Attacks on Alan Joyce are silly and totally unfair

The attacks on Qantas and its CEO Alan Joyce have ranged from the viciously unfair to the just plain embarrassingly silly.

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce. Picture: Getty Images

The attacks on Qantas and its CEO Alan Joyce have ranged from the viciously unfair to the just plain embarrassingly silly.

The great Four Corners expose last week was like a double episode of Seinfeld. An extended show about a big fat nothing.

That’s to say, nothing we didn’t already know was happening; that we knew why it was happening; and that the reasons were if not entirely excusable were at least understandable and to a large extent unavoidable.

Flights were late or being cancelled. Baggage was getting lost. Who knew, before Four Corners told us?

What about context? How was Virgin going? Other airlines around the world?

What about Covid? Not just the Covid of the last two years; but the post-Covid reality. As Joyce explained at the results, on any day as many as 300 pilots could be off with Covid or isolating.

Bizarrely, the ABC kicked off its great expose by ‘inviting’ any discerning viewer – that is to say, anyone who has ever flown – to immediately stop watching.

It kicked off with this heart-wrenching tale of a woman who nearly lost a precious bracelet from her father in her checked luggage which went missing, but did eventually turn up.

Hmm, if only there’d been an alternative to putting the bracelet in the checked luggage. Like, I dunno, wearing it? It did sort of warn you that if that’s the best Four Corners had, we probably weren’t going to get some great revelation. And true enough we didn’t; just bleating from what might be termed the “usual suspects” and unionists playing an all-too willing Four Corners off a break.

At the other extreme, we got a rather – as in, very – nasty hit piece on Joyce in Monday’s Fin Review, headlined “The ugly truth about Alan Joyce”.

It basically accused Joyce of running the airline into the ground just for his personal aggrandisement and enrichment.

The Fin’s article also showed a yawning – embarrassingly yawning – lack of understanding about financial dynamics, criticising Qantas’s extensive use of share buybacks.

There is a very simple, utterly anodyne reason for the buybacks. They’ve been used as quasi dividends because Qantas had massive accumulated tax losses and so could not deliver franking credits. The buybacks served two purposes: to return cash to (mainly institutional) holders, and to manage capital efficiently.

To say, as the Fin did, that this starved Qantas of cash that could have been spent on planes and staff, was just ludicrous and indeed embarrassingly ignorant.

To say, as the Fin did, this was done to place “Joyce’s interests” above that of customers and staff was outrightly and indeed viciously offensive.

Putting aside those seizing their chance to push their own barrow against the privatised national carrier with a new Labor government, do any of these critics have the slightest understanding what Qantas – and indeed, the rest of us – have just been through?

Back in March 2020, its entire business was closed. Overnight. Its revenues fell to zero.

This, a business with huge capital investment and a very big workforce. And it took a month for the Government to finally come up with JobKeeper.

Who knew, back in March 2020, how long the border closures were going to last? Unlike state and federal governments Joyce – and Qantas – couldn’t just put its spending on the national credit card.

Yes, he took drastic, brutal action. And yes, this meant Qantas couldn’t spring back to top form when the flights started again and rapidly expanded.

But as I wrote at the profit release, it is really quite extraordinary that Qantas even survived the last two years, far less how well it emerged.

And that buck really does stop at Joyce’s desk. And appropriately so.