There are precious few public company directors willing to pierce the cordiality of board proceedings with inexpedient truth. For most, the unspoken personal objective is continued membership of the professional directors’ club, the closest thing Australia offers to life peerage. And the Qantas board was its highest prize.

The elite status and soft perquisites of Qantas board membership were widely recognised, but its financial value was not. Qantas directors who partook even moderately of their travel entitlements were easily the highest-paid directors in Australia – comfortably more so than the directors of BHP and the Commonwealth Bank, companies twenty times larger than Qantas. This fact was always hidden in Qantas’ financial statements because Qantas heavily discounted the reported value of those travel benefits. This was permitted under the Corporations Act and Australian accounting standards, whose rules on remuneration reporting are incredibly loose.