with their employers – exactly what the pilots were asking for, and for which they were called every name under the sun.
The other people who should take a major share of the blame are Australian journalists, both television and print. They allowed themselves to be used, and the very few who did seek out the truth behind the airline companies sometimes grossly inaccurate propaganda were silenced without a whimper from the majority, who toed their proprietors’ line, it seemed to me at least, with undisguised glee, happy to be a part of pulling down what they perceived to be undeserving ‘tall poppies’ or ‘fat cats’.