Opinion: ‘New’ faces, but still part of the same rotten culture

Vanessa Hudson and Steven Miles believe they live by different rules and that unlike you and I, are unaccountable for past deeds, writes Mike O’Connor.

Vanessa Hudson and Steven Miles

Herewith something to puzzle over as you digest the feasting of the last few days and promise to take up running, walking, cycling and swimming vast distances in the new year.

What do Premier Steven Miles and Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson have in common?

Give up? It’s an unshakeable belief that you and I have the attention span of goldfish, that each day’s dawn wipes away transgressions that may have preceded it and that any bad things that may have happened were really somebody else’s fault.

Ms Hudson sat at former CEO Alan Joyce’s side as Qantas illegally sacked workers, deferred new aircraft purchases, made it all but impossible for customers to obtain refunds, ran a customer call centre that was a sad joke, sat on millions of dollars of money that rightly belonged to customers, gamed the employee awards system, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission sold tickets for flights that had been cancelled and effectively trashed the once glittering reputation of the airline while becoming one of the most highly paid executives in Australian corporate history.

She has said she’s sorry and the airline will do better but she was present for everything that Joyce did.

She was part of the inner sanctum, part of the culture that put profit, the share price and inevitably, Joyce’s personal remuneration above the interests of its workers and customers.

But she’s said sorry and tomorrow’s a new day and all that and there’s no point in dwelling in the past.

You and I are answerable for our actions but not the likes of Ms Hudson who expect us to meekly accept the absurd position that somehow she had nothing to do with all that nastiness and in any case has seen the light and been reborn.

Mr Miles has undergone a similar rebirth. He sat at his predecessor’s right hand for years, stood behind her at countless media conferences nodding furiously in agreement and championed the government’s every move as it alienated more and more voters with its incompetence, laziness, secrecy and its control by its trade union puppet masters.

That’s all in the past. We could have done better. Sorry about that but if I’d had the guts to stand up in cabinet and fought for better governance for Queenslanders I might have been sent to the backbench.

Miles is Palaszczuk in a blue suit and tie who seems to believe that by saying after nine years that we’ll do better, a long suffering electorate will say “Gee, that’s fair enough, Mr Premier. We all make mistakes.”

If seen only in the light of the human misery, heartache and suffering inflicted by his government’s politically driven Covid-19 border policies alone, sorry just doesn’t cut it.

We are asked to believe that now that he has descended Christ-like from the mount or in this case the hill on which Government House stands, he has been transfigured and now shines with a golden light.

How is it that a degree of transparency and honesty with the public is now a good and a great thing when it was an absolute anathema just a few weeks ago?

Oh, that’s right. There will be an election next year and things don’t look too flash for Team Miles so it’s time to stage manage a political renaissance.

That’s fine. Go for your life mate, but what grates is the expectation that we simple souls are so stupid as to believe that overnight, the Premier has seen the error of his ways and that henceforth it will all be sweetness and light as he leads us to the sunlit uplands.

Hudson and Miles believe they live by different rules and that unlike you and I, are unaccountable for past deeds.

If Hudson survives, it will be a travesty because how can Qantas recover while she remains? As for Miles, the simple souls will decide.

Footnote. Prime Minister Albanese has come from behind with a late entry in the Did They Really Say That? awards for 2023 with his description of recent heavy rainfall in the height of summer in the middle of the cyclone season in Far North Queensland as “unprecedented”.

Good one, Albo. Snow at this time of the year would be unprecedented. Rain, not so much.

Thank you for your support in 2023. See you next year.