Qantas, Alan Joyce’s personal play thing.
Nodded her head exactly how & when she was told.
The following users liked this post:
Thread Starter
I thought it was telling that Hudson was no where to be seen at the Senate questioning of Joyce. I suspect she is trying to put as much daylight between herself and this disaster as is possible. Joyce is up there with Sol Trujillo when he was at Telstra.
But seriously the C suite should all be held accountable not promoted, yeah right!
I still call Starya hommmmmmeeeeeeerer………. (Pan away to Alan sipping Billiecart on his balcony)!
Thread Starter
Why a referendum on a Joyce to parliament would fail
Parnell Palme McGuinness
September 3, 2023 — 5.00am If there were a referendum held today on a Joyce to parliament, it would fail. The prime minister should reconsider his advocacy, lest he go down with it.Qantas CEO Alan Joyce has become a major drag on a prime ministership with alarming parallels to Qantas flights: oversold, likely to disappoint or be cancelled, and designed to privatise gains while socialising losses.
Anthony Albanese’s political honeymoon is over; now voters are keen to know how – what with the difficulty of cashing in flight credits and prices sky-high – he got tickets for a honeymoon in the first place.
In 2010, Albanese was named Aviation Minister of the Year; in the same year, The Australian Financial Review dubbed Joyce “the Wizard of Oz”. Joyce and Albanese were close even then, with the CEO praising Albanese as understanding “that a strong local aviation sector is essential to our national wellbeing”. The Wizard of Oz moniker proved prophetic. In the story, the wizard’s trickery is exposed, revealing a small man manipulating perceptions with pulleys and levers. Now Joyce’s magic trick has been demystified, his tawdry collection of political levers and accounting pulleys is on full display.
Qantas under Joyce is a case study of evasive accounting. Literally. In the Australian Institute of Company Directors’ course, Qantas is used as an example of accounting practices which are used to shape a narrative. Joyce likes to announce “underlying profit” to the media, which is a measure calculated to reflect a company’s truth about how much money it generates, rather than the truth generally arrived at under international accounting standards, found in the statutory accounts.
The institute teaches cohorts of company directors to look out for the discrepancies between the two truths. The way Qantas reports is legal, to be clear, but when I did the institute course last year, I bluntly paraphrased the Financial Literacy and Performance unit facilitator in my notes: “using ‘underlying profit’ as a measure in company accounts is a warning sign – underlying profit is often higher than statutory profit, so it can indicate that the company is hiding something”.
The government isn’t averse to a bit of post-modernist accounting in its own federal budget, perhaps one of the reasons Joyce is naturally simpatico in Canberra. The prime minister Albanese is also not a known fan of hard numbers, having chosen to study “political economy” at university. That’s the economics you’re doing when you’re not doing maths.
But for those who have the wherewithal to look, the signs have long been there that Qantas was having a lend and not a repay. As one jaded financial services professional points out, in 2014, Qantas announced a statutory loss of $2.8 billion. In the face of this terrible result, Joyce announced that Qantas would undergo a “transformation”. Miraculously, in 2015, he was able to announce a $975 million underlying profit.
In that same year, Joyce commissioned and issued a Deloitte Access Economics report detailing “the Qantas Group’s contribution to the Australian Economy”. Unsurprisingly, it is splendiferous, finding that Qantas is an economic keystone which contributes 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product. Why did Qantas feel the need to issue such a document? Well, let’s just say it’s come in handy over the years.
In 2018, Joyce found himself defending the fact that the airline, despite “transformation”, had not paid tax in three years. Nothing to see here. “Corporations tax is a tax on profits,” he condescended. “If you don’t make money, you don’t pay the tax.” And quite right he was. But Qantas profits bounce around erratically and quite conveniently.
A couple of years later, Qantas’ huge contribution to the national economy was augmented by its absolutely essential role in bringing home Australians stuck abroad. Between that and its contribution to the national economy, a $2 billion taxpayer handout to the airline was a no-brainer.
Except that Qantas didn’t bring many home, so it wasn’t. Qatar was the airline that flew most Australians home after Qantas parked its fleet in the Californian desert. Now that Qatar wants to add more flights, maybe reducing the cost of airfares a bit, Joyce is arguing that competition would kill the flying kangaroo and probably plunge the nation into penury. Don’t forget that 0.7 per cent of GDP!
But years of playing aerial acrobatics with the airline’s accounting is starting to catch up with the Irishman. Qantas was, until this past week, looking like it would hold onto the pandemic billions, hold onto customer credits issued due to COVID cancellations, and hold onto its uncompetitive position in the market.
Then Qantas was forced by public outcry to extend the life of credits for flights cancelled during the pandemic. They had been due to expire on December 31, meaning Qantas customers would have forfeited their money to the airline’s bottom line. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is also alleging Qantas sold tickets it knew it couldn’t honour, and ACCC chief Gina Cass-Gottlieb wants the penalty to be something that can’t be absorbed as a regular cost of doing business. She’s hinted she wants a fine of more than $500 million.
An adverse Federal Court finding could wipe out any profit for the airline. Now, remember it was only last week that Joyce told us he was going to repay the pandemic handout with corporate tax. Perhaps that idea won’t fly: “If you don’t make money, you don’t pay the tax.”
Qantas’ troubles have leapt out of the financial press and into the mainstream because they’re hitting regular folk where it hurts: right in the cost of living.
Meanwhile, in bad news for Canberra, Alan Fels, the former head of the competition watchdog, is making sure that politicians can’t slink out of the Chairman’s Lounge unimplicated. Fels told ABC radio this week, companies should be looking after shareholders but the government should be looking after consumers, not companies.
That’s a painful lesson for a Labor government to be schooled on publicly. As Qantas chairman Richard Goyder told the Australian Institute of Company Directors, “the biggest challenges are poor decisions made and also reputational issues”. If only Albanese had been across the details of the Joyce to parliament, he might have realised – as prime minister – what a reputational risk the relationship posed.
Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at award-winning campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.
The following users liked this post:
Haha joyce to parliament
Why a referendum on a Joyce to parliament would fail
Parnell Palme McGuinness An adverse Federal Court finding could wipe out any profit for the airline. Now, remember it was only last week that Joyce told us he was going to repay the pandemic handout with corporate tax. Perhaps that idea won’t fly: “If you don’t make money, you don’t pay the tax.”The Australian government gave some handouts but declined to take ownership of the carrier to keep its operations mostly running. They most certainly could have.
Well said Dr Dre.
It’s also interesting to note that Qatar also received Australia government “handouts” in the form of the multiple weekly IFAM flights, yet I don’t hear anyone clamouring for Akbar to pay that back. Usual double standards.
It’s also interesting to note that Qatar also received Australia government “handouts” in the form of the multiple weekly IFAM flights, yet I don’t hear anyone clamouring for Akbar to pay that back. Usual double standards.
The following users liked this post:
But as usual QF cops it all. I see the media have made a mountain of how some washed up AFL “star” had a sook on TV about his flight being pushed back a few hours, as if it was the end of the world and from now on he’s only flying VA despite QF having a much better OTP (71% vs 59%) and lower cancellation rate (3.8% to 5.6%) than VA in the latest BITRE stats. And I believe Spud Dutton had to throw the boot in as well this morning.
Just the typical pile on.
Last edited by dr dre; 3rd Sep 2023 at 06:36.
The following users liked this post:
And I seem to recall that Qatar were stinging punters with some pretty exorbitantly priced fares at the time.
Not just QR, there were plenty of foreign carriers funded with Australian taxpayer handouts to operate pax and cargo flights and some of those carriers were fully foreign state backed as well.
But as usual QF cops it all. I see the media have made a mountain of how some washed up AFL “star” had a sook on TV about his flight being pushed back a few hours, as if it was the end of the world and from now on he’s only flying VA despite QF having a much better OTP (71% vs 59%) and lower cancellation rate (3.8% to 5.6%) than VA in the latest BITRE stats. And I believe Spud Dutton had to throw the boot in as well this morning.
Just the typical pile on.
But as usual QF cops it all. I see the media have made a mountain of how some washed up AFL “star” had a sook on TV about his flight being pushed back a few hours, as if it was the end of the world and from now on he’s only flying VA despite QF having a much better OTP (71% vs 59%) and lower cancellation rate (3.8% to 5.6%) than VA in the latest BITRE stats. And I believe Spud Dutton had to throw the boot in as well this morning.
Just the typical pile on.
There is huge damage being done to the brand but, maybe this is the pain we need to endure to see systematic changes at all levels. Aren't you sick of being treated like garbage and part of a working environment where all of your colleagues absolutely hate the company to such an extent they go out of their way to **** it over in every way.
Although I fear that when the next outrage hits the 24 hour news cycle we will all go back to the status quo. Joyce will sail off into the sunset with his millions and Vanessa will increase the beatings further until morale improves.
The following 3 users liked this post by cLeArIcE:
The entire executive team bar 1 have all grown up under Joyce and his cronies. They have ingratiated themselves with the little emperor by emulating him. Even now I have no doubt they are admiring his latest garb in typical obsequious form.
Vanessa et al only know one playbook, meanwhile the chairman thought his donkey was Phar lap.
This lot don’t know how to change…. Even IF they wanted to.
Thread Starter
This nails it and he carries weight IMO
Qantas facing ‘extraordinary decline’ in trust and reputation[img]data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7[/img]
And, just as happened at AMP, the first step in repairing the catastrophic damage to the value of the Qantas brand is that the chairman must stand down as soon as possible. And the same applies to the chief executive.
In the case of the Qantas chairman, Richard Goyder has a wonderful record of past achievement, but he took on two of the toughest chairmanships in the land, Qantas and Woodside. And then he added a task many times more difficult than either of those two chairmanship: the chairman of the AFL Commission. It was too much.
Chief executive Alan Joyce has done many wonderful things at Qantas but CEOs who stay on longer than 10 years become much riskier for the chairman and the board, because they often become too dominant.
What makes the governance breakdown of Qantas so much more serious is that it was not caused by a sudden event like the ACCC charges against the company for selling airline tickets for cancelled flights. Over two or three years Qantas suffered an unprecedented destruction of the value of its main asset, and the issues causing the catastrophic decline were not tackled by the board – either because of ignorance or a failure to do their job.
Roy Morgan Research actually documented how Qantas plummeted from being one of the country’s most trusted brands to one of its most distrusted, and that in 2022-23 the decline was gathering pace. The Qantas brand ranking fell an unprecedented 181 places in the nine months to June 30.
In the same period Australia’s most distrusted brand, Optus, fell only 18 places, or 10 per cent of the Qantas fall.
Every board alarm bell should have rung, particularly as Morgan chillingly isolated what was outraging Qantas’s actual and potential customers: “There was moral blindness everywhere, from appalling call centre delays, cancelled flights and snail’s-pace fare refunds to a leader turning a blind eye to the anguish of tens of thousands of once-trusting customers.
“But the biggest example of Qantas’s moral blindness was Alan Joyce refusing to pay back any of the $2bn in corporate welfare, including JobKeeper,” Morgan said.
A proper board investigation into the Morgan findings would have revealed the complaints that arose from the sale of cancelled tickets, now the subject of an ACCC charge.
Unless Qantas plans to challenge the ACCC charges, the company faces more blows.
First, if the ACCC case goes to court, I would be stunned if the fine isn’t much greater than what the ACCC is seeking. Second, all the cancellations and fraudulent ticket sales have to be reversed, and there may be additional damages. Then comes the enormous task of starting to repair the damage that has been done. That task is urgent and cannot start while the current chairman and CEO are in office.
Whenever a situation like this arises, usually more disastrous events emerge. I have no evidence to suggest there is a link between the unprecedented Qantas backing of the divisive Yes campaign and the government’s decision to block extra flights by Qatar airlines in the Middle East.
But almost certainly parliament is going to demand that this be investigated, which means that more damage for the brand.
In addition, like all other large companies, Qantas will be aware from its legal advice that the public debate about the voice to parliament is not the main game.
The Uluru agenda of self-*determination, a separate system of law and international relations, plus heavy reparations will not be achieved by the voice to parliament. Rather it is the voice to the public service where the voice body will have the power to completely clog up the running of government to achieve the Uluru agenda.
Maybe the Qantas board needed to look more closely at such an alignment of the company’s main asset, the Qantas brand, with such a divisive issue among its *customers.
When company boards have a strong chief executive, it is very tempting to just leave matters to the chief executive and top *management.
And in the case of Qantas it worked for a long time. But not in recent times.
To be fair to Alan Joyce, along with the board he had reduced the capacity of the airline in line with the sharp reduction in passenger numbers, and when the numbers exploded unexpectedly the airline was not prepared to handle it. That sort of mistake is understandable and not a governance breakdown. But then came all the rest.
The new CEO of Qantas, Vanessa Hudson, will need to distance herself from her predecessor and cut a very different path as she tries to restore value in the brand. It is usually best for an outsider to take on this task, but there are precedents where long-term executives have been able to turn the company’s brand value around (CBA is a good example).
Qantas shareholders will have to hope that this is one of those occasions. But she has no hope of doing that unless the board recognises what has happened and undertakes the required surgery that is essential in any rescue.
Another issue which will come to the fore is Alan Joyce’s retirement package. Only the board and top management know how Joyce’s agreement was structured. But there are precedents for amounts of money to be held back assuming the agreement allows it. In 2016, one of the great executives of Rio Tinto, Sam Walsh, found himself accused of bad practices and the board held back part of his retirement package until the matter was sorted out. Sam (not surprisingly in my view) was cleared and he received his full retirement package.
Qantas facing ‘extraordinary decline’ in trust and reputation[img]data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7[/img]
By ROBERT GOTTLIEBSEN
- 8:13PM SEPTEMBER 3, 2023
And, just as happened at AMP, the first step in repairing the catastrophic damage to the value of the Qantas brand is that the chairman must stand down as soon as possible. And the same applies to the chief executive.
In the case of the Qantas chairman, Richard Goyder has a wonderful record of past achievement, but he took on two of the toughest chairmanships in the land, Qantas and Woodside. And then he added a task many times more difficult than either of those two chairmanship: the chairman of the AFL Commission. It was too much.
Chief executive Alan Joyce has done many wonderful things at Qantas but CEOs who stay on longer than 10 years become much riskier for the chairman and the board, because they often become too dominant.
What makes the governance breakdown of Qantas so much more serious is that it was not caused by a sudden event like the ACCC charges against the company for selling airline tickets for cancelled flights. Over two or three years Qantas suffered an unprecedented destruction of the value of its main asset, and the issues causing the catastrophic decline were not tackled by the board – either because of ignorance or a failure to do their job.
Roy Morgan Research actually documented how Qantas plummeted from being one of the country’s most trusted brands to one of its most distrusted, and that in 2022-23 the decline was gathering pace. The Qantas brand ranking fell an unprecedented 181 places in the nine months to June 30.
In the same period Australia’s most distrusted brand, Optus, fell only 18 places, or 10 per cent of the Qantas fall.
Every board alarm bell should have rung, particularly as Morgan chillingly isolated what was outraging Qantas’s actual and potential customers: “There was moral blindness everywhere, from appalling call centre delays, cancelled flights and snail’s-pace fare refunds to a leader turning a blind eye to the anguish of tens of thousands of once-trusting customers.
“But the biggest example of Qantas’s moral blindness was Alan Joyce refusing to pay back any of the $2bn in corporate welfare, including JobKeeper,” Morgan said.
A proper board investigation into the Morgan findings would have revealed the complaints that arose from the sale of cancelled tickets, now the subject of an ACCC charge.
Unless Qantas plans to challenge the ACCC charges, the company faces more blows.
First, if the ACCC case goes to court, I would be stunned if the fine isn’t much greater than what the ACCC is seeking. Second, all the cancellations and fraudulent ticket sales have to be reversed, and there may be additional damages. Then comes the enormous task of starting to repair the damage that has been done. That task is urgent and cannot start while the current chairman and CEO are in office.
Whenever a situation like this arises, usually more disastrous events emerge. I have no evidence to suggest there is a link between the unprecedented Qantas backing of the divisive Yes campaign and the government’s decision to block extra flights by Qatar airlines in the Middle East.
But almost certainly parliament is going to demand that this be investigated, which means that more damage for the brand.
In addition, like all other large companies, Qantas will be aware from its legal advice that the public debate about the voice to parliament is not the main game.
The Uluru agenda of self-*determination, a separate system of law and international relations, plus heavy reparations will not be achieved by the voice to parliament. Rather it is the voice to the public service where the voice body will have the power to completely clog up the running of government to achieve the Uluru agenda.
Maybe the Qantas board needed to look more closely at such an alignment of the company’s main asset, the Qantas brand, with such a divisive issue among its *customers.
When company boards have a strong chief executive, it is very tempting to just leave matters to the chief executive and top *management.
And in the case of Qantas it worked for a long time. But not in recent times.
To be fair to Alan Joyce, along with the board he had reduced the capacity of the airline in line with the sharp reduction in passenger numbers, and when the numbers exploded unexpectedly the airline was not prepared to handle it. That sort of mistake is understandable and not a governance breakdown. But then came all the rest.
The new CEO of Qantas, Vanessa Hudson, will need to distance herself from her predecessor and cut a very different path as she tries to restore value in the brand. It is usually best for an outsider to take on this task, but there are precedents where long-term executives have been able to turn the company’s brand value around (CBA is a good example).
Qantas shareholders will have to hope that this is one of those occasions. But she has no hope of doing that unless the board recognises what has happened and undertakes the required surgery that is essential in any rescue.
Another issue which will come to the fore is Alan Joyce’s retirement package. Only the board and top management know how Joyce’s agreement was structured. But there are precedents for amounts of money to be held back assuming the agreement allows it. In 2016, one of the great executives of Rio Tinto, Sam Walsh, found himself accused of bad practices and the board held back part of his retirement package until the matter was sorted out. Sam (not surprisingly in my view) was cleared and he received his full retirement package.
Not just QR, there were plenty of foreign carriers funded with Australian taxpayer handouts to operate pax and cargo flights and some of those carriers were fully foreign state backed as well.
But as usual QF cops it all. I see the media have made a mountain of how some washed up AFL “star” had a sook on TV about his flight being pushed back a few hours, as if it was the end of the world and from now on he’s only flying VA despite QF having a much better OTP (71% vs 59%) and lower cancellation rate (3.8% to 5.6%) than VA in the latest BITRE stats. And I believe Spud Dutton had to throw the boot in as well this morning.
Just the typical pile on.
But as usual QF cops it all. I see the media have made a mountain of how some washed up AFL “star” had a sook on TV about his flight being pushed back a few hours, as if it was the end of the world and from now on he’s only flying VA despite QF having a much better OTP (71% vs 59%) and lower cancellation rate (3.8% to 5.6%) than VA in the latest BITRE stats. And I believe Spud Dutton had to throw the boot in as well this morning.
Just the typical pile on.
Then wouldn’t they be much closer to 100%? The long term average was around 80-85% OTP. If the figures were being fudged I think they wouldn’t fudge them to below the historical norm.
The fact is they constantly do this and its BS. Especially when the company is at fault over the delay.
The whole thing has become untenable. Joe Aston has seen it happening for years, it’s only now that every other journalist in the country is finally piling on.
Surely the CEO and Chairman will go in the next few days? They must know their jig is finally up.
And the only way Hudson stays is if she comes out immediately and denounces what they’ve done, distances herself from it, and swiftly makes significant repatriations for staff and customers.
News articles now appearing suggesting there may be insider trading allegations added to the list.
Surely the CEO and Chairman will go in the next few days? They must know their jig is finally up.
And the only way Hudson stays is if she comes out immediately and denounces what they’ve done, distances herself from it, and swiftly makes significant repatriations for staff and customers.
News articles now appearing suggesting there may be insider trading allegations added to the list.
The following users liked this post:
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Unfortunately not the Orient
Posts: 387
Likes: 0
Received 88 Likes
on
32 Posts
Speaking of QF being bastards, has there been any decision on the A380 SO disagreement that QF took to the federal court in attempt to bully AIPA into allowing them to ignore black and white statements in the contract?
But as usual QF cops it all. I see the media have made a mountain of how some washed up AFL “star” had a sook on TV about his flight being pushed back a few hours, as if it was the end of the world and from now on he’s only flying VA despite QF having a much better OTP (71% vs 59%) and lower cancellation rate (3.8% to 5.6%) than VA in the latest BITRE stats. And I believe Spud Dutton had to throw the boot in as well this morning.
Just the typical pile on.
Just the typical pile on.