Margin Call: Qantas departure traverses culture divide

ALICE SPRINGS, 2 MARCH 2018 – Qantas’ newest Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner, which features a unique Indigenous livery, touched down in Alice Springs today. Picture: Qantas

Alan Joyce’s head of industry affairs Damian Callachor is flying out of progressive airline Qantas and into the conservative heart of the Turnbull government.

Hope he’s packed his Qantas “Spirit of Inclusion” manual.

Margin Call can reveal Callachor — who joined Joyce’s Andrew Parker-led Qantas government relations team in December 2015 — will soon become the chief-of-staff to Infrastructure and Transport minister Michael McCormack.

Political aficionados might remember that, as of a fortnight ago, Riverina MP McCormack, 53, is the leader of the Nationals and, consequently, Australia’s deputy PM. So it’s a senior advising gig for Callachor.

Before last month’s elevation, McCormack, a former Wagga Wagga newspaperman, was best known for his 1993 editor’s note about “homosexuals and their sordid behaviour” — the sort of thing that would, quite understandably, give Qantas’s People and Culture group executive Lesley Grant a heart attack.

It’s a back to the future moment for Callachor, who joined Qantas from the office of the then Nationals leader Warren Truss (also the Transport minister) months before the Nats began their two year long Barnaby Joyce experiment.

After Joyce’s ascension in February 2016, Darren Chester replaced Truss as Transport minister.

That was then snatched by a petulant Joyce last December in his a retributive reshuffle, which added Transport to the Member for New England’s duties until he imploded, two months later, in fifty shades of grey.

Read the full Margin Call column tomorrow in print and online.