‘Game over. Life’s short’: Virgin boss Jayne Hrdlicka clears the air about past – and present – turbulence

Before I meet Jayne Hrdlicka, the CEO of Virgin Australia, I call a lot of people. This is because what I know about aviation could be written on the head of the world’s tiniest pin, riveted to the world’s tiniest airplane (the sweetly named Bumble Bee II, which plummeted to earth while carrying its inventor, Robert Starr of Phoenix, Arizona, in 1988). It’s also because she has a reputation in some quarters for being, shall we say, difficult.

There’s no doubt she’s professionally formidable. Though only three of the world’s top 100 airlines have female CEOs, Virgin will be her second time in the role: she was CEO of the Jetstar Group between 2012 and 2017, during which time the low-cost Qantas subsidiary nearly doubled its profits and increased its revenue by $2 billion. Then she became CEO of A2 Milk, whose stock price rose 40 per cent during her brief tenure. Before these roles, she was the first female partner in Australia at management consultants Bain & Company, a director on the Woolworths board and the first female chair of Tennis Australia, re-elected unopposed in 2019 for three more years.

Such unyielding success can be intimidating, but in addition, say journalist colleagues, she can be guarded and defensive when it comes to interviews. Friends of mine who’ve come across her in business, meanwhile, agree she’s extremely able but “not very likeable”.

“Steely-edged,” says one.

“Good luck,” says another, sounding doubtful. “Rather you than me.”

Excellent.

I meet Jayne Hrdlicka at 10am at Brisbane airport on a cloudless Queensland day. She’s small and whippet-lean, and carries herself tilted slightly forwards, as if she might break into a run at any moment. (Perhaps just in case, she’s wearing trainers.) She has a low, American-accented voice, and a line in ironic self-deprecation that is recognisably Australian. She also smiles more than I was expecting – a surprise, not least because when we arrive at the airport car park she cannot make the payment machine work. Nor can she find her car.

We’re standing at the car park entry, and she’s waving her credit card across the payment screen, and nothing is happening. She tries again and again. I’m about to offer my own credit card (“Journalist Springs for CEO Parking”) when the Virgin PR representative leans between us and points gently to a large sign taped at eyeline. “Not in service,” he reads.

“Aha!” says Hrdlicka. She moves to another machine, and pays successfully. She walks confidently towards a large black four-wheel drive. She fiddles with her key. There’s a pause. “This is not my car,” she announces, peering in the front window.

There’s another pause while she looks around. She does not appear flustered or frustrated. “Maybe over here …” she suggests, and we set off towards a different vehicle in another block. The front passenger seat of this one – a Jeep – contains a pile of papers, a battered drink bottle (Hrdlicka has two teenage sons) and a chewed dog ball (she also has three dogs). It beeps
reassuringly at Hrdlicka’s arrival, and we all get in.

“Okay,” says Hrdlicka, smiling. “Not a great start. Let’s see how we go from here.”

In common with the car park, Hrdlicka’s reign as CEO of Virgin began less than smoothly late last year. In April, the airline itself collapsed, after years of failed attempts to compete with Qantas as a full-service airline. Virgin posted seven solid years of losses even before the pandemic hit, and when global air travel collapsed amid the catastrophe of COVID-19, its downward dive became a death spiral into voluntary administration.

Virgin’s demise was greeted with consternation by politicians, who were horrified at the prospect of bailing it out, as well as by ordinary Australians, many of whom had ticket money left hanging in limbo ($352 right here, Virgin!).

There was sadness, too. For more than two decades, Virgin Airlines had been the glamorous party girl in Australian aviation, a foil to Qantas’s matronly grand dame – and no one likes to see the party girl lose.

But Virgin rose again. After months of administration and a high-profile bidding process, American private equity firm Bain Capital finally purchased Virgin last September for $3.5 billion. The airline would be stronger than ever, promised Bain: the future of Australian aviation was assured.

Or was it? Not everyone welcomed Bain’s brand of private equity salvation. Specifically, not everyone welcomed Hrdlicka. Her most vocal critics were the unions, who remembered her tenure at the Qantas group during a historic period of industrial action, starting in 2011. When unions realised Hrdlicka was advising Bain on its bid – and more, when they began to suspect she was Bain’s pick for CEO – “the proverbial shit hit the fan,” as one observer put it to me.

Unions refused to allow Hrdlicka’s presence in meetings (though she maintains she only missed one); they supported rival bids, hoping to avoid her influence; they walked out of enterprise agreement negotiations. Some of this was sabre-rattling, but there were real issues at stake.

There were serious doubts about whether Bain would keep its promises not to slash jobs and turn Virgin into a low-cost airline of the ill-fated Tigerair variety. There were questions about Bain’s long-term commitment to the company; fears for the future of the aviation industry; and criticisms of Hrdlicka’s own management style and suitability. Why had she left A2? What had really happened with the unions? And what would she do at Virgin? Did she – does she – have what it takes to manage a 6000-strong, traumatised workforce, already cut by 3000, through such an unprecedented time?

Carla Jayne Hrdlicka was born in Wichita, Kansas, in the wheat plains heartland of America – country that Hrdlicka, 58, remembers as “gorgeously beautiful. You can see forever, it feels like. You can see storms building on the horizon.” There’s an idyllic, small-town vibe to her childhood. Her mother Carol came from old Kansas ranching stock; pictures from Hrdlicka’s yearbooks at Newton High School show her in blue denim and plaid shirts, complete with a ’70s bowl cut and flicked bangs.

But alongside this apple-pie Americana runs the other vein in Hrdlicka’s history: a story like a European art film, complicated and tragic. Hrdlicka’s father, Richard, was born in Prague, now the capital of the Czech Republic. A talented only child, despite the horrors of German occupation during World War II, and Russian control afterwards, he learnt fluent English, and in 1947 he travelled to France for the World Scout Jamboree. The following year, in Paris again as part of a national ice hockey team, he defected. He was 16.

Telling this story, Hrdlicka’s eyes fill with tears. “As a mother, thinking of my 16-year-old,” she says, “I’m sure he thinks he’d be totally fine alone in Europe! But to lose your only child? That’s just a diabolical thing. And as a kid, knowing you may never see your parents again? [Indeed, Richard Hrdlicka’s father died before he was able to return to Prague.] Both sides are impossible.”

But as well as European tragedy, this is also a story of pure Hollywood triumph. Alone in France, the teenager wrote to other teenagers: the American scouts he’d met the previous year. These boys received his letters, raised money, and brought him to the US – all the way along the yellow brick road to Kansas. There, says his daughter, he raised her and her younger brother David to believe that “if you work hard enough, there are no rules. Absolutely anything is possible. He embraced everything with open arms and a lot of joy.”

Hrdlicka’s positivity and relish for work seem to come directly from her father – the penniless immigrant who finished his career as general counsel of Fiat for North America. “I always knew Jayne could do anything,” he says, now aged 88, from his home in New Mexico. “She was very good at school; she worked hard but it came easy. But I remember one time, she had this beautiful ski jacket we’d given her – wonderful colours, just gorgeous. She was so proud of it. And she wore it to her part-time job at Dillons grocery store, and it got stolen.

“Anyhow, she found out who stole it – a girl at the store – and she called her, then went round to her house. It was amazing. She stayed an hour, and she talked to the girl, and she got her jacket back. And she and that girl became friends. It’s one thing to be bright, but I always thought, negotiating like that as a teenager – it was kind of remarkable.”

Hrdlicka’s positivity and relish for work seem to come directly from her father Richard.Credit: Tennis Australia

Hrdlicka was state tennis champion at high school and graduated in the top two per cent of her class (“French held me back!” ). She studied maths and
economics at Colorado College, a selective university where instead of the normal program of semester-long courses in several subjects, she worked on only one course at a time, all day every day, in intensive 18-day blocks: a system that rewarded deep focus, an intense work ethic and a total absence of procrastination. She graduated on the dean’s list. Then, after only two years’ business experience instead of the usual three to five, she was accepted into Tuck Business School at Dartmouth, where she completed an MBA.

From there, she joined Bain & Company (a different company to Bain Capital, Virgin’s buyers) in 1987, leaving to run operations at a small US company called Skybox International. She arrived in Australia in 1994 to run a sports trading card company, Dynamic Marketing. She was only 30, and her parents hated the thought of her being so far away. But she’d wanted a CEO job since Dartmouth, and she thought she’d only be gone “five years. Maybe six.”

Twenty-five years later, Hrdlicka has an Australian husband, Australian sons and an Australian life. Like her father, she’s ended up a long way from where she began.

In 1997, Hrdlicka returned to Bain, this time in Australia. There’s an anecdote she tells about this time. At company dinners with her husband Jason (a former executive of American bank Wells Fargo) “inevitably, conversation would turn to ‘Poor you, Jayne, it must be terrible. You must never see your kids; the trade-offs you must make.’ I would listen for a while, and then I’d say, ‘Actually, I have the best of both worlds, because I spend a lot of time with my kids, I’m always home by six, I’m always there for the special moments, I always do drop-offs.’

“And you’d get the wife going, ‘Well! Gary leaves the house at 7.30 in the morning and he doesn’t come home till 8, and then he’ll have dinner for half an hour and then he goes back to work!’ And I’d be like, ‘Oh well … I’m sure Gary earns a lot more money than I do.’ ”

Hrdlicka in 2008 with father Richard, son Alec and husband Jason.Credit: Courtesy of Jayne Hrdlicka

She tells this story laughing, but you can see a lot of Jayne Hrdlicka’s personality in it. There’s a refusal to play the victim; a genuine positivity; a real commitment to doing things her way. And also an impatience at being questioned; an edge of superiority; a clear and, perhaps to Australian ears, slightly off-putting, pride in her own priorities and achievements. You can imagine, too, that such a conversation might not endear Hrdlicka to Gary – let alone his wife.

Hrdlicka does rub some people up the wrong way. People who’ve worked with her say she makes unreasonable demands in terms of output and time-frames – and there’s no doubt she relishes her professional life, and is prepared to work a lot harder than most people, frankly, are willing to.

On the flipside, her commitment to family and her life outside of work also irritates people: some former Qantas colleagues still say that during the Australian Open she was so busy watching the tennis she was “unreachable” unless your name was Alan Joyce. This year during her speech after the Open men’s final, her comments about the vaccine rollout and the Victorian government’s support were booed by a Covid-weary crowd.

What was that about? “Well, people in Melbourne have been locked down for a long time,” says Hrdlicka. “It was a chance for them to really be expressive again!” She smiles. “It was an interesting night. The atmosphere in the stadium was electric – and also pretty rowdy. But as my 16-year-old son said, that’s what made it so great: the whole night was really emotional.”

Many people admire this engagement with life beyond work. “She always struck me as almost deliberately understated but very self-assured, very openly committed to her family time. Good on her,” says another Qantas source, who is female. “She was clearly focused on her own goals rather than in love with some grand Qantas mythology.”

“I think about it in terms of outcomes, rather than time clocked,” is Hrdlicka’s take. She makes time for her kids and family by working well outside standard office hours. “It’s not about being in the office: it’s about delivering great results. If you do that, you earn the right to flexibility.” In the case of the Australian Open this year, she says she was “getting up to be on calls at 4am, and then being at the desk at Virgin from eight to eight, and then doing more tennis after that. Luckily, I don’t need a lot of sleep.”

Tennis is a family passion: her sons Josh, now 13, and Alec, 16, spent last year at a tennis academy in Europe (which reportedly costs upwards of $80,000 a year). “My younger one, Josh, came in one morning and pitched this idea of a year at tennis school,” she recalls. “He’d narrowed it down to two possibilities! And in the end, I said to Jase, ‘If that’s what he wants to do and he’s got the courage to do it, as long as we’re comfortable he’s going to be safe, I’m inclined to let him go.’ ” She laughs. “And then, suddenly Alec’s going too! But actually, I felt more comfortable with them going as a little family pod.”

Hrdlicka with Novak Djokovic at this year’s Australian Open men’s final.Credit: Getty Images

Alec is still in Europe, hoping to play college tennis in the US; Josh has returned to Australia and is attending school in Queensland. Hrdlicka’s life is one of great privilege – endless international travel (at least in the old world), A-list socialising (parties with US Vogue’s Anna Wintour, tennis with Treasurer Josh Frydenberg), the blessing of never having to think about money. In her final year at Qantas (when she briefly headed the group’s lucrative loyalty business), Hrdlicka earned $8.1 million; at A2 she took home some $10.2 million in 18 months. But at Virgin, the management equity pool that is a normal part of such private equity deals has the potential to make these sums look like small change. Payday will arrive if and when Bain is able to cash in by re-floating the company. As one ex-banker explains it to me:
“If things go well, she has the potential to make life-changing money. Tens of millions.”

For this, however, Hrdlicka will have to convince staff earning a minuscule fraction of her income that she’s not a private equity stooge, but actually on their side: that she cares about their jobs, their wages, their lives. She will have to get Virgin not just running, but running profitably, during the greatest crisis in aviation history.

When Hrdlicka rejoined Bain in Australia, she was the most senior woman for three entire levels of management. In the early 2000s, along with colleague Scott Tanner, she ran an analysis of women’s career paths and how to improve them that ended up in a global ‘toolkit’ developed by Australian advocacy organisation Chief Executive Women to empower women in leadership roles. “Jayne was instrumental in putting that toolkit together,” recalls former CEW president Diane Grady, who says it helped thousands of women. “Bain did two years of pro bono work on it, all under her auspices. She was fantastic.”

Grady was the first woman outside the US elected to McKinsey’s global partnership, so she shares a certain fellow feeling with Hrdlicka. “She has a really impressive ability to confront different situations or individuals in a way that doesn’t leave blood on the floor,” she says. “She is very clear, very direct, but she lets everyone keep their dignity.” Still getting the stolen ski jacket back without alienating the thief, it seems.

“Jayne has a really impressive ability to confront different situations or individuals in a way that doesn’t leave blood on the floor.”

But Grady acknowledges some people – which in the corporate world, still means overwhelmingly “men” – have conflicting views about her. “The thing to realise is that the rumour mill of the male business network is mind- blowing,” she explains. “So if someone hears that she’s abrasive, for example, and then they meet her and she isn’t afraid to put an issue on the table in a way that’s more direct than a lot of people, then confirmation bias takes over and they believe everything they hear.“

Many of the things she’s criticised for, moreover, are qualities – directness, toughness, driving people hard – that would never be questioned in a male CEO. Indeed, they’d be taken as positives.

The fact is, says Grady, women are still not accepted in business: they’re still on the outer of almost every circle. Hrdlicka has dealt with this exclusion her entire career. Nonetheless, she’s built genuine relationships that have lasted a long time. Qantas CEO Alan Joyce was her first client in Australia; the chair of Woolworths her second.

“I’ve known Jayne a long time,” says Joyce via email, who reportedly rang to congratulate her when she was appointed Virgin CEO. She attended his wedding in 2019, and the pair often speak – though, as Joyce admits, that might be more difficult now they’re direct competitors. “There’s an elephant in the room where there wasn’t one before,” he acknowledges. “[But] she’s always been astute, analytical, a quick thinker. And very driven.”

Hrdlicka with former boss, Qantas head Alan Joyce, with whom she is now a direct competitor.Credit: Jamie Freed

Hrdlicka clearly values people like Joyce and Grady, and she can clearly inspire loyalty. Lisa Burquest, her chief people officer, followed her from Jetstar to A2, and now to Virgin. “She runs fast,” she says, “and she expects people to pull their weight. She’ll say, ‘We’re not here running the Mickey Mouse Club, we’re here for this opportunity, and we’re lucky to have it.’ And she likes to win – she’s deeply competitive. But she’s also really human. I’m a mother of five boys, and I feel safe doing what I need to do for my family. I remember once my mother was very ill, and Jane stood me up, walked me to the door, and said, ‘Get on a plane right now.’ ”

During my day with her in Brisbane, Hrdlicka is open, friendly and funny. Of course, there’s a chance my ineffable journalistic charm has won her over. There’s also a chance she’s trying to remake her image: maybe she’s using her ineffable charm to win me over. Or maybe she’s simply trusting that her ability and achievements will tell their own story. This has been a good strategy throughout her career, after all: ability and achievements have always trumped rumour and opinion. Or they did, until December 2019.

When Hrdlicka joined The A2 Milk Company in 2018, it was considered a two-way coup. A2 acquired a superstar CEO, while Hrdlicka secured the top job at a publicly listed company that was an unlikely sharemarket darling. During her 18 months at A2, it recorded a 40 per cent rise in share price, a 75 per cent surge in profit and increased its market value by $5 billion. Then suddenly, in December 2019, she left. And a storm of critical attention broke over her.

As CEO of A2, Hrdlicka “ruffled a few feathers” but oversaw a 75 per cent surge in profit.Credit: Josh Robenstone

It began with stories about the way she’d sold A2 shares not long after starting with the milk company. Hrdlicka sold her first tranche of shares, received in compensation for losing incentives when she departed Qantas, a few months after taking the job. These were valued at nearly $4 million. The following September she sold another tranche, for $2.06 million. As it happened, 16 other directors and executives sold A2 shares at about the same time as her first transactions, as did A2 chairman David Hearn soon after her second. She had tax and house purchase obligations to meet, she said.

Nonetheless, it was considered bad form for the boss to have disposed with this “skin in the game” so early in her role.

Secondly, reports began to appear claiming Hrdlicka had forked out $19 million on Bain consultants at A2, who were “crawling over the business”. Suddenly, she looked like a nepotistic spendthrift.

“Those reports weren’t true,” she says now. “The total spend on consulting and other things went to $19 million. But only a small proportion was Bain fees. I mean, we didn’t have an IT person in the company when I arrived. Market cap of, I think, $6 billion, and not a single IT person. Supply chain, the ERP system, everything was super fine for a company that’s turning over $50 million in revenue, but not one who’s on its way to a billion. So of course you have to spend to get people who know what they’re doing, because you don’t have anybody inside the company who does.”

For a rare moment, she looks frustrated. “All that stuff about the $19 million was just BS – but I did really appreciate Geoff coming out and saying, ‘Thank goodness she did that.’ ”

She’s referring to Geoff Babidge, A2’s previous CEO, who returned temporarily after her departure, and was subsequently quoted saying the work she’d commissioned was of “high quality” and “very valid”. Nevertheless, the sense lingered that she’d spent too much, given jobs to the boys, and been at odds with her management.

The third and final criticism was the most amorphous, but also the most persistent. Searching for reasons behind her abrupt departure, media and the business community began to speculate about a clash of cultures. Had Hrdlicka, people wondered, been too much “the change agent”, too determined on a “my way or the highway” approach? Unwittingly or not, A2 chairman David Hearn, who’d been at odds with Hrdlicka over what he called “execution and balance”, fanned these rumours by saying that she’d “ruffled a few feathers” during her time at A2.

In the midst of all this innuendo and speculation, Hrdlicka’s resignation statement said only that she was leaving for “family reasons”. Nobody believed her. Ironically, she was judged exactly as men are judged in such circumstances: with a collective eye-roll. No leader ever really leaves a job for “family reasons”: it’s simply a polite fiction to cover either 1) personal scandal, 2) outstanding incompetence or 3) terminal unpopularity. In Hrdlicka’s case, the rumour mill settled on 3). But the wording of Hrdlicka’s final statement was slightly unusual.

“There have been unforeseen changes in my personal circumstances in the very recent past and they must take priority at this time.” These changes have never been explained, but when I began researching this story I found a couple of glancing references in Queensland media to her husband receiving chemotherapy for cancer. What? Had she left A2, in fact, because her husband had cancer?

“Yes.” Hrdlicka sits up at the table, hands spread out in front of her.

“Here’s the background. When I joined A2, I was away almost all the time. And Jason had been having this issue with his leg.” She smiles, raising her hands. “I was extremely unsympathetic about it. In fact I remember when it first started, my younger son and I were rolling our eyes and saying, ‘You’re such a hypochondriac! You’re overweight, you’re unfit! Go and get yourself fit and that will sort it.’ And so when I was away he actually did get fit, lost weight, the whole thing. And he started going to doctors to figure out the story with his leg. He had some ultrasounds done, went to a great urologist, found nothing. And then we got to the third week of November [2019], and he went back for a three-month check-up. He had another ultrasound, with a different person, who happened to check the kidneys. And spotted this huge tumour.”

She sits back. “So that was kind of it. Game over. Life’s short. We just said, ‘We’ve got a massive problem on our hands, we don’t know exactly how it’s going to play out, but I can’t keep doing what I’m doing, and I can’t see how this job can be done any differently, because all the growth, and all the profit, everything’s in China. And I can’t look shareholders in the eye and say I can do this job in Australia.’ And so I left.” She pauses, then says evenly: “And I don’t think A2 handled that particularly well.”

[Following publication of this story, A2 chairman David Hearn disputed three statements made by Hrdlicka.1. He said $NZ26 million in consultancy fees during her A2 tenure were spent on Bain. 2. He said the board asked Hrdlicka to leave A2. 3. He said there was a “dedicated IT manager” at A2 when Hrdlicka arrived.]

“So that was kind of it. Game over. Life’s short. We just said, ‘We’ve got a massive problem on our hands.’ ”Credit: Kristoffer Paulsen

One wonders if Hrdlicka’s first few months at Virgin Australia would have been easier if people had known about her husband’s illness. On the one hand, it’s a personal matter and should have no bearing on judgments about her professional ability. On the other, it would have helped balance the narrative that she was untenably unpopular at A2. That, in turn, might have helped her at Virgin.

The excellently named Michael Kaine is the head of the Transport Workers Union (TWU). He says when Hrdlicka arrived at Virgin, there was a feeling among his members of “We know you, but we don’t know you”. Was she a skilled CEO with the aviation experience and energy to steer them out of this unprecedented crisis? Or was she, as memories from the industrial battles at the Qantas group and now the A2 rumours seemed to suggest, some kind of Disney villain – a Cruella de Vil figure, as she’s been described in The Australian Financial Review’s Rear Window column – who’d ride roughshod over their concerns and run the airline “without an ounce of human feeling”?

Hrdlicka’s history with the unions was certainly patchy. Steve Purvinas, federal secretary of the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association (ALAEA), remembers a real sense of “an anti-union playbook” during her Jetstar tenure. “I remember one EBA meeting,” he recalls. “They were obliged to meet with us under the Fair Work Act. And to meet their obligation, they met with us for six minutes. Then they asked us to leave.” That was typical of the company’s attitude, he says, and though he admits he’s not sure how much of it can be directly attributed to Hrdlicka as CEO, “she did oversee it. For the six years she was in charge, Jetstar did all they could to avoid dealing with our union.”

Others, meanwhile, point to wage freezes under Hrdlicka at Jetstar, and her agreement that these should be partially compensated for by bonuses – on the condition that workers not take industrial action against the company. “That’s Hrdlicka’s hard edge,” says a union official: “It was like ‘You won’t get it unless you behave.’ ” Sure enough, when Jetstar workers did take action, albeit after Hrdlicka had left the airline, outstanding bonuses were not paid.

During the Virgin sale, further distrust was prompted by Bain Capital’s sudden removal of then Virgin CEO Paul Scurrah, who was popular with unions and had seen his workforce faithfully through the crisis. Bain gave repeated assurances that Scurrah’s job was safe; then suddenly – and after he’d used his credit with workers to persuade them to vote for the Bain bid – he was gone, and Hrdlicka installed.

This less than classy bait-and-switch move was made by the leader of the Bain bid, Mike Murphy, but it’s hard to believe Hrdlicka was ignorant of the plan. Paul Scurrah, who has preserved a dignified silence since his resignation, did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Hrdlicka’s first day as CEO was November 17. By this point, she had already spent three weeks meeting staff and developing a US presidential-style 100-day plan. Since then, Virgin has reconfirmed its plan to offer business class and position itself in the market as a mid-range airline; it has committed to an existing order for 25 new planes; and Hrdlicka has restructured her top team and reconfigured the company’s commercial systems.

Virgin is now flying at about 50 per cent of pre-COVID capacity, and while Hrdlicka says she expects it to be at “roughly 70 per cent during the Easter school holidays”, whether it stays at that level remains to be seen. The airline intends to fly internationally, though it will need new long-haul planes to get beyond New Zealand, and perhaps Bali. “Domestically, we will fly to all major airports and regional holiday destinations.” Virus cases, political agendas and border closures permitting, of course.

That’s a lot to get done, I say. “But it’s very energising,” says Hrdlicka, looking thrilled. “These opportunities don’t come along very often, and when they do you’ve just got to grab them with both hands.”

“The negative media was pretty punishing … I’m sure it gets a lot of clicks to see a senior female who everybody’s bad-mouthing.”

In December, Hrdlicka also signed in-principle agreements with four unions in which workers will have to accept pay freezes for up to two years. In return they’ve been promised – unlike more than 2000 ground staff at Qantas
recently – that their jobs will not be outsourced. “It’s the starting point of a bridge of trust being built between us,” said the TWU’s Michael Kaine at the time, adding, “[Hrdlicka] is engaged, she’s been constructive and she’s listened and responded. And we can’t ask at this point more than that.”

“As long as she is honest and fair,” ALAEA’s Steve Purvinas tells me, “the relationship can work.”

“ ‘Shazam! She doesn’t have three heads!’ ” says Hrdlicka, laughing. “The negative media was pretty punishing. It gets frothy: I’m sure it gets lots of clicks to see a senior female who everybody’s bad-mouthing. But then, thankfully, it all settles down, because there’s not a lot of substance to it.”

There’s still time for a hydra-like transformation, of course. The looming end of the federal government’s JobKeeper will mean the 3000-odd staff (half of Virgin’s workforce) who’ve been supported by it will lose this income. Without a replacement, Hrdlicka would have faced the unpalatable prospect of sacking at least some of them. This would have put her in a very difficult position, since, when Bain was bidding for Virgin last year, it spoke a great deal about its “deep pockets,” which would enable it to keep jobs and honour employee entitlements. At the time, JobKeeper had not been extended beyond September, so Bain must have assumed it would be fully responsible for wages within a few months. In the event, it got an extra six months of government support for nothing.

Now, it appears, it’s about to get a bit more. Along with others in the aviation and tourism industry, Hrdlicka has been been advocating hard for more government assistance, and on Thursday, the federal government announced a $1.2 billion package to help the tourism industry and airlines, including the sale of 800,000 half-price airline tickets between April and July. The idea is that by subsidising tickets, more Australians will fly, which will allow airlines to increase flights and get more staff back to work. The passengers they carry, meanwhile, will deliver tourism dollars to their destinations. The Qantas Group and Virgin will also receive federal payments to keep about 8600 workers in jobs until international travel resumes, estimated to be in the last quarter of this year.

Industry response to the package has been mixed, with airline unions claiming that it amounts to “corporate welfare”, with no guarantees that workers will benefit. The TWU claims that thousands of jobs in aviation – including those of Virgin workers – are still at risk. Industry groups say the package is not targeted at helping workers directly, is not fairly distributed among the states, and is too small to cope with the problems at hand.

Hrdlicka, however, believes it will allow planes to get back in the air and staff back on the job. “This enables us to get more of our team members back to work more quickly than we would have been able to do before,” she explains in a statement. For starters, she says, of the 3000 workers either currently stood down (about 1000) or on reduced hours on JobKeeper, some 400 Virgin cabin crew will be returning in April. She’s also hopeful that no forced redundancies will be required when JobKeeper ends, claiming: “No, we’ve announced redundancies that were necessary.”

Well, we’ll see, says the TWU’s Michael Kaine. “When Bain bought Virgin, their commitment was to keep Virgin’s 6000 workers,” he reiterates. “They said to us, ‘No, while JobKeeper is important, we have enough capital to support them.’” Whatever happens with this, or any other package: “We will be holding them to that promise.”

Hrdlicka: “We wanted to have our normal world back again, where this is just a process we have to go through.”Credit: Kristoffer Paulsen

Jayne Hrdlicka believes she can make a success of Virgin Australia. In light of everything, this is an impressive belief, and one you can’t help admiring, the way you might admire a matador, twirling his silken cape as the snorting bull bears down. It seems particularly valiant in light of the fact that just before she was offered the job at Virgin, she learnt that her husband needed more treatment.

Jason’s initial surgery in January 2020 gave him “a clean bill of health – clear margins around the tumour, everything looked fantastic,” explains Hrdlicka. “But then we discovered he has another round of issues he has to manage.” She takes a breath. “Then the Virgin job came up, so we sat down and we said, ‘Okay, what’s the most important thing now?’ And it was that we wanted to have our normal world back again, where this is just a process we have to go through.”

Part of Hrdlicka’s normal world, of course, is an extraordinarily demanding job – but maybe it’s a relief to be totally absorbed by work for many hours a day?

“Certainly it’s really important to get distance, get perspective. Because otherwise it overwhelms you, and that’s the kiss of death.” She pauses. “I’ve always been calm in a crisis, too, and so you just think, ‘Okay, okay, this is a lot. But what are the things we’re going to hang on to to solve the problem?’ And with respect to Jason’s health, we have absolute confidence in his doctors; he’s very healthy; he’s proven hugely capable of navigating each major milestone that’s come his way; and he’s had fantastic medical results every go around. He’s positive and in good form.”

But even Jayne Hrdlicka can’t make everyone focus on the positive all of the time. When Bain rang to offer her the CEO job at Virgin, her younger son Josh heard her on the phone. At 13, he sounds slightly like the family sage: when he was five and Hrdlicka joined Jetstar, it was he who pointed out that she couldn’t actually fly a plane. This time round, he was equally worried. “He heard me talking, and I was saying, ‘Well, let me talk to the family about it.’ And he’s right beside me saying, ‘No! No! Everybody’s going to hate you! They already hate you!’ ”

She laughs. “So I had to say to him, ‘I’m going to be fine. Mum’s going to be fine.’”

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