Campbell: Government needs to reverse its decision to block extra flights from Qatar Airways

The nation’s political class has been caught embarrassingly out of touch with how voters feel about Qantas — there will be no shame in Labor u-turning on the decision to block extra flights from Qatar.

To understand how Australia’s politicians, a group whose expertise is supposed to be reading public opinion, came to be so out-of-touch with how voters feel about Qantas you need to understand the difference between the way the airline treats them and the way it treats just about everyone else.

In the old Soviet Union, the elite of the Communist Party enjoyed access to “special” shops and hospitals from which ordinary citizens were barred.

The closest thing we have to that in Australia is the Qantas chairman’s lounge, a private space in our airports where good food and nice drinks are available free to the lucky few.

The pleasure of being in the Chairman’s lounge doesn’t come from the facilities or the hospitality on offer however – nice though both of them are – it comes from the quiet satisfaction of knowing that you are rubbing shoulders with the people who run the country.

And as membership of this world is entirely at the discretion of the management of Qantas, it’s a constantly updating power-index unlike clubs where the privilege of membership lingers on long after the influence that got you there is gone.

The Qantas lounge at Sydney airport. Membership is at the discretion of Qantas management. Picture: Supplied

Our elected representatives are only human after all which is why it is understandable that their emotional attachment to Qantas is qualitatively different from the rest of us.

This explains why they seem to have been taken by surprise at the anger over Qantas’s behaviour, just as the elite in the Eastern Bloc were genuinely shocked to discover just how much their fellow citizens hated life under communism.

Qantas’s corporate reputation has been in decline for some time of course, as you would expect of an airline whose services has declined at the same time as it has hoovered up hundreds of millions in subsidies, while unlawfully sacking a chunk of its workforce.

Personally I’ve always found a lot of this criticism overstated.

If Josh Frydenberg failed to design a wage-subsidy system with a payback mechanism, was that really Alan Joyce’s fault?

Likewise the claim Qantas is a terrible employer has always been difficult to square with the observable fact that so many of its staff are, to put politely, not exactly in the first flush of youth.

If it’s so bad to work for, why do so many of them hang around?

And despite the complaints about delays and cancellations, the stats seemed to suggest if its performance was bad post-covid, so was the rest of the airline industry’s.

But selling hundreds of thousands of tickets on 8,000 flights it had already cancelled, as ACCC last week alleged?

That’s really shitty.

According to the authorities in a two-month period between May and July last year, Qantas cancelled a little less than a quarter of its advertised flights.

Outgoing Qantas Group chief executive officer Alan Joyce.

The ACCC alleges many of these cancellations were made “for reasons that were within its control, such as network optimisation including in response to shifts in consumer demand, route withdrawals or retention of take-off and landing slots at certain airports.”

What this means is that Qantas did not just continue to sell tickets for flights that were later cancelled, it sold tickets for services it had no intention of ever running.

What needs to be clearly understood is the $600 million penalty the regulator is seeking isn’t for Qantas’s dishonesty in taking money for these services “but rather relates to Qantas’s conduct after it had cancelled the flights.”

Which if I read the media release correctly means the ACCC’s action can give Qantas customers no comfort that this practice isn’t still happening.

Being seen to be in the pocket of a company that engages in this sort of – alleged – behaviour isn’t great for any government.

It was therefore unfortunate for Labor that news of ACCC action should have broken weeks after the government refused Qatar Airways request for an extra 28 flights a week into Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney – flights which presumably it would actually be flying unlike the ghost flights the ACCC alleges Qantas hasn’t been operating.

Even more unfortunate for the Prime Minister personally, was the almost simultaneous revelation by the Australian Financial Review that Albo’s son Nathan has been made a member of the Chairman’s Lounge.

The PM has refused to answer questions about how this membership came about – ie whether it was sought or just fell from the box into his cereal bowl one morning.

All he has offered so far is the far from convincing non-answer that his son “is not a public figure” but “a young person trying to make his way in the world.”

Indeed he is and good luck to him.

It should go without saying however that his dad is a public figure and if he’s been admitted to the most exclusive club in Australia there’s probably a connection between the two.

There’s no shame in U-turning when you’re going the wrong way. The Government needs to revisit the Qatar decision and quickly.

Originally published as Campbell: Government needs to reverse its decision to block extra flights from Qatar Airways