Hi Gaz,
The opportunity may not to work against your policy but try and make it work for you and if there is an opportunity for influence also try and improve this. If you have lounge access already at QF is the F and B savings taken into consideration when benchmarking fares?, I would expect there would be at least $30 in savings per flight on meals if you are in the lounge eating and working instead of eating at an airport, if you can highlight this a variance may be considered and a reason code could be added to your reporting which should get you on QF more often and should also demonstrate the value that you are being offered. The other consideration is how often you change your ticket, with change fees on the increase many companies opt for the cheapest outbound and a semi flex return, if you work in an industry where changes cannot be helped I would push for a flexi on the return increasing your earn rates and reducing the cost of change. If your travel company can provide reporting on cost of change this should help as well, the easiest way as you mentioned to ensure that QF is the cheapest or close to is to book as early as possible. Domestic demand has been fairly flat and the airlines have a clear strategy, they want to be able to offer cheap fares to the leisure traveller who can be flexible with when they fly and can also book and plan early and maximise the corporate dollar. The unfortunate part for open skies best fare of the day is Jetstar and Tiger will always be cheaper, if Tiger is the cheapest and you would prefer Jetstar they do price beat the price by 10% if the flight is around the same time. This is a manual process so could not be done if you use a booking engine and can only be done manually by your travel agent so will incur a higher fee.
I am not suggesting this however I have heard that individuals in companies have ensured to utilise the maximum extent of all allowances for meals etc and after a reasonably short period of time their finance team recognised that they actually saved money flying on their preferred and making use of lounge memberships due to status.