There’s an easy way out for the Prime Minister amid seemingly relentless focus on his close relationship with Qantas, as Joe Aston explains. in his new book. This is a solution that involves the old virtue of making good policy good policy – ​​with a dash of sweet vengeance.

The most important point Aston made about Qantas was lost to the improvements at Albanese. The President’s Lounge is being used to skew airline competition in Australia in favor of Qantas by duping politicians, CEOs and senior executives – including in the public sector – to ignore the lower cost of traveling with Virgin and the writs competitors of third-party airlines, and to entrust their travel budget to the national carrier.

So the simplest solution is this: Albanese announces that he is abandoning the president’s lounge, and that his main office will also abandon it. Labor backbenchers will be told that if they want a frontbench place or a committee chairmanship, they must give that up too. All department secretaries and other senior officials present in the President’s Lounge will be informed that the laughter is over for them. And Albanese announces that no one in his ministry will also accept a Qantas upgrade. What they buy, they steal. The same goes for the entire civil service.

Of course, none of this will mean much to Albanese as prime minister, who has his own plane. But it will in one fell swoop eliminate Qantas’ most serious problem: using the president’s lounge to distort airline competition.

This will then leave Peter Dutton and the Coalition in a difficult position: either they align with Labor and also abandon the Speaker’s Lounge and lock themselves with the rest of us at the door, or their entire campaign against Albanese seems deeply hypocritical. Having a problem with updates? GOOD. More upgrades. For anyone. This is particularly true of infrastructure spokeswoman Bridget McKenzie, who – in a flight path as certain as night follows day from the moment she began attacking Albanese this weekend – has now announced that she had been ringing the airlines to find out how many undeclared upgrades she had had. over the years.

As a further measure, Albanese could announce that he will ask the entire utility to relinquish its travel contracts and return to the market to see if Qantas can compete fairly with Virgin for those lucrative utility travel budgets. without that of the President.

In doing so, he could invite journalists from media outlets where CEOs, senior executives, editors and star anchors are members of the President’s Lounge to withhold all questions on the issue until they, too, have left the lounge of the president. After all, how can you report fairly on Qantas if senior colleagues slip through the unmarked gate every time they head to the airport?

And besides, every major company should tell its investors whether its executives are members of the Chairman’s Lounge and what that means for the company’s travel budget. How much investor money is wasted on overpriced trips so the CEO can relax in the president’s lounge? As a result, we could find that Australia’s airline industry is suddenly much more competitive than recent history suggests… or that many more public service and business meetings could be conducted via Zoom.

One more thing. HAS CrikeyWe’re big fans of Joe Aston, who built Rear Window into one of the country’s top corporate and executive accountability vehicles – he was one of the few hard-working Financial review who continued to speak truth to corporate power rather than acting as cheerleaders and recyclers of the corporate pabulum of Australia’s incompetent ruling class. What’s more, he is one of Australia’s most devastating and, in his time, funniest writers.

So it sounds a lot like “What did the Romans do for us?” » – but where was Aston, and for that matter none of his EN Colleagues, when Alan Joyce committed perhaps the most offensive act of hubris of his entire reign at Qantas and illegally dismissed 1,700 baggage handlers in August 2020? Years later, the decision still has consequences worth hundreds of millions for the airline’s investors, not to mention the thousands who have since lost their belongings to Qantas’ baggage roulette. Maybe we missed it, but we searched and only found A EN piece on layoffs at the time – with a approval by Tony Boyd about Joyce’s “restructuring” of the Qantas workforce a few months later.

It could surely not be, according to Boyd’s article, that the AFR Joyce’s attitude to hubris was a little different when it came to firing workers and attacking unions, wasn’t it?

Will banning the president’s lounge achieve anything? Let us know your thoughts by emailing [email protected]. Please include your full name for your post to be considered. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.