QANTAS - WHERE TO NOW?
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Toffee coated turd
Give me a break, that add is abysmal. Maybe attach the year 2000 to it and it would be believable, but that is NOT Qantas 2012.
And what's doing with the lame music in the commercial? Is that what Elaine had playing as his wedding waltz, some Bronski Beat?
Definitely a case of the toffee coated turd. The commercial makes the place look pristine and sweet, but lick the top layer off and you have ****e underneath!
And what's doing with the lame music in the commercial? Is that what Elaine had playing as his wedding waltz, some Bronski Beat?
Definitely a case of the toffee coated turd. The commercial makes the place look pristine and sweet, but lick the top layer off and you have ****e underneath!
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Looks like another reporter, just got his membership to the chairman's lounge well done Cameron.
Fasten your seatbelts
BY: CAMERON STEWART From: The Australian May 12, 2012 12:00AM
Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian
Fasten your seatbelts
BY: CAMERON STEWART From: The Australian May 12, 2012 12:00AM
Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian
Last edited by MR WOBBLES; 12th May 2012 at 04:01.
Arrrggh. I thought I worked for an airline, not a 'brand' 
Last edited by maggot; 12th May 2012 at 04:18.
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IN a bar high above Hong Kong harbour, Alan Joyce cradles a vodka and tonic as if it were an old friend.
The Qantas chief has just flown in from New York and this is the last stop of a grinding global roadshow, spruiking the national carrier to the world. He should be in a jetlag haze, but instead Joyce is in the mood for some fun. His blue eyes dance as he leans forward and tells a tale which almost defies belief.
"I remember when people were stealing Jetstar's seatbelts," he says. "Apparently they were being worn by some in the community as a proper belt and they had become quite a fashion statement." The Irishman dissolves into laughter as he conjures up the mental picture of a Jetstar fashionista. He warms to the theme and talks about the lifejackets which have also been disappearing on flights to water-playgrounds such as Hamilton Island. Then he tells a tale about how the lightest fingers on an aircraft can be those adorned with the biggest diamonds. First and business class passengers, he says, have recently been slipping Marc Newson-designed teaspoons into their pockets at an alarming rate. The Great Teaspoon Robbery has cost Qantas more than $50,000.
Joyce revels in these tales of the bizarre. Like many of his countrymen, he loves a good story and he tells it well. His thick brogue flies at such a speed he can be hard to follow. The only respite is when he laughs or sips his drink. He is still talking more than two hours later, as night falls over Hong Kong harbour and a million lights twinkle across the city.
The longer we speak, the harder it is to reconcile this Alan Joyce with the tightly coiled CEO of six months earlier who plucked his planes from the sky, leaving a nation agog, and who now wields the axe over more than 1000 workers as his airline restructures to survive. "Me personally, I'm feeling great, no issues," he says, as if it is a strange question to be asked. "And it's really good to focus on something other than industrial relations."
JOYCE'S stunning decision last October to ground the entire Qantas fleet, disrupting the travel plans of some 100,000 people, propelled this gay mathematician from the wrong side of Dublin to instant national fame or infamy, depending on your perspective. Since then, Joyce has been directing in Napoleonic detail a fierce behind-the-scenes campaign to repair the damage to the Qantas brand; to stitch the flying kangaroo back together piece by piece. Having gambled his career, his reputation and his airline, Joyce knows this is a challenge he cannot afford to lose. "Most management decisions are gut feelings," he says about the quest to win back those disaffected Qantas customers. "You are trying to do enough to ensure you are regaining people's trust and loyalty ... to apologise and do it in a sufficient way that isn't an insult, but in a way that also isn't way over the top because you are running a business."
In truth, Joyce's rescue mission began on the day of the grounding on October 29. Despite it being a defining moment in his life, he can't pinpoint the exact moment when he decided to take the drastic action. He knows that when he went to bed in his apartment at The Rocks in Sydney on the evening of Friday, October 28 last year, he was thinking that Qantas' battle with the unions, which had been orchestrating rolling stoppages against the airline for months - causing havoc to its schedules - had gotten out of hand. Earlier that day he had attended a fiery annual general meeting that saw many shareholders leave in disgust after Joyce was granted a $2 million increase in his salary package. He maintains that as he turned out the light that night he had not decided what course to take, although contingency plans - including grounding the fleet - had been canvassed weeks before.
He slept soundly and the next morning, somewhere en route to his office from his home, he resolved to propose the radical plan to his team. "I knew what my gut feeling was, but I also knew my mind could be changed if my advisers said, 'Alan, that's a crazy decision, you shouldn't be doing it.'" He met with around 10 of his key executives that morning and when each of them backed his proposal he contacted the Qantas board, which also supported him unanimously.
Joyce held his memorable granite-jaw press conference at 5pm that afternoon to announce the grounding and, less than two hours later, he went into damage control. "I said, 'Who are our key stakeholders?'" he says. "I rang the top five or six CEOs, our really important customers, and gave them a heads up about what was happening and why." These included BHP, Rio Tinto and Leighton Holdings. Joyce says they were supportive, but outside the nation's boardrooms the public mood was poisonous as thousands of stranded passengers missed family holidays, reunions, weddings and funerals.
Almost overnight Joyce morphed into a caricature that bore little resemblance to the real man. The union movement portrayed him as a heartless, union-busting thug, gambling the future of an Aussie icon for profit. Fellow CEOs saw Joyce as the courageous corporate hero, drawing a line in the sand on behalf of employers in the face of union blackmail. For the next two months, Joyce and his trusted spokesperson, Olivia Wirth, had bodyguards follow them everywhere and stake out venues before they arrived in response to written death threats that had been sent to their homes.
The intense personal focus coupled with the threats was an uncomfortable experience for Joyce, partly because he is relatively private - although not reclusive - about his sexuality. Joyce lives with his partner of 14 years, a New Zealand man whom he does not want named. "I have been sensitive because of the aggression that was out there [after the grounding]," says Joyce. "I don't want him brought into that. I don't think he deserves it." He has at times also been wary about how some people in the corporate arena might react to his sexuality and for that reason he has neither hidden it nor promoted it. Joyce says his partner was an important source of advice and comfort throughout the dispute. "We talked about everything, I can trust him completely and he doesn't talk to anyone else about what I tell him."
In the days immediately following the grounding Joyce was all over the media, having followed Wirth's advice to take every opportunity to explain his actions. Privately, however, he was also holding a series of emergency meetings within Qantas to nut out a strategy of recovery for the national carrier, which some feared had been irrevocably tarnished. "We were asking ourselves in those meetings, 'What can we do to get our brand loyalty back,'" recalls Joyce. "I said, 'What's the [common] sense check on this? Do we offer a free domestic flight to these people, a free international flight, what is right?'"
Meanwhile, he closely monitored public feeling, wandering over to the Qantas customer complaints department and reading the incoming emails. Eventually, Joyce settled on a $29 million package of sweeteners such as free flights and full refunds for affected passengers, as well as a raft of frequent flyer bonuses and full-page apologies in newspapers.
The grounding was a tactical triumph for Joyce because it forced Fair Work Australia to terminate industrial action, allowing Qantas to resume flying without the threat of rolling strikes. But the biggest shock for Joyce and his team was not the response of his customers but the ferocity of the Government, with Prime Minister Julia Gillard accusing Qantas of acting in "an extreme and irresponsible way". A furious Joyce dispatched Wirth to Canberra for the second time in three days to roam the corridors of Parliament and argue Qantas' case. It was, she says, a "bloody awful" experience, although several ministers were more sympathetic privately about Joyce's decision than they felt they could be in public.
Some accepted the logic of Joyce's argument that industrial action in the preceding months had cost Qantas $68 million (although this figure is disputed by the unions). Some ministers could also see that industrial action had robbed the airline of any certainty in its schedules, sparking an exodus to Virgin and other carriers. Some also accepted that with Qantas' international arm losing some $200 million a year, Joyce had little choice but to make unpleasant cost cuts to the business in order to secure the airline's future. But many did not accept that this justified Joyce's decision to ground the airline. Ironically, it was the government that inadvertently helped foster some sympathy for Joyce days later when it overreached in its attacks on him at a Senate Committee. Labor Senator Doug Cameron famously accused Joyce of being "a bit like Richard Nixon", to which the Irishman quipped: "You're a bit like a McCarthy trial."
Some felt the very personal targeting of Joyce had gone too far. Among the messages of support he received was a phone call from British Airways chief Willie Walsh, a fellow Irishman who'd once worked with Joyce at the Irish carrier Aer Lingus. "Willie said he saw me on Sky [TV] and he had his own union problems so we exchanged stories," recalls Joyce. "I joked to him, 'Why do we run full service legacy carriers, because it's much easier running low-cost carriers.' He said, 'Because you can make a difference.' I think that was a good line."
After his Senate hearing in Canberra, Joyce was boarding his flight home on a Qantas Dash 8 aircraft when another passenger came up to him. Rather than take a swing, the man shook his hand and told him he ran a small construction company with only 35 employees and he was having union problems. "He told me he was going to walk into his next union meeting with a T-shirt which said, 'We fly Qantas'," says Joyce. The man insisted on getting his photo taken with the CEO so he could hand out copies to his employees. At a Business Council of Australia dinner attended by Gillard in Sydney barely two weeks after the grounding, business leaders broke into spontaneous applause when it was announced that Joyce was in attendance.
Union leaders maintain that being a hero to the corporate sector means nothing in the real world. They say Joyce has a long way to go before he repairs what they argue was a breach of faith with ordinary Australians who once loved Qantas. "It is our view that his actions have damaged the Qantas brand reasonably significantly," says Richard Woodward, a Qantas pilot and vice-president of the Australian & International Pilots Association. "Customers are still not happy and his style is such that he is not bringing his staff with him during this tumultuous period of change. Now it seems that Joyce's PR machine is trying to soften his image."
Joyce is also clearly on the nose with many Qantas staff, who fear for their futures under his rationalisation of the airline. One Qantas pilot, who asked not to be named, says: "Joyce has little respect among the staff and doesn't seem to comprehend that if he worked with the staff instead of against them, they would actually become engaged and more productive. The board had the choice of him or [Virgin Australia chief John] Borghetti. Look at the direction that both airlines are now heading and it's pretty obvious which airline got the better deal."
JOYCE'S rags-to-riches life story is a remarkable tale yet it is hardly the sort of background that might foster a right-wing hero. "It has been weird," says Joyce, who puzzles at being portrayed by some as a hardline neocon. "I've always voted Labor my entire life. My background is working class, I come from a very working-class suburb in Dublin called Tallaght and my grandfather was heavily involved in the union movement. I think unions have a role to play in society and they can be a force for good, but sometimes they can be a force for not so good. At the end of the day you have to stand up to bullies and what depresses me badly is that we have union leaders who took a deliberate campaign to hurt the brand ... it was so outrageous and destructive."
The more he talks about the airline unions, the more heated and animated Joyce becomes. Those who know him best say he is a genuinely nice bloke but that there is a fire deep within him which flares wildly in a confrontation. "He's a street-fighter," says one insider.
Joyce's determination was a birthmark. He describes himself as a "fiery kid" with a hatred of bullies and an obsessive love of mathematics. He realised he was gay from his late teens, but says that his family had already guessed by the time he confided in them. "My parents were fantastic and my [three] brothers were like, 'What's the big deal, we already knew'."
He obtained a master's degree in mathematics at Trinity College Dublin and only applied for a job at Aer Lingus because it involved building mathematical models. "Once I was there I just fell in love with the aviation industry," he says. He left Ireland in 1996 to join Ansett Australia, where he caught the attention of former British Airways chief Sir Rod Eddington. "He was incredibly thorough, hard-working and had a terrific head for strategic networks and fleet details," says Eddington, who was so impressed that he called Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon to tell him about the Irish mathematics wiz. When Dixon met with Joyce in 2000, the Irishman made such an impact that Dixon offered him a job before their meeting was finished.
Dixon reveals that Qantas almost lost Joyce in around 2005 when he contemplated moving back to Europe after setting up Qantas' low-cost carrier, Jetstar. "Alan came up to me one day and said, 'I have a great offer from a European carrier to start up a low-cost carrier with them. It is a good opportunity for me to be closer to my family and I'm going to take it,'?" recalls Dixon. Dixon gave him a sealed letter and told him to open it on the plane to Europe. The letter offered Joyce a big pay rise and promised him a golden future at Qantas. "He [Joyce] went to see his family in Dublin and his father read my letter," says Dixon. "His father said, 'Alan, you get back on that plane and tell them you are staying [with Qantas]." Joyce surpassed even Dixon's expectations and in late 2008 he succeeded him as CEO of Qantas. Dixon is full of praise for Joyce and says he had no choice but to ground the airline in order to confront the unions.
Since taking the helm, Joyce's reign at Qantas has at times appeared to have been cursed by the gods. Under his watch the airline has had to navigate the fallout from cyclones and floods in Queensland, earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand, volcanic ash from Chile, the European economic crisis and the near-disaster of an engine explosion on a new Airbus A380, which saw the temporary grounding of that fleet.
Then, in March last year, the gods delivered Joyce a far more personal jolt. The illness of one of his senior executives persuaded Joyce that his management team should have mandatory health checks - a practice that had been discontinued five years earlier due to cost-cutting. "I said I'd be the first one to do it, so I went in and did the health check and the doctor noticed my PSA [a protein that can indicate prostate cancer] was high," he recalls. Joyce had a biopsy and two days later was told that he had prostate cancer. He was stunned. He was not yet 45 years of age. His partner accompanied him to the doctor to discuss the options. "[The doctor] explained to me what the implications were, what my chances were. He explained it was a very aggressive form of cancer and he recommended taking the prostate out."
As always, Joyce did the maths, this time on his own life. He went home and surfed the net for information, and "it was a no-brainer". The operation went well and he is now cancer-free, but Joyce admits that grounding Qantas six months later was hardly consistent with his doctor's advice to avoid unnecessary stress. "I love my job and I have to do what's needed," he says. "You can either live life and do all that you need or you can go into a room and lock your windows and die a safe death. I think you have to go out there and live life."
The barbs that most hurt Joyce in the months after the grounding were those that targeted his Irish heritage. Did he think some of the criticism was racist? He ponders the question carefully. "Some of the commentary out there I wouldn't have been happy with," he says. "I felt [MP] Bob Katter's commentary was very racist and I insisted on a meeting with him where I told him, 'I took offence to what you said about foreigners coming in and running these companies'." Katter recalls a fiery exchange with Joyce in his Parliament House office. "It wasn't pleasant; we had a frank exchange of views," he says. "I don't think we agreed on anything but I did admire him fronting up to his critics. I wasn't mocking the Irish but there is a breed of Irish CEOs that have a very ruthless attitude."
Says Joyce, a dual citizen: "I think being Irish is one of the best nationalities you could have but I am also Australian and the fact that this is not recognised is very disappointing. Australia is built on immigration." Yet Joyce does not agree with former Telstra boss Sol Trujillo, a US businessman of Mexican heritage who once described Australia as racist and said living here was "like stepping back in time".
"I don't think Sol was right," says Joyce. "There is a small minority of Australians that have a problem but the vast majority are unbelievably supportive." Even so, the fact that an Irishman is piloting an iconic Australian brand through the most turbulent period in its history has not made it easier for him.
He knows there is a disconnect between the way Qantas is perceived by many people and the reality of its existence in a cut-throat, deregulated market. "There's a lot of people who think Qantas is still in some way state-owned, has a public service obligation and who don't know it is a listed company. There is a view that it can never disappear but history has told us that amazing brands like Pan Am and TWA have all disappeared - there is no right to existence and we have to fight for our survival."
Joyce says that some unions still believe a "$1 profit" is enough for Qantas even though it is no longer government-owned. Others say it is hypocritical for Joyce to expect people to judge Qantas as nothing more than a cold, hard business when the airline shamelessly exploits its position as the national carrier with its nationalistic, heart-tugging "I Still Call Australia Home" campaign.
"You can't be just another company if you claim to be the Spirit of Australia," says Michael Newman, head of agency Brand Newman and former creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi, who has worked on a number of airline accounts. "Spirit is an aura around the brand that can be felt and can be missed. Apple has an aura; Samsung has a price."
Newman believes Joyce needs to be less clinical and to show more heart in the way he is seeking to reposition Qantas. "The pride Australians used to feel in the Qantas brand forgave a lot over the years and kept fares at a premium mark-up," says Newman. "I suspect current management doesn't put a high value on emotion. But it's emotional values that have to be genuinely embraced if the brand is to flourish long-term."
BY Christmas last year, two months after the grounding, Joyce was battle-weary from his fight with the unions, the fallout from the grounding and his recuperation from cancer. At that point, the damage to Qantas from the crisis - which would later be costed at $194 million - was still raw and palpable. In November, domestic passenger numbers had slumped by 11.3 per cent from the previous November while international numbers were down 3.6 per cent. Qantas was also on the nose in cyberspace, making a number of tactical errors in the Twittersphere.
Joyce was under fierce attack for the appalling timing of his pay rise: at the AGM, on the day before he grounded the airline, he received bonuses and shares that effectively bumped his total salary package by $2 million to $5 million. Joyce maintains he could not avoid the timing and protests that it has been misreported as a $2 million rise in his take-home pay. "I knew we were going to get hammered on it but we couldn't do anything about it."
An exhausted Joyce took three weeks off over Christmas and hosted his family who were visiting from Ireland. He read a biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs and a "maths thriller" that explored a 500-year quest to solve a famous mathematic theory. When Joyce returned to work, in mid January, the news for Qantas had brightened. Confidential research commissioned by Joyce showed that its highly valued corporate clients were flying with Qantas with the same frequency as they had before the industrial crisis.
In March, veteran pollster Rod Cameron, who is now working as a consultant to Qantas, assessed all the available research and wrote a confidential report titled The Qantas Brand and the 2011 Grounding, which he delivered directly to Joyce. It was music to the Irishman's ears. "The impact of the grounding was less than the media hype suggested," the report concluded. "[It] caused shock waves but it was a short, sharp shock.
"What brand damage was evident was primarily among the very infrequent, fare-conscious flyers who tend to side with 'battlers' who they saw as being the unions in the dispute. There were modest declines in brand rating among the larger mums and dads segment (three to four times a year flyers) but these returned quickly to pre-grounding levels and the key premium flyer market (regular flyers, business and corporate market) actually judged Qantas positively during the dispute." Not everyone agrees that the Qantas brand has fully recovered. Its main competitor, Virgin Australia, provided me with its own independent research which argues that since the grounding Virgin has overtaken Qantas in terms of business customer satisfaction. A Virgin spokesperson claims Virgin is now "well on our way to becoming the airline of choice in Australia".
Joyce is now immersed in the unpopular process of implementing hundreds of job cuts and rationalising Qantas maintenance in Australia to address the loss-making international arm of the business (as opposed to the group's highly profitable domestic operation and Jetstar). He says cutting jobs is the worst thing he has had to do as a CEO - more so than the grounding. He knows how unpopular it makes him with staff, although he says there are many employees who understand the need for Qantas to remain competitive.
While Joyce is still viewed by many Qantas workers and by the unions as a wrecker, he firmly believes that time will prove him right. Years from now, he says, Qantas will be stronger for the painful remedies he is currently implementing. Despite this, he knows his own reputation is still a work in progress in the broader community. He recently agreed to a small Q&A profile in the men's fashion magazine GQ because it had a broader non-business audience and he wanted to get his message out to "certain elements of the public out there who didn't get it and didn't understand". Joyce also agreed to be interviewed for this article and flew me from Melbourne to Hong Kong to watch him launch a new airline, Jetstar Hong Kong.
As we share a drink in the Hong Kong bar, Joyce's chipper mood reflects his belief that the biggest gamble of his life has paid off. "All of the indicators are that the brand has recovered to where it was before the industrial action," he says.
A DAY earlier, as my Qantas 747 jumbo rolled backwards from its gate at Melbourne airport bound for Hong Kong, the pilot announced it was the last time a Qantas jumbo jet would fly out of Melbourne. The 747 has been superseded by the new Airbus A380s and, on the Hong Kong route, by the smaller Airbus A330s. Joyce has overseen these changes.
I look out the window to see that the airport's fire trucks have lined up along the runway, spraying our plane with water as a farewell gesture as we pass. The flight attendant sitting nearby, a 15-year veteran of the 747 service from Melbourne, stares out at the waving firemen. "That's very nice of them," he says, his lips trembling with emotion. By the time we are rolling down the runway, tears are rolling down his cheeks. As the plane lifts off, he turns to a colleague across the aisle, wipes his eyes and says: "That's it then, the last one ever."
It's a small moment but it says a lot about the precious egg that Joyce holds in his hand. Many Australians can't help but invest emotion into the debate over Qantas. Joyce's challenge is to emerge from these clouds on the right side of history.
The Qantas chief has just flown in from New York and this is the last stop of a grinding global roadshow, spruiking the national carrier to the world. He should be in a jetlag haze, but instead Joyce is in the mood for some fun. His blue eyes dance as he leans forward and tells a tale which almost defies belief.
"I remember when people were stealing Jetstar's seatbelts," he says. "Apparently they were being worn by some in the community as a proper belt and they had become quite a fashion statement." The Irishman dissolves into laughter as he conjures up the mental picture of a Jetstar fashionista. He warms to the theme and talks about the lifejackets which have also been disappearing on flights to water-playgrounds such as Hamilton Island. Then he tells a tale about how the lightest fingers on an aircraft can be those adorned with the biggest diamonds. First and business class passengers, he says, have recently been slipping Marc Newson-designed teaspoons into their pockets at an alarming rate. The Great Teaspoon Robbery has cost Qantas more than $50,000.
Joyce revels in these tales of the bizarre. Like many of his countrymen, he loves a good story and he tells it well. His thick brogue flies at such a speed he can be hard to follow. The only respite is when he laughs or sips his drink. He is still talking more than two hours later, as night falls over Hong Kong harbour and a million lights twinkle across the city.
The longer we speak, the harder it is to reconcile this Alan Joyce with the tightly coiled CEO of six months earlier who plucked his planes from the sky, leaving a nation agog, and who now wields the axe over more than 1000 workers as his airline restructures to survive. "Me personally, I'm feeling great, no issues," he says, as if it is a strange question to be asked. "And it's really good to focus on something other than industrial relations."
JOYCE'S stunning decision last October to ground the entire Qantas fleet, disrupting the travel plans of some 100,000 people, propelled this gay mathematician from the wrong side of Dublin to instant national fame or infamy, depending on your perspective. Since then, Joyce has been directing in Napoleonic detail a fierce behind-the-scenes campaign to repair the damage to the Qantas brand; to stitch the flying kangaroo back together piece by piece. Having gambled his career, his reputation and his airline, Joyce knows this is a challenge he cannot afford to lose. "Most management decisions are gut feelings," he says about the quest to win back those disaffected Qantas customers. "You are trying to do enough to ensure you are regaining people's trust and loyalty ... to apologise and do it in a sufficient way that isn't an insult, but in a way that also isn't way over the top because you are running a business."
In truth, Joyce's rescue mission began on the day of the grounding on October 29. Despite it being a defining moment in his life, he can't pinpoint the exact moment when he decided to take the drastic action. He knows that when he went to bed in his apartment at The Rocks in Sydney on the evening of Friday, October 28 last year, he was thinking that Qantas' battle with the unions, which had been orchestrating rolling stoppages against the airline for months - causing havoc to its schedules - had gotten out of hand. Earlier that day he had attended a fiery annual general meeting that saw many shareholders leave in disgust after Joyce was granted a $2 million increase in his salary package. He maintains that as he turned out the light that night he had not decided what course to take, although contingency plans - including grounding the fleet - had been canvassed weeks before.
He slept soundly and the next morning, somewhere en route to his office from his home, he resolved to propose the radical plan to his team. "I knew what my gut feeling was, but I also knew my mind could be changed if my advisers said, 'Alan, that's a crazy decision, you shouldn't be doing it.'" He met with around 10 of his key executives that morning and when each of them backed his proposal he contacted the Qantas board, which also supported him unanimously.
Joyce held his memorable granite-jaw press conference at 5pm that afternoon to announce the grounding and, less than two hours later, he went into damage control. "I said, 'Who are our key stakeholders?'" he says. "I rang the top five or six CEOs, our really important customers, and gave them a heads up about what was happening and why." These included BHP, Rio Tinto and Leighton Holdings. Joyce says they were supportive, but outside the nation's boardrooms the public mood was poisonous as thousands of stranded passengers missed family holidays, reunions, weddings and funerals.
Almost overnight Joyce morphed into a caricature that bore little resemblance to the real man. The union movement portrayed him as a heartless, union-busting thug, gambling the future of an Aussie icon for profit. Fellow CEOs saw Joyce as the courageous corporate hero, drawing a line in the sand on behalf of employers in the face of union blackmail. For the next two months, Joyce and his trusted spokesperson, Olivia Wirth, had bodyguards follow them everywhere and stake out venues before they arrived in response to written death threats that had been sent to their homes.
The intense personal focus coupled with the threats was an uncomfortable experience for Joyce, partly because he is relatively private - although not reclusive - about his sexuality. Joyce lives with his partner of 14 years, a New Zealand man whom he does not want named. "I have been sensitive because of the aggression that was out there [after the grounding]," says Joyce. "I don't want him brought into that. I don't think he deserves it." He has at times also been wary about how some people in the corporate arena might react to his sexuality and for that reason he has neither hidden it nor promoted it. Joyce says his partner was an important source of advice and comfort throughout the dispute. "We talked about everything, I can trust him completely and he doesn't talk to anyone else about what I tell him."
In the days immediately following the grounding Joyce was all over the media, having followed Wirth's advice to take every opportunity to explain his actions. Privately, however, he was also holding a series of emergency meetings within Qantas to nut out a strategy of recovery for the national carrier, which some feared had been irrevocably tarnished. "We were asking ourselves in those meetings, 'What can we do to get our brand loyalty back,'" recalls Joyce. "I said, 'What's the [common] sense check on this? Do we offer a free domestic flight to these people, a free international flight, what is right?'"
Meanwhile, he closely monitored public feeling, wandering over to the Qantas customer complaints department and reading the incoming emails. Eventually, Joyce settled on a $29 million package of sweeteners such as free flights and full refunds for affected passengers, as well as a raft of frequent flyer bonuses and full-page apologies in newspapers.
The grounding was a tactical triumph for Joyce because it forced Fair Work Australia to terminate industrial action, allowing Qantas to resume flying without the threat of rolling strikes. But the biggest shock for Joyce and his team was not the response of his customers but the ferocity of the Government, with Prime Minister Julia Gillard accusing Qantas of acting in "an extreme and irresponsible way". A furious Joyce dispatched Wirth to Canberra for the second time in three days to roam the corridors of Parliament and argue Qantas' case. It was, she says, a "bloody awful" experience, although several ministers were more sympathetic privately about Joyce's decision than they felt they could be in public.
Some accepted the logic of Joyce's argument that industrial action in the preceding months had cost Qantas $68 million (although this figure is disputed by the unions). Some ministers could also see that industrial action had robbed the airline of any certainty in its schedules, sparking an exodus to Virgin and other carriers. Some also accepted that with Qantas' international arm losing some $200 million a year, Joyce had little choice but to make unpleasant cost cuts to the business in order to secure the airline's future. But many did not accept that this justified Joyce's decision to ground the airline. Ironically, it was the government that inadvertently helped foster some sympathy for Joyce days later when it overreached in its attacks on him at a Senate Committee. Labor Senator Doug Cameron famously accused Joyce of being "a bit like Richard Nixon", to which the Irishman quipped: "You're a bit like a McCarthy trial."
Some felt the very personal targeting of Joyce had gone too far. Among the messages of support he received was a phone call from British Airways chief Willie Walsh, a fellow Irishman who'd once worked with Joyce at the Irish carrier Aer Lingus. "Willie said he saw me on Sky [TV] and he had his own union problems so we exchanged stories," recalls Joyce. "I joked to him, 'Why do we run full service legacy carriers, because it's much easier running low-cost carriers.' He said, 'Because you can make a difference.' I think that was a good line."
After his Senate hearing in Canberra, Joyce was boarding his flight home on a Qantas Dash 8 aircraft when another passenger came up to him. Rather than take a swing, the man shook his hand and told him he ran a small construction company with only 35 employees and he was having union problems. "He told me he was going to walk into his next union meeting with a T-shirt which said, 'We fly Qantas'," says Joyce. The man insisted on getting his photo taken with the CEO so he could hand out copies to his employees. At a Business Council of Australia dinner attended by Gillard in Sydney barely two weeks after the grounding, business leaders broke into spontaneous applause when it was announced that Joyce was in attendance.
Union leaders maintain that being a hero to the corporate sector means nothing in the real world. They say Joyce has a long way to go before he repairs what they argue was a breach of faith with ordinary Australians who once loved Qantas. "It is our view that his actions have damaged the Qantas brand reasonably significantly," says Richard Woodward, a Qantas pilot and vice-president of the Australian & International Pilots Association. "Customers are still not happy and his style is such that he is not bringing his staff with him during this tumultuous period of change. Now it seems that Joyce's PR machine is trying to soften his image."
Joyce is also clearly on the nose with many Qantas staff, who fear for their futures under his rationalisation of the airline. One Qantas pilot, who asked not to be named, says: "Joyce has little respect among the staff and doesn't seem to comprehend that if he worked with the staff instead of against them, they would actually become engaged and more productive. The board had the choice of him or [Virgin Australia chief John] Borghetti. Look at the direction that both airlines are now heading and it's pretty obvious which airline got the better deal."
JOYCE'S rags-to-riches life story is a remarkable tale yet it is hardly the sort of background that might foster a right-wing hero. "It has been weird," says Joyce, who puzzles at being portrayed by some as a hardline neocon. "I've always voted Labor my entire life. My background is working class, I come from a very working-class suburb in Dublin called Tallaght and my grandfather was heavily involved in the union movement. I think unions have a role to play in society and they can be a force for good, but sometimes they can be a force for not so good. At the end of the day you have to stand up to bullies and what depresses me badly is that we have union leaders who took a deliberate campaign to hurt the brand ... it was so outrageous and destructive."
The more he talks about the airline unions, the more heated and animated Joyce becomes. Those who know him best say he is a genuinely nice bloke but that there is a fire deep within him which flares wildly in a confrontation. "He's a street-fighter," says one insider.
Joyce's determination was a birthmark. He describes himself as a "fiery kid" with a hatred of bullies and an obsessive love of mathematics. He realised he was gay from his late teens, but says that his family had already guessed by the time he confided in them. "My parents were fantastic and my [three] brothers were like, 'What's the big deal, we already knew'."
He obtained a master's degree in mathematics at Trinity College Dublin and only applied for a job at Aer Lingus because it involved building mathematical models. "Once I was there I just fell in love with the aviation industry," he says. He left Ireland in 1996 to join Ansett Australia, where he caught the attention of former British Airways chief Sir Rod Eddington. "He was incredibly thorough, hard-working and had a terrific head for strategic networks and fleet details," says Eddington, who was so impressed that he called Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon to tell him about the Irish mathematics wiz. When Dixon met with Joyce in 2000, the Irishman made such an impact that Dixon offered him a job before their meeting was finished.
Dixon reveals that Qantas almost lost Joyce in around 2005 when he contemplated moving back to Europe after setting up Qantas' low-cost carrier, Jetstar. "Alan came up to me one day and said, 'I have a great offer from a European carrier to start up a low-cost carrier with them. It is a good opportunity for me to be closer to my family and I'm going to take it,'?" recalls Dixon. Dixon gave him a sealed letter and told him to open it on the plane to Europe. The letter offered Joyce a big pay rise and promised him a golden future at Qantas. "He [Joyce] went to see his family in Dublin and his father read my letter," says Dixon. "His father said, 'Alan, you get back on that plane and tell them you are staying [with Qantas]." Joyce surpassed even Dixon's expectations and in late 2008 he succeeded him as CEO of Qantas. Dixon is full of praise for Joyce and says he had no choice but to ground the airline in order to confront the unions.
Since taking the helm, Joyce's reign at Qantas has at times appeared to have been cursed by the gods. Under his watch the airline has had to navigate the fallout from cyclones and floods in Queensland, earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand, volcanic ash from Chile, the European economic crisis and the near-disaster of an engine explosion on a new Airbus A380, which saw the temporary grounding of that fleet.
Then, in March last year, the gods delivered Joyce a far more personal jolt. The illness of one of his senior executives persuaded Joyce that his management team should have mandatory health checks - a practice that had been discontinued five years earlier due to cost-cutting. "I said I'd be the first one to do it, so I went in and did the health check and the doctor noticed my PSA [a protein that can indicate prostate cancer] was high," he recalls. Joyce had a biopsy and two days later was told that he had prostate cancer. He was stunned. He was not yet 45 years of age. His partner accompanied him to the doctor to discuss the options. "[The doctor] explained to me what the implications were, what my chances were. He explained it was a very aggressive form of cancer and he recommended taking the prostate out."
As always, Joyce did the maths, this time on his own life. He went home and surfed the net for information, and "it was a no-brainer". The operation went well and he is now cancer-free, but Joyce admits that grounding Qantas six months later was hardly consistent with his doctor's advice to avoid unnecessary stress. "I love my job and I have to do what's needed," he says. "You can either live life and do all that you need or you can go into a room and lock your windows and die a safe death. I think you have to go out there and live life."
The barbs that most hurt Joyce in the months after the grounding were those that targeted his Irish heritage. Did he think some of the criticism was racist? He ponders the question carefully. "Some of the commentary out there I wouldn't have been happy with," he says. "I felt [MP] Bob Katter's commentary was very racist and I insisted on a meeting with him where I told him, 'I took offence to what you said about foreigners coming in and running these companies'." Katter recalls a fiery exchange with Joyce in his Parliament House office. "It wasn't pleasant; we had a frank exchange of views," he says. "I don't think we agreed on anything but I did admire him fronting up to his critics. I wasn't mocking the Irish but there is a breed of Irish CEOs that have a very ruthless attitude."
Says Joyce, a dual citizen: "I think being Irish is one of the best nationalities you could have but I am also Australian and the fact that this is not recognised is very disappointing. Australia is built on immigration." Yet Joyce does not agree with former Telstra boss Sol Trujillo, a US businessman of Mexican heritage who once described Australia as racist and said living here was "like stepping back in time".
"I don't think Sol was right," says Joyce. "There is a small minority of Australians that have a problem but the vast majority are unbelievably supportive." Even so, the fact that an Irishman is piloting an iconic Australian brand through the most turbulent period in its history has not made it easier for him.
He knows there is a disconnect between the way Qantas is perceived by many people and the reality of its existence in a cut-throat, deregulated market. "There's a lot of people who think Qantas is still in some way state-owned, has a public service obligation and who don't know it is a listed company. There is a view that it can never disappear but history has told us that amazing brands like Pan Am and TWA have all disappeared - there is no right to existence and we have to fight for our survival."
Joyce says that some unions still believe a "$1 profit" is enough for Qantas even though it is no longer government-owned. Others say it is hypocritical for Joyce to expect people to judge Qantas as nothing more than a cold, hard business when the airline shamelessly exploits its position as the national carrier with its nationalistic, heart-tugging "I Still Call Australia Home" campaign.
"You can't be just another company if you claim to be the Spirit of Australia," says Michael Newman, head of agency Brand Newman and former creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi, who has worked on a number of airline accounts. "Spirit is an aura around the brand that can be felt and can be missed. Apple has an aura; Samsung has a price."
Newman believes Joyce needs to be less clinical and to show more heart in the way he is seeking to reposition Qantas. "The pride Australians used to feel in the Qantas brand forgave a lot over the years and kept fares at a premium mark-up," says Newman. "I suspect current management doesn't put a high value on emotion. But it's emotional values that have to be genuinely embraced if the brand is to flourish long-term."
BY Christmas last year, two months after the grounding, Joyce was battle-weary from his fight with the unions, the fallout from the grounding and his recuperation from cancer. At that point, the damage to Qantas from the crisis - which would later be costed at $194 million - was still raw and palpable. In November, domestic passenger numbers had slumped by 11.3 per cent from the previous November while international numbers were down 3.6 per cent. Qantas was also on the nose in cyberspace, making a number of tactical errors in the Twittersphere.
Joyce was under fierce attack for the appalling timing of his pay rise: at the AGM, on the day before he grounded the airline, he received bonuses and shares that effectively bumped his total salary package by $2 million to $5 million. Joyce maintains he could not avoid the timing and protests that it has been misreported as a $2 million rise in his take-home pay. "I knew we were going to get hammered on it but we couldn't do anything about it."
An exhausted Joyce took three weeks off over Christmas and hosted his family who were visiting from Ireland. He read a biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs and a "maths thriller" that explored a 500-year quest to solve a famous mathematic theory. When Joyce returned to work, in mid January, the news for Qantas had brightened. Confidential research commissioned by Joyce showed that its highly valued corporate clients were flying with Qantas with the same frequency as they had before the industrial crisis.
In March, veteran pollster Rod Cameron, who is now working as a consultant to Qantas, assessed all the available research and wrote a confidential report titled The Qantas Brand and the 2011 Grounding, which he delivered directly to Joyce. It was music to the Irishman's ears. "The impact of the grounding was less than the media hype suggested," the report concluded. "[It] caused shock waves but it was a short, sharp shock.
"What brand damage was evident was primarily among the very infrequent, fare-conscious flyers who tend to side with 'battlers' who they saw as being the unions in the dispute. There were modest declines in brand rating among the larger mums and dads segment (three to four times a year flyers) but these returned quickly to pre-grounding levels and the key premium flyer market (regular flyers, business and corporate market) actually judged Qantas positively during the dispute." Not everyone agrees that the Qantas brand has fully recovered. Its main competitor, Virgin Australia, provided me with its own independent research which argues that since the grounding Virgin has overtaken Qantas in terms of business customer satisfaction. A Virgin spokesperson claims Virgin is now "well on our way to becoming the airline of choice in Australia".
Joyce is now immersed in the unpopular process of implementing hundreds of job cuts and rationalising Qantas maintenance in Australia to address the loss-making international arm of the business (as opposed to the group's highly profitable domestic operation and Jetstar). He says cutting jobs is the worst thing he has had to do as a CEO - more so than the grounding. He knows how unpopular it makes him with staff, although he says there are many employees who understand the need for Qantas to remain competitive.
While Joyce is still viewed by many Qantas workers and by the unions as a wrecker, he firmly believes that time will prove him right. Years from now, he says, Qantas will be stronger for the painful remedies he is currently implementing. Despite this, he knows his own reputation is still a work in progress in the broader community. He recently agreed to a small Q&A profile in the men's fashion magazine GQ because it had a broader non-business audience and he wanted to get his message out to "certain elements of the public out there who didn't get it and didn't understand". Joyce also agreed to be interviewed for this article and flew me from Melbourne to Hong Kong to watch him launch a new airline, Jetstar Hong Kong.
As we share a drink in the Hong Kong bar, Joyce's chipper mood reflects his belief that the biggest gamble of his life has paid off. "All of the indicators are that the brand has recovered to where it was before the industrial action," he says.
A DAY earlier, as my Qantas 747 jumbo rolled backwards from its gate at Melbourne airport bound for Hong Kong, the pilot announced it was the last time a Qantas jumbo jet would fly out of Melbourne. The 747 has been superseded by the new Airbus A380s and, on the Hong Kong route, by the smaller Airbus A330s. Joyce has overseen these changes.
I look out the window to see that the airport's fire trucks have lined up along the runway, spraying our plane with water as a farewell gesture as we pass. The flight attendant sitting nearby, a 15-year veteran of the 747 service from Melbourne, stares out at the waving firemen. "That's very nice of them," he says, his lips trembling with emotion. By the time we are rolling down the runway, tears are rolling down his cheeks. As the plane lifts off, he turns to a colleague across the aisle, wipes his eyes and says: "That's it then, the last one ever."
It's a small moment but it says a lot about the precious egg that Joyce holds in his hand. Many Australians can't help but invest emotion into the debate over Qantas. Joyce's challenge is to emerge from these clouds on the right side of history.
Is there a fate worse than a fate worse than death?
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What a nauseating load of ****e. Let's cut through all of his explanations, ponderings, musings and other pooh lined ditties.
Look back several years to the day Joyce took over QF up til today. Look at the airlines structure, profitability, staff morale and achievements?
Finally do the same evaluation on Virgin from when Godfrey took a long walk to Borghetti taking over up til today? I rest my case.
Look back several years to the day Joyce took over QF up til today. Look at the airlines structure, profitability, staff morale and achievements?
Finally do the same evaluation on Virgin from when Godfrey took a long walk to Borghetti taking over up til today? I rest my case.
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The Qantas chief has just flown in from New York and this is the last stop of a grinding global roadshow
That is what the business world thinks of this airline and his forward strategy.
Keep sipping the V&T it's celebration time.
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It's over. Seriously, that's got to be it.
The courts, the media, the public, they're all off side to us pilots.
Lets be honest, how, just how could you possibly win the hearts and minds of the public now. Qantas workers have had their chance.
This was the last straw. Guys, time to get out before you're pushed. I've had enough and I've just signed a contract to get out, it feels great!
The courts, the media, the public, they're all off side to us pilots.
Lets be honest, how, just how could you possibly win the hearts and minds of the public now. Qantas workers have had their chance.
This was the last straw. Guys, time to get out before you're pushed. I've had enough and I've just signed a contract to get out, it feels great!
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Saccharin Sychophantic Crap
That long winded piece of journalistic dross is the most pathetic article I have ever read
No one is on Joyce's side.Everyone sees him for what he is~an Irish geek who has had an incredible run of luck to become CEO of Qantas.His time is running out.The board and Clifford have realized their error and a replacement is being sought
No one is on Joyce's side.Everyone sees him for what he is~an Irish geek who has had an incredible run of luck to become CEO of Qantas.His time is running out.The board and Clifford have realized their error and a replacement is being sought
Last edited by DEFCON4; 12th May 2012 at 12:31.
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IN a bar high above Hong Kong harbour, Alan Joyce cradles a vodka and tonic as if it were an old friend.
The Qantas chief has just flown in from New York
The Qantas chief has just flown in from New York
Dixon reveals that Qantas almost lost Joyce in around 2005 when he contemplated moving back to Europe after setting up Qantas' low-cost carrier, Jetstar. "Alan came up to me one day and said, 'I have a great offer from a European carrier to start up a low-cost carrier with them. It is a good opportunity for me to be closer to my family and I'm going to take it,'?" recalls Dixon. Dixon gave him a sealed letter and told him to open it on the plane to Europe. The letter offered Joyce a big pay rise and promised him a golden future at Qantas.
I read the rest of the "infomercial" and just shook my head. What else can one do when these people are very deluded about themselves?
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The sealed envelope also contained a photo of Darth doing a naked star jump!
I think that was what actually sealed the deal.
I think that was what actually sealed the deal.
Most of what you read is trashy business porn.
The article is a very carefully constructed Puff piece designed to counter the negative image of Joyce. It has Wirth prints all over it. There are others like it around the world. Journalists know exactly how they are structured.
"When little johnny was a child growing up in XXXXX he didn't realise that one day he would be YYYYYY.
Coming from humble beginnings as a ZZZZ growing up in the rough back streets of HHHHHHH, he began work in the mail room of FFFFFFFFF working for a dollar an hour while he studied finance at Harvard, blah blah blah"
You know the drill, it all sounds like a chap has made good through his own hard work, intelligence and diligence instead of luckily being in the right place at the right time with the attendant political skills to climb the corporate greasy pole..
Rest assured that the author was well paid one way or another.
If you want another example of hagiograhy read about Jamie Dimon - last week this paragon blew at least Two billion dollars of JP Morgan money on a complex derivative bet that went wrong.
Top 10 Career Tips from Jamie Dimon - Finance and Accounting Jobs News and Advice
Similar glowing tributes were written about Richard Pratt - who we discovered made his money out of running an illegal cartel. There are many similar "Captains of industry" that I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire.
The article is a very carefully constructed Puff piece designed to counter the negative image of Joyce. It has Wirth prints all over it. There are others like it around the world. Journalists know exactly how they are structured.
"When little johnny was a child growing up in XXXXX he didn't realise that one day he would be YYYYYY.
Coming from humble beginnings as a ZZZZ growing up in the rough back streets of HHHHHHH, he began work in the mail room of FFFFFFFFF working for a dollar an hour while he studied finance at Harvard, blah blah blah"
You know the drill, it all sounds like a chap has made good through his own hard work, intelligence and diligence instead of luckily being in the right place at the right time with the attendant political skills to climb the corporate greasy pole..
Rest assured that the author was well paid one way or another.
If you want another example of hagiograhy read about Jamie Dimon - last week this paragon blew at least Two billion dollars of JP Morgan money on a complex derivative bet that went wrong.
Even future Masters of the Universe need a hero.
Wall Street pros in search of a role model may need to look no further than JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon who has weathered the financial crisis better than most other financial titans.
"He's not where he is because he's a maker of mistakes," says Duff McDonald, author of a new biography, "Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase."
At 53, Dimon has perhaps the best reputation on Wall Street, one that extends even beyond the Street, and has earned the respect of Warren Buffett, once his role model. Sure, he has benefited from the mentorship of family friend and legendary Wall Street dealmaker Sandy Weill and is known for brashness that would short-circuit the careers of lesser talents.
But there's a lot to be learned from his career thus far. FINS.com recently spoke with McDonald about the career insights to be gleaned from Dimon's career. Here are the takeaways:
Wall Street pros in search of a role model may need to look no further than JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon who has weathered the financial crisis better than most other financial titans.
"He's not where he is because he's a maker of mistakes," says Duff McDonald, author of a new biography, "Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase."
At 53, Dimon has perhaps the best reputation on Wall Street, one that extends even beyond the Street, and has earned the respect of Warren Buffett, once his role model. Sure, he has benefited from the mentorship of family friend and legendary Wall Street dealmaker Sandy Weill and is known for brashness that would short-circuit the careers of lesser talents.
But there's a lot to be learned from his career thus far. FINS.com recently spoke with McDonald about the career insights to be gleaned from Dimon's career. Here are the takeaways:
Similar glowing tributes were written about Richard Pratt - who we discovered made his money out of running an illegal cartel. There are many similar "Captains of industry" that I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire.
Last edited by Sunfish; 12th May 2012 at 22:51.
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Well .. That article was one big f.....g hallmark moment.
It brought a tear to my eye ... Lucky I was wearing underwear to catch it.
How someone could disrespect their journalistic integrity by writing such tripe is beyond me.
It brought a tear to my eye ... Lucky I was wearing underwear to catch it.
How someone could disrespect their journalistic integrity by writing such tripe is beyond me.
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Appears to have been written by:
Why not send him a text on how you feel about the article
Cameron Stewart
The Australian
The Australian
Our Staff
Cameron Stewart
Cameron Stewart Source: The Australian
Associate Editor
Cameron Stewart is The Australian’s Associate Editor, specialising in investigative reports on national security issues such as terrorism and defence as well as federal politics and international affairs.
After graduating from Melbourne University with BA (Hons) in politics and history he became a spook with the spy agency Defence Signals Directorate before joining The Australian in 1987.
Almost immediately he found himself covering the October 1987 global stockmarket crash as the paper's stockmarket reporter.
From 1992 to 1995 he was posted to Canberra as the paper's foreign affairs and defence writer, covering major news stories on the ground in Somalia, Rwanda and throughout Asia.
From 1996 to 1999 he was The Australian's New York correspondent, a role which saw him cover the 1996 US presidential campaign.
From 1999 to 2000 he was the Victorian Editor of The Australian, presiding over coverage of Premier Jeff Kennett's shock election loss.
From 2000 to the present, he has worked as a senior news/investigative writer based in Melbourne. In 2009 he was awarded the highest honour in Australian newspapers, the Graham Perkin Award for Australian Journalist of the Year.
He has also won five Melbourne Press Club quill awards for excellence in Victorian journalism, two News Limited News Awards and has been a Walkley finalist for investigative journalism and runner up in News Limited’s highest honour, the Sir Keith Murdoch Award for Journalism.
Cameron lives in Melbourne and is married with three kids.
Phone; 03 9292 2824 or 0413 080 953
Cameron Stewart
- From: The Australian
- October 26, 2007 12:00AM
Cameron Stewart Source: The Australian
Associate Editor
Cameron Stewart is The Australian’s Associate Editor, specialising in investigative reports on national security issues such as terrorism and defence as well as federal politics and international affairs.
After graduating from Melbourne University with BA (Hons) in politics and history he became a spook with the spy agency Defence Signals Directorate before joining The Australian in 1987.
Almost immediately he found himself covering the October 1987 global stockmarket crash as the paper's stockmarket reporter.
From 1992 to 1995 he was posted to Canberra as the paper's foreign affairs and defence writer, covering major news stories on the ground in Somalia, Rwanda and throughout Asia.
From 1996 to 1999 he was The Australian's New York correspondent, a role which saw him cover the 1996 US presidential campaign.
From 1999 to 2000 he was the Victorian Editor of The Australian, presiding over coverage of Premier Jeff Kennett's shock election loss.
From 2000 to the present, he has worked as a senior news/investigative writer based in Melbourne. In 2009 he was awarded the highest honour in Australian newspapers, the Graham Perkin Award for Australian Journalist of the Year.
He has also won five Melbourne Press Club quill awards for excellence in Victorian journalism, two News Limited News Awards and has been a Walkley finalist for investigative journalism and runner up in News Limited’s highest honour, the Sir Keith Murdoch Award for Journalism.
Cameron lives in Melbourne and is married with three kids.
Phone; 03 9292 2824 or 0413 080 953
Last edited by ALAEA Fed Sec; 13th May 2012 at 01:15.