Qantas executives pay the price for cyber attack — or do they?

Only in the Qantas universe is a $250,000 pay cut barely noticeable. And those shares Alan Joyce offloaded when he left in 2023 for close to $17m? They’d now be worth almost $30m.

Bonus cuts dished out by the Qantas board to executives including CEO Vanessa Hudson have barely made a dent in their take-home pay.

For most people, having an annual bonus docked by $250,000 is unimaginable simply because the sum in itself is more than most Australian workers earn in a couple of years, let alone one.

But at Qantas a quarter of a million dollars is the equivalent of a mere 15 per cent of the chief executive’s short term bonus – or one component of her total remuneration.

With that in mind, it’s difficult to imagine Vanessa Hudson missing that $250,000, taken as a board-imposed penalty for the cyber attack on a Qantas call centre in Manila.

Her fellow executives also paid a price, missing out on a total $550,000 from their short term bonuses, to reflect their “shared accountability” of the hack in which the personal details of 5.7 million customers were stolen.

It’s hard to imagine such disciplinary action occurring under the previous board led by Richard Goyder who failed to see an issue with then CEO Alan Joyce selling 92 per cent of his shares.

But it still smacks of being seen to do the right thing rather than any real admission of failure, when the annual report makes it clear there will be no further repercussions for Qantas’ top tier.

“While we recognise that the investigations into this incident may not be finalised for some time and there may be other outworkings, we believe it is important for both our executives and shareholders that the remuneration consequences of this incident be dealt with this year,” the report said.

In other words, no matter what the investigation uncovers or what a looming class action over the airline’s failure to secure sensitive customer information might cost, for Qantas executives it’s now all in the past.

Former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce made his first aviation-related speech in August since departing the airline two years ago. Picture: John Feder

It was a similar story with the unlawful outsourcing saga, which saw Qantas hit with the largest fine in Australian corporate history along with a stinging rebuke from Federal Court judge Michael Lee.

As far as Qantas chairman John Mullen was concerned, that was dealt with the previous year when executives had their short term bonuses slashed by a third.

He did not see fit to impose any further penalty on the back of Justice Lee’s observations that Qantas’ contrition for the mass sackings was “performative” and Hudson’s absence from the witness stand ill-considered.

It was that mindset that saw Alan Joyce receive a final jaw-dropping bonus of $3.8m — as about 350,000 shares awarded under a long term incentive scheme vested. Admittedly Joyce was subject to a brutal $9.26m cut imposed by the board when other executive bonuses were slashed, over a series of controversies that saw the Qantas brand plunge from one of the most trusted, to one of the most distrusted.

Would it have been simply nasty or pandering to the will of a disenchanted public to clawback more from the former long-serving CEO who only recently re-entered the workforce on the public speaking circuit?

After all, he did see Qantas through the difficult Covid-19 years, albeit with some generous taxpayer support, and masterminded the much-anticipated Project Sunrise flights that promise to connect Australia with any city in the world in a single hop.

There is also the rather delicious fact that had Goyder not allowed Joyce to offload 2.5 million shares in June 2023 for a windfall of close to $17m, those same shares would now be worth almost $30m thanks to a near doubling of the share price.

But what’s another $13m when you’ve already pocketed in excess of $120m?

Vanessa Hudson should be so lucky – in her first two years as CEO she’s had to make do with a total of $10.7m, even after the $250,000 cut.

And in fairness she has done much to earn that, with employee engagement and customer satisfaction rates on the up, on-time performance improving, the share price doubling, the reinstatement of dividends and two very tidy profits.

As far as Mullen is concerned the only way is up, with Qantas “well placed to achieve its long-term goals”.