There’s an easy fix for the prime minister amid apparently ceaseless attention on his close relationship with Qantas, as detailed by Joe Aston in his new book. It’s a fix that involves the old virtue of making good policy good politics — with a dash of sweet revenge thrown in.
The more important point raised by Aston about Qantas has been lost in the focus on Albanese’s upgrades. The Chairman’s Lounge is used to skew airline competition in Australia in favour of Qantas by duchessing politicians, CEOs and senior executives — including in the public sector — to ignore the lower cost of travel with Virgin and whatever brief third airline competitors are around, and to give their travel budget to the national carrier.
So the easy fix is this: Albanese announces he’s ditching the Chairman’s Lounge, and that his frontbench will ditch it as well. Backbench Labor MPs will be told that if they want a frontbench spot or a committee chair spot, they must abandon it too. Every departmental secretary and whichever other senior bureaucrats are in the Chairman’s Lounge will be told that the giggle is over for them. And Albanese announces that no member of his ministry will accept an upgrade from Qantas too. What they buy, they fly. Same for the entire public service.
Sure, none of this will mean much for Albanese as prime minister, who has his own plane. But it will at a stroke remove the more serious problem with Qantas — the use of the Chairman’s Lounge to distort airline competition.
That will then leave Peter Dutton and the Coalition in the difficult position that either they match Labor and abandon the Chairman’s Lounge too and slum it with the rest of us at the gate, or their entire campaign against Albanese looks deeply hypocritical. You have a problem with upgrades? Fine. No more upgrades. For anyone. That especially goes for infrastructure spokesrorter Bridget McKenzie, who — in a flightpath that was as certain as night follows day from the moment she began attacking Albanese on the weekend — has now announced she’s been ringing around airlines to find out how many undeclared upgrades she’s had over the years.
For extra measure, Albanese could announce he will instruct the entire public service to spill their travel contracts and go back to the market to see whether Qantas can compete with Virgin fairly for those lucrative public service travel budgets, sans the Chairman’s.
While doing so, he could invite journalists from media outlets where CEOs, senior executives, editors and star presenters are members of the Chairman’s Lounge to pause all queries on the issue until they, too, have left the Chairman’s Lounge. After all, how can you possible report fairly on Qantas if senior colleagues slip in the unmarked door every time they head to the airport?
And for that matter, every large company should tell its investors whether their executives are members of the Chairman’s Lounge and what that means for the company’s travel budget. How much investor money is being wasted on overpriced travel so that the CEO can relax in the Chairman’s Lounge? We might find, as a result, that Australia’s airline industry is suddenly a lot more competitive than recent history suggests… or a lot more public service and corporate meetings might be conducted by Zoom.
One more thing. At Crikey, we’re big fans of Joe Aston, who turned Rear Window into one of the best vehicles for corporate and executive accountability in the country — he was one of the valiant few at the Financial Review who have continued to speak truth to business power rather than act as cheerleaders and recyclers of corporate pabulum from Australia’s inept management class. Moreover, he’s one of Australia’s most devastating and, on his day, funniest writers.
So this is a lot like “What have the Romans ever done for us?” — but where was Aston, and for that matter any of his AFR colleagues, when Alan Joyce performed perhaps the most offensive act of hubris in his entire reign at Qantas and illegally sacked 1,700 baggage handlers in August 2020? That decision years later is still having consequences in the hundreds of millions for the airline’s investors, not to mention the thousands of people who have lost their possessions in the Qantas baggage roulette ever since. Maybe we’ve missed it, but we’ve searched and only found one AFR piece on the sackings at the time — along with an endorsement by Tony Boyd of Joyce’s “restructuring” of the Qantas workforce a few months later.
Surely it couldn’t be, as per Boyd’s piece, that the AFR’s attitude to Joyce’s hubris was a bit different when it came to sacking workers and attacking unions, could it?
Will banning the Chairman’s Lounge achieve anything? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
