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Jetstar strategy may be clear to some, but as a regular traveller they are often more expensive than both QF and VA so go figure.

Not sure why anyone would pay more for a lesser experience and be happy about it under any circumstances but the smartest guys in the room obviously have (or it that had) a plan that ignores the punter.

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We are the only full service airline that has successfully launched a LCC.
(How successful?)

The Boeing 777 is old technology.
(Comedian Dixon)

We are the oldest continuously operating airline in the world.
(Until I decided to ground the airline)

We are one of only 2 investment grade airlines in the world.
(We were until today)

Jetstar has expanded faster than Ryanair or Easyjet in their first 8,9years.
(Nothing like expanding too quickly)

We will not cannibalise mainline.
(We are smarter than all the other full service airlines that did this)

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UPDATE 1-Qantas relegated to junk status after shock loss warning


SYDNEY, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Embattled Qantas Airways Ltd was relegated to junk status by credit rating agency Standard & Poor's on Friday, a day after the Australian carrier issued a shock loss warning that sent its shares to a 16-month low.

S&P cut its ratings on Qantas by a notch to BB+/B, one rank below investment grade, and placed a negative outlook on the airline that means ratings could be cut again. The agency said a structural shift in the domestic competitive landscape had weakened Qantas' business risk profile.

The downgrade means that Qantas could lose some shareholders whose rules on investment prevent them from retaining stock in companies rated below investment grade. It also means the carrier will have to pay higher rates when it borrows money.

Qantas also faces the prospect of losing a chunk of its $2.8 billion cash balance: the rating downgrade could slow the transfer of revenue from credit card companies for ticket sales because additional processing is now required.

Adding to Qantas's headaches, ratings agency Moody's on Thursday placed its Baa3 rating on the airline, the lowest investment grade, under review for a possible downgrade.

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Temasek's a 'one-of-a-kind sovereign wealth fund'
It is not a govt fund manager; it pays taxes, has equity focus: Lim Boon Heng

Published on Dec 06, 2013

Contributions from Temasek Holdings, GIC and others comprise about 2.2 to 2.6 per cent of gross domestic product, and boost government budget revenues by about 15 per cent. -- PHOTO: BLOOMBERG

By Chia Yan Min

TEMASEK Holdings is usually lumped together with other sovereign wealth funds, yet it is a unique body that shares few characteristics with these organisations, said chairman Lim Boon Heng yesterday.

Mr Lim told a conference in Singapore: "Defining Temasek is not easy: We have not found another entity that does exactly what we do."

He ran through the many points of difference, which range from the investment company's strategies to its relationship with the Government.

Temasek, he noted, owns its assets outright as a commercial investment company and is not a fund manager for the Government like most sovereign wealth funds.

It also pays taxes - "no different from other companies", added Mr Lim, a former politician who became Temasek chairman in August.

While most sovereign wealth funds invest in broadly liquid and globally diversified portfolios, Temasek mostly puts its money in equities.

This is riskier and accompanied by higher volatility, but also comes with an "expectation of higher long-term returns", said Mr Lim, who was speaking at a sovereign wealth fund conference at the Singapore Management University.

"We have the full flexibility to take concentrated risks, whether in owning up to 100 per cent of a portfolio company, or in deploying most of our investments into a concentrated geography."

Temasek's investments are mostly concentrated in Asia, including Singapore, with about 25 per cent exposure to countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Mr Lim noted that Temasek tracks asset performance over the long term and is under "no pressure to sell if the long-term outlook remains positive".

However, it sometimes chooses to sell even when it would record a realised loss.

"(We) take money off the table where it isn't working for us the way we want it to," he added.

Temasek's portfolio was valued at $215 billion as at March this year - 10 per cent higher than the previous year in US dollar terms.

Mr Lim also highlighted the contributions Temasek makes to Singapore through the annual dividends it distributes to its sole shareholder - the Government.

Temasek's payouts mean the Government does not need to tax the economy and working population as much, noted Mr Lim.

Contributions from GIC, Temasek and others comprise about 2.2 to 2.6 per cent of gross domestic product, and boost government budget revenues by about 15 per cent.

While it is Temasek's sole shareholder, the Government is not consulted on the investment company's day-to-day business and does not direct its investment decisions, said Mr Lim.

This clear separation between the Government's roles as policymaker and shareholder is for the "larger good of Singapore".

He cited the Government's policy of developing Singapore into a vibrant air hub, an aim that takes precedence over its interests in Singapore Airlines as a company.

Australian carrier Qantas, for example, was given a licence to base its budget airline Jetstar here.

Temasek makes investment decisions based on commercial principles and promotes sound corporate governance in its portfolio companies, added Mr Lim.

The two-day conference, which ends today, also featured prominent speakers such as Nobel laureate Thomas Sargent from New York University and Nobel laureate designate Robert Shiller from Yale University.

Asset management firm Amundi organised the event, which attracted more than 250 academics and representatives from sovereign wealth funds.

[email protected]

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Singapore's Temasek sells stake in Qantas


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Singapore: Temasek Holdings has sold its entire stake in Qantas Airways, believed to be three per cent, one month after the Australian airline succeeded in lobbying its government to shut Singapore Airlines out of the Sydney-Los Angeles route.

"This is part of our ongoing efforts to actively manage our portfolio to maximise shareholder value. Notwithstanding this divestment, we remain co-investors in Jetstar Asia and are open to other opportunities to work together.''

The Singapore investment company bought a three per cent share in the Australian airline back in September 2004, when British Airways (BA) sold its 18.3 per cent stake.

Temasek could have pocketed US$11.11 million in profits from the Qantas stake sale, assuming that it bought the shares at A$3.28 from BA and sold at an average price of A$3.71.

Australian media reported rumours that Temasek had sold several large tranches of Qantas stock since last Friday and had arranged a sale of 40 million shares for sale through UBS.

One Sydney-based equity analyst who covers Qantas, and who asked not to be named, told The Straits Times: "Let's put it this way: Qantas is looking at lower profits, there's going to be a long fight ahead with its unions over cost-cutting. It's a good time to get out.''

Temasek has raised more than $1.23 billion recently from its sales of shares in SingTel, agricultural products supplier Olam and medical equipment maker LMA, as it continues to rebalance its portfolio to have a third each of its investments in Singapore, the rest of Asia and the rest of the world.

Macquarie Equities slapped a big downgrade on Qantas' stock on Monday, lowering its full-year profit forecast by 15 per cent. Other brokerages soon followed with their own "sell'' calls.

Qantas last month reported a 9.6 per cent fall in first-half profits due to rising fuel costs and payouts from cutting jobs.

The airline is facing possible legal action from its pilots, who are worried that plans for subsidiary Jetstar to fly international routes will result in their own wages being cut.

Its engineers are restive, irked by the sending of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet to Singapore for heavy maintenance checks after management decided that its Sydney base could not do it in time.

Even its caterers are unsettled, with job and wage cuts almost certainly on the menu.

Meanwhile, Qantas' management is reportedly thinking of going into the rail freight business. It already has a parcel trucking joint venture with Australia Post.
-- Straits Times

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geography (and population) favors New Zealand even less, yet they seem to be able to support a progressive national carrier with a modern fleet

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Be very sure, everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen, is in accordance with the master plan.

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THE central question that arguably should be posed is whether Qantas today is in a similar position to that of Holden a dozen or so years ago: the already weakened but still dominant player in its industry embarked on its irresistible slide. And so, that any attempt by government to prop up the airline would prove a similar, ultimately futile waste of taxpayer money; but worse, help cement management in its pursuit of what is an unsustainable dead-end strategy.

The comparison between the airline and local car manufacturing industries is of course not an exact one. But the key similarities are clear and instructive.
In both cases we start with a government-sponsored -- indeed, mandated -- two-player industry. Holden and Ford, Qantas and Ansett. The first sustained by a tariff and quota wall; the second by more outright effective prohibition.
In both cases, the industry structure and the mandated profits -- and the associated high cost structure and exorbitant prices/fares -- become unsustainable under the relentless pressure of overseas competition off much lower cost-bases.

In the airline industry case, the impact of that overseas competition was delayed by 9/11, which put the final nail in Ansett's coffin and yet "made" Qantas, by leaving it with an all but domestic monopoly.
The only thing standing in the way of its total domination was Richard Branson's cheery chutzpah and Virgin's handful of planes -- now grown to 140 and 35 per cent-plus of the domestic market.

In my comparison, the two Middle East government-owned airlines Emirates and Etihad -- which virtually did not exist in 2001 -- have played the particular cutting-edge roles of the Korean makers like Hyundai and Kia, similarly non-existent, coming on top of the traditional flag-carriers like Singapore-as-Toyota.

In this comparison, it is Qantas's international arm that is the "local manufacture", once, like Holden and Ford, with 50 per cent-plus of the market, now shrunk to 10 per cent or so, with no bottom in sight.
That leaves the domestic airline business as the proxy equivalent of car imports. With one crucial and obvious difference -- it is the duopoly that is more the norm in Australian industry structures.
And that brings us to the heart of Qantas's challenge and what it demands of government.

This is that, one way or another, government should deliver it the 65 per cent of the domestic market that is the minimum on which it can sustain the interlocking parts of its operational model, and in particular to cross-subsidise its equivalent of local manufacture: its international operation.
More particularly, it's not just 65 per cent, however obtained. It's 65 per cent obtained with a -- self-evidently -- higher fare structure than is the reality threatened by the three airline-backed Virgin, aggressively chasing market share.

There are two ways of characterising Virgin's operational dynamic. Qantas says it is an exercise in predatory pricing. That Virgin is dramatically undercharging, because its dominant shareholders pick up broader -- and leveraged -- advantages from their international linkages into that growing domestic network.

Apart from the fact that it is somewhat -- perhaps uniquely -- unusual for the dominant player in a two-company market to accuse the smaller of predatory pricing, there's a fine and usually near-impossible to delineate line between that and legitimate competitive tactics. Look at Coles and Woolworths in the supermarket duopoly space. Hasn't Coles been doing exactly the same thing as Virgin, to grow its market share, starting with and sustaining $1-a-litre milk?
Albeit Coles (and Woolies-as-Qantas) have been able to sustain their profits, in a way denied Virgin and Qantas, by being able to ruthlessly squeeze their suppliers. No such opportunity for the airlines, given their milk equivalent is aviation fuel.

The Qantas bleat also denies the reality that Virgin's been doing essentially that for more than a decade, and not simply surviving but growing steadily, well before it came to have the three foreign airlines as shareholders, far less dominant ones.

Qantas is really demanding to be allowed to over-charge domestically to cross-subsidise its uneconomic "local manufacture" -- its international arm.
This is where the comparison is telling. That would be as fundamentally unsustainable as was -- and is -- the demand of the local carmakers to continue to produce cars that are too expensive in the international context. And be "made competitive" by taxpayer money.

That brings us to the heart of the issue and the irresistible conclusion. Whatever else happens, Qantas's international business is ultimately unsustainable. It's a traumatic idea for the national psyche. But a necessary one. That we should face in the same year the end of both the Holden car and the (internationally) flying roo.

Arguably there's a future for Jetstar International, which perhaps even could be rebranded as Qantas, as it is more akin to an "importer", being able to build itself on an internationally competitive cost base. Which would lead incidentally, to a subsidiary conclusion. That it would be a major mistake for Qantas to sell any part of Jetstar other than for partnership-building reasons; and not just to raise cash to contribute to operational expenses.

Of course all this would lead to the accusation that this was Qantas's Machiavellian intent all along: to destroy its -- our, Australia's -- pay and conditions by using Virgin and Jetstar as twin stalking horses.
I'd suggest that Qantas chief Alan Joyce was more canny leprechaun than cynical Machiavelli. That Jetstar was, more simply, dealing with reality and building a fall-back.

Qantas's lucrative frequent flyer program is an altogether different matter. Qantas would do three things by capitalising part of it. It would raise cash. It would put a value on the program -- a value that would arguably be greater than the total Qantas value.

And most crucially, the sale could be used as part of the construction of the global strategic relationships needed by the post-international Qantas. None of this denies the two sets of burdens imposed on Qantas. Its uneconomic operational cost structure, courtesy of the burdens of national carrier and domestic residence, and the Qantas Sale Act limitations on its shareholdings.
The first was irrelevant, or at best incidental, for so long as Qantas had its domestic monopoly or near-monopoly. Now it is exacerbated by the nature of the Virgin-three airline pressure.

The second was similarly just an irritation until the Middle East airlines grew into major threats, as Qantas's dominance of bilateral landing rights was a profit plus, not a profit-draining burden.
And for a significant period, a protective irritant; when without it, we could have seen Qantas swallowed by British Airways.

Now wouldn't that have been some mess to be now untangling. Think the equivalent: were Holden by some bizarre misadventure to have been taken over by British Leyland at some point.
In sum and in short, the Qantas Sale Act limitations should go. Qantas international with them.

Jetstar becomes our Australia-Qantas national carrier -- either via the artifice constructed by Virgin to keep its international business 51 per cent "Australian-owned", or because Qantas itself chooses to remain 51 per cent locally owned. Qantas and Virgin can then be left to go at each other in the domestic market Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian

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Think about it- Joyce and Dixon have a very public spat, results in abandonment of tie up with Tourism Australia , Along with what are inexplicable and diabolically appalling strategic decisions, share price plummets but no-one can sheet this home to a conspiracy as they're not on speaking terms now are they?
It's hard to understand how someone with such errant judgement can have been put in the position and allowed to remain ,of making so many apparently aberrant decisions- unless... all this creates a smokescreen for the ultimate goal- P E assault. do the institutional investors know something? Why does J consistently get their support at shareholder level.? There is a solution, others know what it is, its just not what we all want to hear.

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China Southern airline in plan to back stake in Qantas


THE biggest airline in Asia, state-owned China Southern, held detailed discussions last year to bankroll a group of wealthy investors - including former Qantas chief executive Geoff Dixon, adman John Singleton and retail king Gerry Harvey - to buy a cornerstone shareholding in the national carrier.
The Weekend Australian understands the powerhouse Asian carrier was introduced to the consortium by billionaire trucking magnate Lindsay Fox and that Mr Dixon held discussions with China Southern chairman Si Xianmin, encouraging the Chinese to provide financial backing for the syndicate, which had acquired a stake of about 2 per cent in Qantas.


While some sources said a draft agreement was reached under which China Southern was prepared to bankroll the consortium to take an initial stake of 19.9 per cent in Qantas, which could eventually rise to 25 per cent, others say the discussions never got to that stage.


The ginger group, which included former Qantas chief financial officer Peter Gregg and venture capitalist Mark Carnegie and was planning to agitate for strategic change at the airline, is believed to have grown impatient waiting for a firm commitment from the Chinese and quietly sold their 2 per cent stake in Qantas in January this year for an estimated $18 million profit.
Qantas signed a code-share deal this week with China Southern, which the Australian carrier believes will drive increased Chinese tourism and cement its presence in the world's second-biggest economy. While China Southern president Tan Wangeng said this week the airline had "no plan as such" to invest in Qantas, there is speculation this may change if the government repealed the Qantas Sale Act.


Under the act, foreign investment in the national carrier is capped at 49 per cent; total ownership by foreign airlines is limited to 35 per cent; and by a single foreign investor to 25 per cent.
Any such move by China Southern would present a fresh dilemma for the government after it knocked back global agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland's $3 billion bid for Graincorp.


Tony Abbott said yesterday he might consider allowing foreign companies to take a bigger stake in Qantas. While the Prime Minister preferred to see the company kept in majority Australian hands, he would be happy to look at changes to the Qantas Sale Act if there were no cost to taxpayers.
On Thursday, Qantas shares experienced their biggest one-day fall in 18 months after the airline announced it would lose as much as $300m in the first half of the financial year and slash 1000 jobs over the next 12 months.
Chief executive Alan Joyce revealed that the airline would also consider a radical restructure of its operations, which could include partial sales of its frequent-flyer or Jetstar budget airline operations.


Ratings agency Standard & Poor's downgraded the airline's investment-grade credit rating yesterday to junk status, a move that will increase its borrowing costs and means some institutions may not be able to hold its debt.


Qantas moved to reassure travel agents and passengers that this week's savage profit downgrade would not affect its operations.

Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian

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Excerpts from Manufacturing Consent
Noam Chomsky interviewed by various interviewers
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992


QUESTION: You write in Manufacturing Consent [(Pantheon, 1988)] that it's the primary function of the mass media in the United States to mobilize public support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector. What are those interests?

CHOMSKY: Well, if you want to understand the way any society works, ours or any other, the first place to look is who is in a position to make the decisions that determine the way the society functions. Societies differ, but in ours, the major decisions over what happens in the society -- decisions over investment and production and distribution and so on -- are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations and conglomerates and investment firms. They are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government. They're the ones who own the media and they're the ones who have to be in a position to make the decisions. They have an overwhelmingly dominant role in the way life happens.

You know, what's done in the society. Within the economic system, by law and in principle, they dominate. The control over resources and the need to satisfy their interests imposes very sharp constraints on the political system and on the ideological system.


QUESTION: When we talk about manufacturing of consent, whose consent is being manufactured?


CHOMSKY: To start with, there are two different groups, we can get into more detail, but at the first level of approximation, there's two targets for propaganda. One is what's sometimes called the political class. There's maybe twenty percent of the population which is relatively educated, more or less articulate, plays some kind of role in decision-making. They're supposed to sort of participate in social life -- either as managers, or cultural managers like teachers and writers and so on. They're supposed to vote, they're supposed to play some role in the way economic and political and cultural life goes on. Now their consent is crucial. So that's one group that has to be deeply indoctrinated. Then there's maybe eighty percent of the population whose main function is to follow orders and not think, and not to pay attention to anything -- and they're the ones who usually pay the costs.


QUESTION: ... You outlined a model -- filters that propaganda is sent through, on its way to the public. Can you briefly outline those?


CHOMSKY: It's basically an institutional analysis of the major media, what we call a propaganda model. We're talking primarily about the national media, those media that sort of set a general agenda that others more or less adhere to, to the extent that they even pay much attention to national or international affairs.


Now the elite media are sort of the agenda-setting media. That means The New York Times, The Washington Post, the major television channels, and so on. They set the general framework. Local media more or less adapt to their structure.


And they do this in all sorts of ways: by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis and framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits. They determine, they select, they shape, they control, they restrict -- in order to serve the interests of dominant, elite groups in the society.


The New York Times is certainly the most important newspaper in the United States, and one could argue the most important newspaper in the world. The New York Times plays an enormous role in shaping the perception of the current world on the part of the politically active, educated classes. Also The New York Times has a special role, and I believe its editors probably feel that they bear a heavy burden, in the sense that The New York Times creates history.


That is, history is what appears in The New York Times archives; the place where people will go to find out what happened is The New York Times. Therefore it's extremely important if history is going to be shaped in an appropriate way, that certain things appear, certain things not appear, certain questions be asked, other questions be ignored, and that issues be framed in a particular fashion. Now in whose interests is history being so shaped? Well, I think that's not very difficult to answer.


Now, to eliminate confusion, all of this has nothing to do with liberal or conservative bias. According to the propaganda model, both liberal and conservative wings of the media -- whatever those terms are supposed to mean -- fall within the same framework of assumptions.
In fact, if the system functions well, it ought to have a liberal bias, or at least appear to. Because if it appears to have a liberal bias, that will serve to bound thought even more effectively.


In other words, if the press is indeed adversarial and liberal and all these bad things, then how can I go beyond it? They're already so extreme in their opposition to power that to go beyond it would be to take off from the planet. So therefore it must be that the presuppositions that are accepted in the liberal media are sacrosanct -- can't go beyond them. And a well-functioning system would in fact have a bias of that kind. The media would then serve to say in effect: Thus far and no further.


We ask what would you expect of those media on just relatively uncontroversial, guided-free market assumptions? And when you look at them you find a number of major factors determining what their products are. These are what we call the filters, so one of them, for example, is ownership. Who owns them?
The major agenda-setting media -- after all, what are they? As institutions in the society, what are they? Well, in the first place they are major corporations, in fact huge corporations. Furthermore, they are integrated with and sometimes owned by even larger corporations, conglomerates -- so, for example, by Westinghouse and G.E. and so on.


So what we have in the first place is major corporations which are parts of even bigger conglomerates. Now, like any other corporation, they have a product which they sell to a market. The market is advertisers -- that is, other businesses. What keeps the media functioning is not the audience. They make money from their advertisers. And remember, we're talking about the elite media. So they're trying to sell a good product, a product which raises advertising rates. And ask your friends in the advertising industry. That means that they want to adjust their audience to the more elite and affluent audience. That raises advertising rates. So what you have is institutions, corporations, big corporations, that are selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses.


Well, what point of view would you expect to come out of this? I mean without any further assumptions, what you'd predict is that what comes out is a picture of the world, a perception of the world, that satisfies the needs and the interests and the perceptions of the sellers, the buyers and the product.


Now there are many other factors that press in the same direction. If people try to enter the system who don't have that point of view they're likely to be excluded somewhere along the way. After all, no institution is going to happily design a mechanism to self-destruct. It's not the way institutions function. So they'll work to exclude or marginalize or eliminate dissenting voices or alternative perspectives and so on because they're dysfunctional, they're dysfunctional to the institution itself.
Now there are other media too whose basic social role is quite different: it's diversion. There's the real mass media-the kinds that are aimed at, you know, Joe Six Pack -- that kind. The purpose of those media is just to dull people's brains.


This is an oversimplification, but for the eighty percent or whatever they are, the main thing is to divert them. To get them to watch National Football League. And to worry about "Mother With Child With Six Heads," or whatever you pick up on the supermarket stands and so on. Or look at astrology. Or get involved in fundamentalist stuff or something or other. Just get them away. Get them away from things that matter. And for that it's important to reduce their capacity to think.


Take, say, sports -- that's another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view. For one thing because it -- you know, it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance. [audience laughs] That keeps them from worrying about -- [applause] keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it's striking to see the intelligence that's used by ordinary people in [discussions of] sports [as opposed to political and social issues]. I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in -- they have the most exotic information [more laughter] and understanding about all kind of arcane issues. And the press undoubtedly does a lot with this.


You know, I remember in high school, already I was pretty old. I suddenly asked myself at one point, why do I care if my high school team wins the football game? [laughter] I mean, I don't know anybody on the team, you know? [audience roars] I mean, they have nothing to do with me, I mean, why I am cheering for my team? It doesn't mean any -- it doesn't make sense. But the point is, it does make sense: it's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements -- in fact, it's training in irrational jingoism. That's also a feature of competitive sports. I think if you look closely at these things, I think, typically, they do have functions, and that's why energy is devoted to supporting them and creating a basis for them and advertisers are willing to pay for them and so on.

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The mounting cost of long delays to Jetstar's offshoot in Hong Kong gaining approval to fly have been revealed in leaked internal documents that show it considered getting Qantas to store planes in Australia.
It raises questions about the risk of Qantas' investments in budget airlines in Asia at the same time as the national carrier is pleading for financial assistance from the federal government.
A letter from Qantas, obtained by BusinessDay, shows it proposed taking three A320 aircraft from Jetstar Hong Kong as recently as three weeks ago, and storing at least two of them in Australia.
Under an aircraft procurement agreement, Qantas Airways was to have taken title over the planes.
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But the airline said on Thursday that Jetstar Hong Kong had since decided not to sign off on the agreement, and the three new A320s were now parked indefinitely in France.
It would not disclose the cost of storing them there, saying it was up to Jetstar Hong Kong's board to decide what to do with them.
In a leaked email to Jetstar Hong Kong chief executive Edward Lau and other executives on November 15, its chief financial officer, Howard Cheung, detailed arrangements for sending one of the planes to Qantas.
He called a management meeting to discuss a range of scenarios, which included considering the ''cost of aircraft storage in Toulouse vs Australia''. The French city of Toulouse is the base for the plane's maker, Airbus.
The other items to be considered were ''technical concerns of aircraft storage in Australia and subsequent delivery'' to Hong Kong.
The need to store the planes in France highlights the risk Jetstar Hong Kong undertook in ordering new aircraft before it gained approval from the city's authorities to operate services there.
Qantas had earmarked the middle of this year for Jetstar Hong Kong to fly, but is now not likely to hear until next year whether authorities will give it approval to fly. Cathay Pacific has mounted an aggressive campaign against the new airline, in which Qantas has a 33 per cent stake.
However, the storage of the planes in France indicates that Jetstar Hong Kong does not expect to be able to fly any time soon. It was initially due to begin with three A320 planes, before growing to 18 by 2015.
''We confirm that Jetstar Hong Kong has advised us that it does not anticipate that it will receive the relevant authorisations prior to the expected delivery date for each of the relevant aircraft,'' Qantas said in the leaked letter to Jetstar Hong Kong on November 15 in reference to the three planes.
Qantas has repeatedly said it has adopted a ''capital light'' strategy in Asia via its budget offshoot Jetstar.
Federal Transport Minister Warren Truss has made it clear he does not want the government to be pressed into a situation where it is bankrolling Qantas' desire to open new airlines in other parts of the world.


Read more: Leak reveals risky moves in Jetstar bid

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