Qantas, Alan Joyce’s personal play thing.
From another thread. Aston is......eloquent.
https://www.afr.com/rear-window/qant...0230903-p5e1nh
Apparently Alan doesn't think he is a public figure. Saturation media coverage seems to indicate otherwise.
The Qantas board still hasn’t quite paid Joyce his long-term bonus for 2023, which is another wheelbarrow of shares worth $8 million, or his short-term cash bonus for 2023 of around $4 million – his reward for leaving a gigantic turd in the punch bowl at his retirement party.
Apparently Alan doesn't think he is a public figure. Saturation media coverage seems to indicate otherwise.
ASIC should be investigating AJ for insider trading.
1. He sold large share parcels during company buy back, maximising his return. He would have known if and when future buy backs were planned and planned his selling accordingly. The May buy back was extended into June, just coincidentally when AJ needed cash for his new pad.
2. He sold shares whilst certainly knowing QF was being investigated by the ACCC and that the investigation and potential fines would be market sensitive information.
Come on ASIC, do your job!
1. He sold large share parcels during company buy back, maximising his return. He would have known if and when future buy backs were planned and planned his selling accordingly. The May buy back was extended into June, just coincidentally when AJ needed cash for his new pad.
2. He sold shares whilst certainly knowing QF was being investigated by the ACCC and that the investigation and potential fines would be market sensitive information.
Come on ASIC, do your job!
Last edited by The The; 4th Sep 2023 at 03:12.
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ASIC should be investigating AJ for insider trading.
1. He sold large share parcels during company buy back, maximising his return. He would have known if and when future buy backs were planned and planned his selling accordingly. The May buy back was extended into June, just coincidentally when AJ needed cash for his new pad.
2. He sold shares whilst certainly knowing QF was being investigated by the ACCC and that the investigation and potential fines would be market sensitive information.
Come on ASIC, do your job!
1. He sold large share parcels during company buy back, maximising his return. He would have known if and when future buy backs were planned and planned his selling accordingly. The May buy back was extended into June, just coincidentally when AJ needed cash for his new pad.
2. He sold shares whilst certainly knowing QF was being investigated by the ACCC and that the investigation and potential fines would be market sensitive information.
Come on ASIC, do your job!
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Thread Starter
Qantas board in the firing line of Joyce’s parting PR grenade
Elizabeth Knight
Qantas’ outgoing chief executive Alan Joyce has delivered a hideous parting gift to the airline – a public relations grenade, the damage from which could take years for his successors to fix.The public pressure on Qantas has been relentless, and punishing the airline’s top brass for their seemingly astounding complacency will require many uncomfortable walk-backs, most notably from Qantas chairman Richard Goyder.
First, Goyder will have to concede Joyce may not be the greatest ever chief executive. That would be a big concession, given how effusive Goyder has been in his praise of Joyce. Goyder has also been remarkably muted in his public comments, even as the Qantas brand is shredded around him.
Qantas chairman Richard Goyder (left) and CEO Alan Joyce.CREDIT: LOUIE DOUVIS Next, Qantas’ major shareholders might have to acknowledge that the airline has a bigger public responsibility than just churning out record profits.Then there is Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who might have to admit that his government has made a poor judgement call on the request from Qatar Airways for extra flights. The fallout from that decision continues to hang over the Albanese government, which chose to give Qantas a financial leg up by blunting Qatar Airway’s moves.
For Qantas’ incoming chief executive Vanessa Hudson, who was in part appointed as a foil to Joyce, mending the fractured relationship between the airline and its disaffected customers will take a mammoth effort.
Hudson should have been the fresh face of Qantas but instead will take up the role of chief litigator in two upcoming legal battles – the first, a shareholder class action claiming it misled customers over refunds, and the more damaging case being mounted by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which alleges the airline engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct when it sold tickets for flights it had already cancelled.
Hudson also made the rookie error of tying herself too closely to Joyce. For example, when he farewelled shareholders and analysts at his final profit briefing, Hudson declared staff were “blessed” to have had Joyce as their leader.
But for Hudson to avoid being mired in the Joyce customer relations swamp, she needs the help of the board – which has been studiously avoiding any move that looks like its holding Joyce accountable.
ACCC chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb has crashed Alan Joyce’s farewell tour.CREDIT: MICHAEL QUELCH; DION GEORGOPOULOS But how can the board’s chairman, Goyder, exercise any discretion the board may have to claw back Joyce’s performance-based bonuses when he has regularly described him as the country’s best chief executive?Inadvertently or not, Goyder has painted himself into a corner.
The board has the option to ask Joyce to leave the company ahead of his official departure date in November, but there is no suggestion of this. In a practical sense, an earlier departure of Joyce wouldn’t disadvantage Qantas given he is already leaving in a couple of months, and it would improve the optics.
Instead, the board opted for a cookie-cutter statement on Monday, saying it would review the allegations made by the ACCC. It also took issue with what it believed was an unfair comparison between the airline selling tickets to flights that had been cancelled and financial institutions that were previously found to have charged fees for no service.
Qantas says these customers were offered alternative flights or refunds. (Of course this would be cold comfort for the person who missed their business meeting, or their friend’s wedding, and had to navigate Qantas’ Byzantine refunds policy.)
The difficulty in dealing with Qantas when attempting to change flights or get refunds back in 2022 was legendary. Customers complained that it was near impossible to navigate the process online and call centre wait times ballooned out to 14 hours.
And then there are those who attempted to redeem credits for the same destinations, only to find the price had risen significantly.
The statement from the board on Monday said it recognised Qantas’ reputation had already been hit hard – and that was before the ACCC action. So the regulator’s legal action has just moved the dial for Goyder and Co from disastrous to Defcon 2.
Not that the board would be unaware of how furious its customers are about the way they had been treated. Over the past week, social media, mainstream media and talkback radio has been a flooded with complaints about Qantas.
Having misread the public sentiment on Qantas, the Albanese government is now having to deal with division within its own party’s ranks, with Queensland and South Australia now questioning the Qatar decision.
And the country’s largest travel agency, Flight Centre, has mounted an advertising campaign applying even more pressure to have the government reverse the decision.
But nothing puts a board under pressure like the share price. And on that front, Qantas’ stock has dipped more than 7 per cent over the past week, as shareholder goodwill for a record $2.5 billion profit clashes with the moral outrage about the airline’s perceived impudence.
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Thread Starter
FLYING KANGAROO OR LURKING LOUNGE LIZARD?
David PenberthyEvery man has his price. Mine was a Neil Perry club sandwich. For a few sensational years I was a member of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge. It was an absurd benefit bestowed by dint of marriage. As the husband of a then federal politician, my associate membership turned up unexpectedly in the post some time in 2016. A sexy matt black card, set in a swanky presentation envelope with a personal welcome note from Alan Joyce himself. I umm-ed and ah-ed about the ethics of accepting it but figured no taxpayers were being harmed in the process, and I never reported on aviation so, what the hey, it’s club sandwich time. The sandwiches, I should add, were excellent. As indeed was everything.
In 2019 Dad and I spent a week in New Orleans. We had done New Orleans right, meaning we had done a number on ourselves. We saw about 20 bands in seven days, ate turtle soup, oysters Rockefeller and table-flambeed steak Diane at Brennans, Commanders Palace, Galatoires and Cochon, drank our body weight in bloody Marys, sazeracs and hurricanes. On one action-packed day my medically trained father saved a meth addict from swallowing his tongue while having an epileptic fit, Dad drily saying “Good thing your mother isn’t here”, while I rang 911 and gave the ambos the poor chap’s location.
We needed to return home and re-enter civil society.
Our American Airlines flight from Louis Armstrong International to Dallas Forth Worth was cancelled when lightning hit our plane while preparing for takeoff. We were stuck in New Orleans for another day and missed our Qantas flight from Dallas to Sydney. We were completely stuffed as the flights weren’t connected, so when we made it to Dallas the following day, Qantas figured we were just no-shows. We wound up stuck in a giant, motionless queue with hundreds of people in the same situation, nervously watching the clock as the economy check-in staff moved at glacial pace towards resolving our concerns. We were going to miss our flight home again.
I told Dad I had an idea. “Maybe we should give the Chairman’s card a whirl and see if it helps?”
We approached the first-class desk. I was dressed like a dag in jeans, sneakers and a New Orleans Saints NFL T-shirt. The guy at the counter said tersely: “No cutting the queue, this area is for first-class passengers only.” “Yes, I know, I was just wondering if, as Qantas Chairman’s Lounge members, we are in the right spot?” His demeanour changed in an instant. “Oh sir, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t be here at all! See that escalator? Just go up there to those double doors and they will look after you.”
The doors opened. Dad and I were bathed in golden light. We were in the American Airlines First Class lounge. I explained our situation to the concierge, a stunning 40-something Texan woman with sculpted American hair. “Now Dave, I’m a Cowboys girl and normally wouldn’t help a Saints fan, but in your case I’m going to make an exception. Y’all get yourselves a drink. Leave your passports with me and I’ll have this sorted in a flash.”
Three minutes later we were sitting in deep leather chairs eating jumbo shrimp and veal tournedos with asparagus and bearnaise sauce and sharing a bottle of Hugel Riesling. The concierge sashayed over just before the cheese plate arrived and handed us our passports and boarding passes.
I mention this story for two reasons: one, it was one of the more entertaining experiences of my life, and two, nothing exposes the yawning gulf in the travelling experience than the two worlds we inhabited at DFW that night. By simply flashing that little black card, we exited a miserable place where frazzled travellers were crying and shouting, recharging dead phone batteries on powerpoints in the wall, waiting for toilet cubicles to become free, sleeping on the ground, paying through the nose for food and drinks … to another where a woman who looked like Raquel Welch would sort out your flight dramas while you ate giant prawns someone had already peeled for you and then had a hot shower
with exotic unguents and poultices before floating on to the plane.
Herein lies the problem with the Chairman’s Lounge. As I said, the cost of running something as extravagant as the Chairman’s Lounge is borne entirely by Qantas. But there is no quid without a pro quo. For Qantas, the Chairman’s Lounge is akin to what’s known in international relations as soft diplomacy. Whatever its actual costs are to the national carrier,
the unquantifiable benefits to the airline are threefold: it makes Chairman’s Lounge members think more highly of Qantas, it makes them feel less inclined or wholly uninclined towards being critical of Qantas, and it gives them absolutely no capacity to relate to the lived experience of economy-class passengers.
Who are the people who find themselves in this happy situation? Only every senior decision-maker, policy-framer and opinion-shaper in the land, every federal MP, premier and opposition leader, many if not most state ministers, every senior judge, chief executives, senior members of the media, and all of their families, the happy hangers-on like my old man and I, living the maxim allez les bon temps rouler on Alan’s expense en route from The Big Easy.
I didn’t use the Chairman’s Lounge that often in Australia, mainly because I don’t travel much, but whenever I did I would bump into Labor, Liberal and Greens MPs who I knew through my work. In light of the scandals that have beset Qantas over the largesse afforded to Joyce, its treatment of its staff and customers and its reputational collapse versus historically less well-regarded airlines, you can’t help but wonder whether every one of them has been a bit co-opted by the chumminess of it all.
The motivation of Qantas in what is superficially an innocent act of corporate generosity was plainly illustrated by what happened when my wife quit politics. We received a letter from Qantas soon after explaining that regretfully her and my membership would be expiring.
I can’t stress enough, that is not a complaint. I should thank Qantas for all the fun I had. But it does say something about the transactional nature of the arrangement, where the intention quite clearly on the airline’s part is to make people in positions of policy influence feel indebted and co-opted, and to send them politely on their way when they return to being just another average punter.
A question for me here. Would
I have written this piece or others bagging Qantas if I were still a Chairman’s Lounge member? You would hope the answer to that is yes. Without fear or favour, to employ a journalistic cliche. But you know, those club sandwiches …
For what it’s worth, my theory is that the avalanche of media criticism this past few months has been like a dam wall bursting. Historically, the press had pulled its punches with the national carrier, in part because of the relationships outlined above. As Joyce and the airline were left exposed, as per the emperor’s clothes, fighting fires on so many fronts ranging from reliability to cost to remuneration to the uproar over Qatar’s expansion plans, the media has entered all-bets-are-off mode. About time too, frankly. It was all
a bit cute, and suss, and as Groucho Marx said, I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member
David PenberthyEvery man has his price. Mine was a Neil Perry club sandwich. For a few sensational years I was a member of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge. It was an absurd benefit bestowed by dint of marriage. As the husband of a then federal politician, my associate membership turned up unexpectedly in the post some time in 2016. A sexy matt black card, set in a swanky presentation envelope with a personal welcome note from Alan Joyce himself. I umm-ed and ah-ed about the ethics of accepting it but figured no taxpayers were being harmed in the process, and I never reported on aviation so, what the hey, it’s club sandwich time. The sandwiches, I should add, were excellent. As indeed was everything.
In 2019 Dad and I spent a week in New Orleans. We had done New Orleans right, meaning we had done a number on ourselves. We saw about 20 bands in seven days, ate turtle soup, oysters Rockefeller and table-flambeed steak Diane at Brennans, Commanders Palace, Galatoires and Cochon, drank our body weight in bloody Marys, sazeracs and hurricanes. On one action-packed day my medically trained father saved a meth addict from swallowing his tongue while having an epileptic fit, Dad drily saying “Good thing your mother isn’t here”, while I rang 911 and gave the ambos the poor chap’s location.
We needed to return home and re-enter civil society.
Our American Airlines flight from Louis Armstrong International to Dallas Forth Worth was cancelled when lightning hit our plane while preparing for takeoff. We were stuck in New Orleans for another day and missed our Qantas flight from Dallas to Sydney. We were completely stuffed as the flights weren’t connected, so when we made it to Dallas the following day, Qantas figured we were just no-shows. We wound up stuck in a giant, motionless queue with hundreds of people in the same situation, nervously watching the clock as the economy check-in staff moved at glacial pace towards resolving our concerns. We were going to miss our flight home again.
I told Dad I had an idea. “Maybe we should give the Chairman’s card a whirl and see if it helps?”
We approached the first-class desk. I was dressed like a dag in jeans, sneakers and a New Orleans Saints NFL T-shirt. The guy at the counter said tersely: “No cutting the queue, this area is for first-class passengers only.” “Yes, I know, I was just wondering if, as Qantas Chairman’s Lounge members, we are in the right spot?” His demeanour changed in an instant. “Oh sir, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t be here at all! See that escalator? Just go up there to those double doors and they will look after you.”
The doors opened. Dad and I were bathed in golden light. We were in the American Airlines First Class lounge. I explained our situation to the concierge, a stunning 40-something Texan woman with sculpted American hair. “Now Dave, I’m a Cowboys girl and normally wouldn’t help a Saints fan, but in your case I’m going to make an exception. Y’all get yourselves a drink. Leave your passports with me and I’ll have this sorted in a flash.”
Three minutes later we were sitting in deep leather chairs eating jumbo shrimp and veal tournedos with asparagus and bearnaise sauce and sharing a bottle of Hugel Riesling. The concierge sashayed over just before the cheese plate arrived and handed us our passports and boarding passes.
I mention this story for two reasons: one, it was one of the more entertaining experiences of my life, and two, nothing exposes the yawning gulf in the travelling experience than the two worlds we inhabited at DFW that night. By simply flashing that little black card, we exited a miserable place where frazzled travellers were crying and shouting, recharging dead phone batteries on powerpoints in the wall, waiting for toilet cubicles to become free, sleeping on the ground, paying through the nose for food and drinks … to another where a woman who looked like Raquel Welch would sort out your flight dramas while you ate giant prawns someone had already peeled for you and then had a hot shower
with exotic unguents and poultices before floating on to the plane.
Herein lies the problem with the Chairman’s Lounge. As I said, the cost of running something as extravagant as the Chairman’s Lounge is borne entirely by Qantas. But there is no quid without a pro quo. For Qantas, the Chairman’s Lounge is akin to what’s known in international relations as soft diplomacy. Whatever its actual costs are to the national carrier,
the unquantifiable benefits to the airline are threefold: it makes Chairman’s Lounge members think more highly of Qantas, it makes them feel less inclined or wholly uninclined towards being critical of Qantas, and it gives them absolutely no capacity to relate to the lived experience of economy-class passengers.
Who are the people who find themselves in this happy situation? Only every senior decision-maker, policy-framer and opinion-shaper in the land, every federal MP, premier and opposition leader, many if not most state ministers, every senior judge, chief executives, senior members of the media, and all of their families, the happy hangers-on like my old man and I, living the maxim allez les bon temps rouler on Alan’s expense en route from The Big Easy.
I didn’t use the Chairman’s Lounge that often in Australia, mainly because I don’t travel much, but whenever I did I would bump into Labor, Liberal and Greens MPs who I knew through my work. In light of the scandals that have beset Qantas over the largesse afforded to Joyce, its treatment of its staff and customers and its reputational collapse versus historically less well-regarded airlines, you can’t help but wonder whether every one of them has been a bit co-opted by the chumminess of it all.
The motivation of Qantas in what is superficially an innocent act of corporate generosity was plainly illustrated by what happened when my wife quit politics. We received a letter from Qantas soon after explaining that regretfully her and my membership would be expiring.
I can’t stress enough, that is not a complaint. I should thank Qantas for all the fun I had. But it does say something about the transactional nature of the arrangement, where the intention quite clearly on the airline’s part is to make people in positions of policy influence feel indebted and co-opted, and to send them politely on their way when they return to being just another average punter.
A question for me here. Would
I have written this piece or others bagging Qantas if I were still a Chairman’s Lounge member? You would hope the answer to that is yes. Without fear or favour, to employ a journalistic cliche. But you know, those club sandwiches …
For what it’s worth, my theory is that the avalanche of media criticism this past few months has been like a dam wall bursting. Historically, the press had pulled its punches with the national carrier, in part because of the relationships outlined above. As Joyce and the airline were left exposed, as per the emperor’s clothes, fighting fires on so many fronts ranging from reliability to cost to remuneration to the uproar over Qatar’s expansion plans, the media has entered all-bets-are-off mode. About time too, frankly. It was all
a bit cute, and suss, and as Groucho Marx said, I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member
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FLYING KANGAROO OR LURKING LOUNGE LIZARD?
Three minutes later we were sitting in deep leather chairs eating jumbo shrimp and veal tournedos with asparagus and bearnaise sauce and sharing a bottle of Hugel Riesling. The concierge sashayed over just before the cheese plate arrived and handed us our passports and boarding passes.
[size=33px]
Three minutes later we were sitting in deep leather chairs eating jumbo shrimp and veal tournedos with asparagus and bearnaise sauce and sharing a bottle of Hugel Riesling. The concierge sashayed over just before the cheese plate arrived and handed us our passports and boarding passes.
[size=33px]
Love it and oh so true. The question is did you get handed first class or business boarding passes?
For what it’s worth, my theory is that the avalanche of media criticism this past few months has been like a dam wall bursting. Historically, the press had pulled its punches with the national carrier,
Harbison amazingly wrote another puff piece, an Ode to Joyce if you will, only this weekend.
If Joe Aston and others had followed the late Steve Creedy’s ethos of pulling the pants off the corporate BS emanating from Coward St, Joyce and the board a little sooner, we might have discovered that under all that BS, the emperor really did have no clothes before the situation became obvious to even the most blinded of sycophant suckholes.
Much pain might have been avoided and the ‘Roo may be in far better shape than it finds itself today.
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