Qantas’ Alan Joyce renews calls for Queensland to fully reopen

Alan Joyce has upped calls for Queensland to reopen to Sydneysiders, saying ‘the popular decision isn’t always the right one’.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce. Picture: Flavio Brancaleone

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce has warned the newly re-elected Queensland Premier that “sometimes the popular decision isn’t the right one” has he continues to campaign for borders to reopen.

Annastacia Palaszczuk has confirmed the decision not to reopen Queensland to residents of greater Sydney or Victoria, will not be reviewed until the end of the month.

Speaking on Sydney’s radio 2GB on Monday, Mr Joyce described the Premier’s hard line on borders as “extremely frustrating” and said the stance was causing economic and social damage.

“What gets me is this is obviously popular. She’s won the election and congratulations to the Premier. But sometimes the popular decision is not the right decision and there’s a lot of factors going into this that clearly are not going into it,” Mr Joyce said.

“We have a very different position across the country.”

He questioned why Australia’s states and territories could not adopt a uniform approach, such as that achieved within the Qantas Group.

“We’ve got eight airlines in the Qantas Group with eight heads of safety and we’re regarded as the safest airline in the world. Those eight people come together all the time and they come up with a definition of what’s safe for the group and the same standard applies across the board,” said Mr Joyce.

“What can’t that be done in Australia? Why can’t we have with the eight states and territories, a similar standard that everybody understands, that everybody knows.”

He said a petition launched by Qantas to “safely open borders” had now been signed by 65,000 people with many sharing “heartbreaking stories of people disconnected”.

Mr Joyce also questioned the “logic” of only reviewing border closures on a monthly basis, following Ms Palaszczuk’s pledge to take another look at the end of November.

“I don’t understand the logic of why you do this at the end of each month,” he said.

“Surely you’d update your data and your information with the best information you have at the time and make a decision then.”

He pointed out that the four COVID cases in Sydney that were cited as the reason for keeping residents of the city out of Queensland, had been confirmed as members of the one family.

“Surely that should go into the decision making process instead of waiting another 30-days,” said Mr Joyce.

Despite his suggestion on Friday that when Queensland did eventually reopen its borders to Sydney and Victoria, people might not want to go there, Mr Joyce said Qantas would schedule flights where ever there was demand.

“We’d be into that straight away, within a week or two weeks we’d have the schedule operating,” he said.

In response to Queensland’s reopening to the rest of New South Wales, Qantas increased flights between Brisbane and Newcastle, and to Tamworth.

The airline has also announced a new Perth-Hobart route, and increased services between Perth-Brisbane, Perth-Adelaide and Perth-Darwin in response to the easing of some border restrictions by Western Australia.

A Virgin Australia spokesman said they currently operated five services a week between Brisbane-Perth as well as three weekly services between Adelaide-Perth and twice-weekly between Darwin-Perth.

“We will continue to monitor booking trends and make any adjustments to our schedule in line with customer demand,” said the spokesman.