Australia’s least effective lobby group, the Business Council of Australia (BCA), is in dire need of a credibility boost.
Despite boasting an array of business luminaries on its board and having an open invitation in Canberra under both sides of politics, the BCA for the best part of a decade has been good only for vomiting up the same banal calls for industrial relations deregulation, increasing the GST and company tax cuts over and over again. Even the BCA’s Liberal mates got sick and tired of how ineffectual the council was in 2016.
Hapless CEO Jennifer Westacott has finally retired — taking a board gig with wage thieves Wesfarmers — to be replaced by former Liberal staffer Bran Black (because the BCA isn’t at all just a Liberal Party front). And chairman Tim Reed — whose tenure since 2019 has been marked by… erm… well, if anyone can think of anything, let us know — this week announced he too was moving on.
His replacement is the opportunity for the BCA to secure that much-needed injection of credibility, because it’s Geoff Culbert, the CEO of Sydney Airport.
Culbert is best known recently for exposing the sordid tactics of Qantas (and, to a much lesser extent, Virgin) in hoarding airport slots for flights it never intended to operate. Culbert’s revelations were confirmed when the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission charged Qantas with selling tickets for ghost flights it said were only scheduled to take up slots, and which were never going to operate.
So from February, Culbert will be chairman of the BCA, which features among its most prominent members… Qantas (who can forget then-CEO Alan Joyce, who was also on the BCA board, promenading around Canberra in 2017 demanding a cut to the corporate tax rate, when Qantas was paying no corporate tax).
What better time for the council to politely inform Qantas that its monopolist ways, anti-competitive behaviour, demonstrated illegal industrial relations tactics and rotten treatment of customers are not welcome in the big end of town anymore?
If you’re looking for a good reason why big business struggles to get its message across and influence policy, it’s Qantas. The airline itself is, along with the fossil fuel industry, one of the most influential in the country, and like big carbon, has Labor in a vice-like grip that means what Qantas wants, Qantas gets. But the hatred that Qantas has engendered in the community has helped convince the community that the political and economic system is too far tilted in favour of big business and away from workers and customers.
Booting Qantas out of the BCA would be a good start in signalling that the council wants to make a serious contribution to public debate and has no truck with those who abuse and exploit Australians.
The pretext can be the airline’s ridiculous ghost flights “defence”, in which it seriously argued it doesn’t sell tickets to flights, just sells a “bundle of rights”. Obviously that’s only the latest example of the spectacular misjudgment that marks the Qantas board and executive, but the contempt for customers and persistent inability to read the room around its misconduct continues to make Qantas the poster child for corporate greed.
If the Federal Court accepts Qantas’ bizarre defence, it will be disastrous for consumer laws, creating a precedent in other areas of activity across the economy where services or promises of performance are made. Inevitably, the government — even this government, which is owned by Qantas — will be forced to amend consumer law to make clear that you can’t redefine your way out of a clear-cut sale of a service for money.
That’s not something that would appeal to big business — especially once such laws get to the Senate and a committee inquiry starts looking at other ways to tighten the net around business in order to enforce consumer rights and stifle anti-competitive behaviour.
The Qantas AGM is on Friday. Chairman Richard Goyder is leaving next year, but other directors are leaving after Friday’s meeting and a couple are going in February. Goyder should depart this Friday, along with alleged branding guru Todd Sampson — not just for their failings during the Joyce era but for allowing this stupidly offensive ghost flights defence to see the light of day.
If they don’t, and Sampson survives the array of institutions voting their stock against him, it’s another excuse for the Business Council of Australia to dump the most complained-about company in the country from its illustrious membership list.
