Now it’s de-Joyced, Qantas should be returned to the people

After 15 years, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce is leaving the national carrier to spend more time with his franking credits.

Anyone with a fondness for air travel, workers’ rights or their luggage should be happy to see this guy go. He’s been an unashamed union-buster, ruthlessly attacking the pay and conditions of his workers, sacking, outsourcing, offshoring and casualising jobs all over the joint (sometimes unlawfully), and even threatening to bring in scab workers during industrial disputes.

This anti-worker agenda, along with Joyce’s addiction to cost-cutting and his failure to update its elderly fleet, has turned Qantas into what Transport Workers’ Union general secretary Michael Kaine describes as “a shadow of what it once was”. Trust in the company has cratered and complaints have soared (unlike many delayed Qantas flights).

It’ll be exciting to see what Joyce will ruin next. He has already been announced as the incoming chairman of the Sydney Theatre Company, where I presume he’ll pursue an aggressive profit-maximisation strategy that will involve purging STC of anything smelling of Brecht and commissioning an Andrew Lloyd Webber rock horror opera about Australian corporate tax rates. Can’t wait!

Joyce was, of course, doing precisely what the CEO of a publicly listed company is supposed to: cut costs, grow profits, increase returns, repeat. If that means smashing organised labour, implementing crappier services or engaging in financial chicanery (like splurging hundreds of millions of dollars on share buybacks to artificially juice Qantas’ stock price), then so be it. Joyce was subservient to the same capitalist logic and pressures as any CEO — the same that will be applied to his immediate successor, and all the others to come.

That’s the tragedy of a privatised national airline. When former prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating swallowed the neoliberal pill and sold off Qantas in the 1990s, they created a corporate behemoth, no longer focused on providing safe and affordable air travel as a service, but on making bank.

All other considerations became secondary, from workers’ rights to taking climate action seriously to even a basic sense of patriotism. Qantas is supposed to be bursting with the “Spirit of Australia”, but Joyce has always hated the idea of government-owned airlines and campaigned hard against the foreign ownership laws that require Qantas to be majority Australian-owned.

Moreover, the idea of a privatised national carrier is premised on a contradiction: Qantas is supposed to be a for-profit business like any other, subject to the rigours, risks and rewards of market forces — and yet it’s simply Too Important To Fail. No Australian government would ever actually allow Qantas to go under on its watch, because a functioning airline is an essential national service and a crucial part of our economic infrastructure. (Even the Ayn Rand-ian Abbott government acknowledged the importance of Qantas’ survival during its troubles back in 2014).

So what we’re left with is a privatised essential service operating as a quasi-monopoly that can always be assured of being bailed out by the taxpayer when times are tough. But when things are going well, it makes sure to funnel away the rewards from the public and workers and into the gobs of the capitalist class.

It’s a rort, and Joyce’s departure is as good a time as any to bring it to an end. If Qantas truly is the “national carrier”, then it should be re-nationalised.

Under public ownership and exposed to greater democratic accountability, Qantas could rededicate itself to providing a crucial service to Australians, as opposed to blindly chasing profits at all costs. With the Australian people as its major shareholder, the airline could once again become a model employer providing good secure jobs and better services to regional Australia, and rolling out far more ambitious climate action plans than a for-profit airline would ever consider.

Like any suggestion to break with the failing neoliberal status quo, proposals for re-nationalisation are immediately dismissed by anyone in the (neoliberal-minded) political class as, to quote Bill Shorten, “crazy-nomics”. This conveniently ignores the fact that Qantas only exists because of massive government intervention in the economy.

In the 1940s, it was the crazy-nomists in the Chifley Labor government who recognised the crucial role aviation would play in the years to come, and promptly created the publicly owned domestic national carrier Trans Australia Airlines and nationalised the private airline Qantas Empire Airways Ltd to offer international flights.

Qantas executed this duty, under public ownership, for 46 remarkably successful years, during which it became the second around-the-world airline on the planet, effectively invented business class, helped make the first inflatable escape slide raft and achieved a world-leading safety record.

(Plus, as far as I know, at no point while it was in government hands did Qantas have to beg its executives to volunteer as baggage handlers, nor did it make the extremely worthwhile decision to arrange a plane to fly directly to nowhere.)

Over the past 40 years, the scourge of privatisation has in many ways turned Australia into a hollowed-out society that rips us off with shitty services and enriches those at the top. It sucks, people hate it, and it should be undone.

As a new CEO takes over the reins, we should collectively demand that this national treasure be returned to the public hands from which it was stolen.

Were you a beneficiary of Alan Joyce’s munificence as CEO or are you glad to see him fly off into the sunset? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.