Jetstar may not have happened with multi-employer bargaining: Joyce (AFR)

[pangwen]

Jetstar may not have happened with multi-employer bargaining: Joyce

The Qantas CEO said he fears the Albanese Government’s multi-employer bargaining will hamper innovation.

www.afr.com

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce has said he fears the Albanese Government’s multi-employer bargaining will hamper innovation and warned if it had been in place 20 years ago a low-cost carrier like Jetstar may not have been set up.
...
“We did set up Jetstar with the aim of democratising air travel and allowing millions of people to travel for the first time. If there was multi-employer bargaining at the time I’m not sure that would have happened and a lot of other things wouldn’t have happened.”

Not the usual type of news that would go into "Travel News", but interesting to hear Joyce's view on how JQ might have been stillborn two decades ago. As a bit of a tongue-in-cheek moment, my reply to Alan (re the loss of Jetstar) would be "don't threaten us with a good time!".

Also wonder what the "a lot of other things wouldn't have happened" would include... perhaps the grounding(tm)?

Edit: Just re-read my post and it does seem overly harsh on JQ - I had just been reading the 18 day stranding in DPS earlier which might have been why.

 

[eastwest101]

Joyce's argument is a bit of a silly specious argument. Twenty years ago the industry was on the floor after 9/11 and Ansett had collapsed and Virgin Blue was growing quickly and the reborn Impulse Airlines was the first step on Joyce's pathway to devolving Qantas from a major legay airline into a series of sub-contractors all cutting each-others grass to drive down costs and workers conditions. The Howard government was still in power until 2007, and then Kevin Rudd won government after that so a different pre GFC world/China boom back then.

He's made a great living ordering shiny new planes for Jetstar, using accounting tricks to load up the costs onto Qantas and inflating the profits into Jetstar and running the Qantas mainline business into the ground, and the recent Covid pandemic has shown his management style is a one hit/one-note wonder, he's got nothing else in the strategic playbook, and only Virgin owners previous incompetence, some very big real estate deals and the Australian taxpayer can take any credit for Qantas even being alive at the moment.