Qantas: when the blarney turns to stone

SMH business editor Danny John 30 October 2011

In his efforts to win friends in the business community and influence the travelling public and the federal government with his hardline attack on the unions, Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce has swiftly become a polarising force within Australian society.

As genial and entertaining as he can be in private, Joyce has been uncompromising in public, particularly with his own workforce and especially with the union leaders who represent his employees.

There was already a fair amount of suspicion about Joyce's agenda and his motives when he took over from the long-serving Geoff Dixon, having set up the low-cost offshoot, Jetstar, which not only undercut Qantas' rivals but also the long term position of its parent airline.

Given his Irish background and Australia's deep cultural links with his home country, that may seem surprising to many but Joyce has never been one for emotion or, for that matter, dwelling on the past.To that end, his willingness to play hardball with the future of the most iconic of Australian companies has been interpreted as a sign that he doesn't fully appreciate or truly understand what Qantas means to the country: that is an institution, part of Australia's fabric, rather than just another company.

Joyce ... has argued that if Qantas is to survive and retain its affectionate place in Australian society the airline has to be dramatically changed from within. From Joyce's perspective that means saving Qantas from itself but to his opponents both inside and outside of the company the chief executive is being seen as more of a destroyer rather than a saviour.

Such polarised positions do not, therefore, bode well for the future of the Flying Kangaroo but given the increasingly ill-tempered nature of this dispute nobody should be surprised that it has come to this.

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Australian Financial Review, Laura Tingle 30 October 2011


So as things stand, we are seeing an industrial dispute where the government has been forced to intervene because employers and employees can't get an outcome. Its intervention has been forced by the company, not the unions, so it will be hard to make the public case that the government is dancing to the unions tune.

The Fair Work Act gives grounds for confidence that it can produce an outcome, even if it is a compulsory one, and the government's capacity to deal with industrial unrest can look good.

There are other potential upsides for Julia Gillard, starting with the fact that this dispute helps revitalise the political conversation, where issues from pokies to carbon and mining taxes have started to go round in such deep circles they have dug themselves into a hole.