Alan Joyce, the proverbial rainbow leprechaun, must be just about everyone’s favourite corporate megastar. Or maybe not. The gloss may be wearing off.
Rich as all get-out, preachy-woke, always in the news, even when he is half way out the Qantas door. Has never seen a leftie progressive cause he didn’t like. And always happy to shove his views down our throats. Despite the fact that no one ever voted for him. No one ever asked for his opinions on political, social or moral matters. Or asked him to turn his company into a public policy machine.
Same sex marriage was a no brainer. He even gave a million dollars to the SSM yes campaign. Very publicly.
Moreover:
Alan Joyce, boss of the Australian airline Qantas, has been named the world's most influential LGBT business executive in an annual listing.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-41755840
Not unexpectedly, Joyce is a Davos man (an “agenda contributor” for the World Economic Forum). And all for feminist rights, with all that that means for the innocent unborn.
Naturally, the “national carrier” is on board with the Aboriginal voice to parliament.
Qantas is providing travel for the Yes23 campaign and the Uluru Dialogue teams “so they can engage with regional and remote Australians”.
The airline is also decorating three planes with special “yes” campaign livery.
Outgoing Qantas chief Alan Joyce appeared on Monday with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Indigenous figures for the unveiling of the livery. It will be on a Qantas Boeing 737, a QantasLink Dash 8 Turboprop and a Jetstar Airbus A320.
Joyce has previously been a strong campaigner, notably on the same sex marriage issue.
The Qantas travel donation might invite some controversy, given the recent reaction against the airline and Joyce over high fares and late and cancelled flights.
Recently there has also been criticism of the apparent closeness between Albanese and Qantas and its CEO.
The government has refused Qatar Airways additional flights into Australia. It said it was acting in the “national interest”, referring variously to climate change and protecting local jobs.
https://theconversation.com/qantas-throws-weight-behind-voice-with-travel-for-yes-campaigners-211523
Climate change? Really? National interest? During a period of high inflation, it might be argued that cheaper flights might be in the national interest.
The Guardian noted:
While international air fares remain about 50% above pre-Covid levels, and Qantas remains constrained from increasing international services, Qatar’s push had been supported by state premiers, the tourism industry and partner airline Virgin Australia as making air fares cheaper and promoting economic spending and jobs.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/28/qantas-ceo-alan-joyce-senate-committee
Some of Qantas’s passengers aren’t that thrilled with yes vote propaganda on his planes.
Qantas has made a bold declaration of support for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament but the public pledge has gone down like a lead balloon among Aussies as support for the Yes vote continues to plummet. (Emphasis added).
Nor are they especially happy with Qantas’s “ghost flights”. Booking passengers on planes that were never going to leave the tarmac, since the flights were already cancelled, and not telling them this till two days before they were due to fly. Then there was the issue of hoarding take-off slots.
Joyce faced repeated questions [in the Senate] about Qantas’s high cancellation rate out of Sydney airport – with the Sydney-Melbourne route averaging a rate of just under one in 10.
He denied his company – which includes budget airline Jetstar – strategically schedules then cancels flights out of Sydney airport to block competitors from launching rival services, instead blaming air traffic controller shortages for stubbornly high cancellation rates out of the city.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/28/qantas-ceo-alan-joyce-senate-committee
Joyce always has slick answers. Yet the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) thinks that $250m might be an appropriate fine for Qantas’s nasty, illegal behaviour, over the ghost flights in particular.
https://australianaviation.com.au/2023/09/fine-qantas-250m-for-ghost-flights-says-accc/
News reports on the looming court case:
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will allege that for more than 10,000 flights scheduled to depart in mid 2022, Qantas did not notify existing ticket holders their flights had been cancelled for up to 48 days.
Yes, that was 10,000 flights. Hence News’ headline:
Qantas has issued a grovelling apology to customers after being accused of flogging tickets for “ghost flights” that were already cancelled.
$250m at the very least, I would think. Perhaps we could take some of that out of the leprechaun’s somewhat generous retirement plan. $24 million and growing.
Joyce is ever on the front foot over linking his personal causes to his company, unblushingly coming out some years back:
Mr Joyce has been criticised for using his company to promote change but he argued corporations should be vocal on social issues.
"We are vocal on gender equality issues, Indigenous issues and on LGBTI issues. That's what good businesses do. They're part of society. They help promote societal changes. They help promote what's good for our people."
He likes saying “that is what good businesses do”, as we shall see. It seems to be a Joyce mantra. This is simply a big lie repeated over and over. Never mind the core role of businesses to make profits and tend to their customers, employees and shareholders. They should also limit themselves to these objectives. They are not there for anything else. Joyce’s assumption that his own ideological peccadillos conveniently coincide with the interests of “our people”, presumably Qantas workers, is risible. But convenient. It is simply arrogant, self-serving bluster with which he seems to get away.
Joyce and his “husband” (Shane) are doing well at the moment, having pocketed $20 million from a house sale in Mosman (where else?). Not to mention Alan’s fortuitous offloading of a bundle of his Qantas shares just before a recent share price dip.
AFR Weekend has confirmed that the ACCC investigation began into the deliberately cancelled flights in earnest in late 2022, with some investors criticising the company for allowing its chief executive, Alan Joyce, to sell $17 million of shares in early June while it was under way.
“If the Qantas board knew [about the investigation], it does raise questions about continuous disclosure. It doesn’t pass the smell test,” said Perpetual’s former head of equities, Peter Morgan, of Mr Joyce’s share sale.
Centennial Asset Management’s Matthew Kidman, who was a Qantas investor until earlier this year, said there was no question that Mr Joyce “did an extremely good job for shareholders over a difficult period”. But the market had big questions over the share sale, even before the disclosure of the ACCC investigation and allegations, Mr Kidman added.
“What probably irks investors above all else is his selling of millions of Qantas shares in June while the company was undertaking a buyback of shares. This may well prove the top in the market. He should have waited until he departed the company in November,” Mr Kidman said.
Ouch.
Next, we come to Covid. Qantas led the charge on vaccine mandates. Edmund Stephen in The Spectator Australia noted in 2021:
By grossly attempting to control the private, medical lives of employees – when those lives have no connection to the workplace itself – Qantas unashamedly takes corporate dictatorship to a whole new level, threatening Australians with an unprecedented loss of control over their medical decisions.
Qantas’s web site still has a great spiel on vaccine mandates for travellers, probably just waiting for the next plandemic. It seems that Covid exceptionalism isn’t quite dead yet. The WEF and the World Health Organisation certainly haven’t given up the vaccines-for-the-planet fight just yet, either.
https://www.qantas.com/au/en/coronavirus/international-vaccination-certificate.html
Then there were the sackings and stand-downs. The Guardian headlined in June 2020:
Qantas to cut 6,000 jobs and keep 15,000 stood down in bid to survive coronavirus downturn.
Those numbers only grew. Massively. It became a bloodbath.
A total of 9,400 people have now left the Qantas Group – an increase on the prior estimate of 8,500 largely due to offshore job losses at airports and sales offices, some automation and an increase in voluntary redundancies.
Fortunately for us all, Alan was able to keep his job during Covid. Probably worked from (his Mosman) home. (And yes, it was Morrison, not Joyce, who shut off the country from the rest of the world).
Qantas generally did pretty well out of Covid, all up, what with ScoMo in Alan’s back pocket (so to speak). What is it with mediocre Australian prime ministers sucking up to Alan Joyce?
At the height of the pandemic, Qantas received around $2.7 billion in government funds. The then-Morrison government hired part of the Qantas fleet to keep some services operational – such as interstate patient transport, medicine delivery and sending agriculture products overseas.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-24/alan-joyce-qantas-record-profits-covid-bailout-730/102772616
And Qantas doesn’t want to give the Covid money back! As the Australian Broadcasting Corporation report headlines:
Qantas CEO Alan Joyce rules out paying back COVID 'bailout' as company celebrates record profits.
Ain’t crony capitalism grand? Qantas’s record profits are ever-so-slightly related to getting the Government to keep Qatar Airlines – a vastly superior carrier – from expanding its services Australia. I guess that as the price for Qantas’s support for the voice. Win-win. Smiles all round.
Now we've come out of COVID after nearly going bankrupt, being 11 weeks away from it, with the strongest balance sheet with the strongest profitability we ever had, and the biggest investment profile we've ever had," CEO Alan Joyce told 7.30.
"That's what good companies do."
That’s what good companies do. Hmmmm. It smells a bit like corporate welfare to me. And now kick-backs. No wonder Little Al wants to get other stories, like his support for the voice, onto the front pages.
The rewards extend even to Albo Junior:
Albanese has been embarrassed by a report that his son, Nathan, had been made a member of the exclusive Qantas Chairman’s Lounge.
The PM would have faced questions on these issues had he spoken to reporters after the Qantas event, but he did not do so.
Funny that.
But will the deal-making actually help the yes vote?
Asked by The Conversation for the total dollar value of the travel Qantas is providing for the “yes” campaigners, and who would be eligible, the airline only said it would be fairly modest.
Apart from the specific example of Qantas, there is now some feeling that corporates’ involvement in the referendum may alienate rather than persuade some voters.
https://theconversation.com/qantas-throws-weight-behind-voice-with-travel-for-yes-campaigners-211523
As Sky News reported:
Qantas comes under fire over new Yes Voice campaign amid backlash against corporations picking sides in referendum.
And the yes vote continues to plummet in the polls, possibly in direct inverse proportion to the ratcheting up of public preaching by celebrity executives and similar right-on types.
Andrew Bogut wasn’t especially impressed:
Australian basketball legend Andrew Bogut heaped criticism on to Qantas and said it was no surprise “Another recipient of heavy Gov grants shockingly backs the Gov”.
“Would have never guessed,” Bogut said on Twitter.
“All this whilst you will be delayed and late to wherever you are going and have your luggage used as a piñata!”
Setting aside the question of corporates getting involved in politics, is it really commercially smart for an airline to risk really pissing off at least half its customer base by brazenly taking one side in an even contest?
Yet no one should be surprised at Qantas’s championing of woke extravaganza like the voice. After all, you get prayers of the faithful prayers for the voice at Catholic Masses. You get indoctrination in the schools.
You get endless corporate messaging. You get the ABC. The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (of course). Johnny Farnham. The fact-checker industrial complex. You get the sporting bodies and the NGOs and the law bodies (especially disgracefully) and the rest of them. And with Joyce’s record, it was inevitable that his planes would be plastered with the appropriate stickers. He just couldn’t help himself.
It is said that Qantas is both “our national carrier” and even (at least back in the day), “the spirit of Australia”. Remember the Gondwana Indigenous voices on the beach? And the late, great (and, yes, gay) Peter Allen? He still called Australia home, and flew Qantas to get here. Oh yes, Qantas has played the jingoistic patriot card for the longest time. What is a national flag carrier anyway? Do we need one? How many of us would pick Qantas, if asked? Perhaps we could outsource it to Qatar. Or better still, Air New Zealand.
And the spirit of Australia?
The spirits of Australians are very low on so many fronts, I would think, right now. While Joyce prances and emotes effortlessly from one progressive cause to the next, and his airline scores profits off the back of the taxpayer – remember that the largesse doled out to Qantas was part of ScoMo’s nearly-one-trillion-dollar punt on Covid being a real pandemic and not a fake one – the rest of us have to make do with vaccine passports (not dead yet by any stretch, as noted), a cost of living explosion, a housing crisis, exploding overseas migration unwanted by voters, threats to our energy supply and potential power blackouts, a landscape dotted with solar panel farms and wind turbines, flatlining economic performance, productivity in the toilet, sinister new laws designed to crush free speech, plunging educational standards, political corruption, rampant government overreach and (as Judge Doug “Bulldog” Drummond recently put it) the reconquest of Australia, engineered by a cabal of activists pretending to speak for Aborigines.
All of this while Alan Joyce still wants us all to come fly with him. Perhaps, instead, Qantas executives might be hauled off to customer service school. And advised sternly to stay out of politics. And give up crony capitalism. And social justice. And shady share dealing. And predatory slot hoarding. And ghost flights.
Murky isn’t a good look. And, after it all, I wonder how long Mr and Mrs Alan will “still call Australia home”.
With apologies to Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn.
Paul Collits
4 September 2023
Who is in who’s pocket our previous health minister Hunt is a WEF. Graduate. Pollies should add that to the conflict of interest report.
I gave up on Qantas 15 yrs ago and family know that if I die OS my ashes are not to fly Qantas.