Joe Aston > Quotes

“None of the world’s leading airlines failed to survive COVID. Yet by 2023, Qantas routinely portrayed its survival of the pandemic as a uniquely Joycean feat, while defining 100 per cent of its operational failures as symptoms of an industry-wide phenomenon. None of that is to trivialise the extraordinary injuries COVID inflicted on Qantas, or Qantas’ decisive efforts to achieve hibernation then manage through oscillating lockdowns. But rather than swallowing Joyce’s post hoc rationalisations offered in 2022 and 2023, I have relied in this book on what he actually said and did in 2020 and 2021.”
― Joe Aston, The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

“Qatar’s Akbar Al Baker, who retired as CEO without warning in October 2023 after twenty-seven years at the helm of the Gulf carrier, is in no doubt as to what happened: ‘It was Alan Joyce blocking us by his relationship with the prime minister.’ Al Baker accepts the Australian government’s desire to ‘look after the national carrier’ but insists that ‘the national carrier was not delivering’. ‘In COVID, we were your national carrier,’ he argues. ‘We lost over US$150 million flying to Australia, operating this long route with only fifteen passengers on board for nearly two years. We never told anybody to wait for weeks or months to get your refund, or that we won’t give you a refund. We showed our commitment was not to swindle people, not to sell tickets on cancelled”
― Joe Aston, The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

“I was twenty-four years old and had never worked for a large company. But I had been schooled in the deranged ways of politics, with its ludicrous bureaucracy and its dubious standards of accountability and personal conduct. The transition was seamless.”
― Joe Aston, The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

“It wasn’t until 8:30pm on the Monday that the Qantas board met (by teleconference). And while the directors must have understood that Joyce’s resignation was possible, it was only once the meeting began that it became apparent it had been called for that express purpose. Of course, this jarred with Goyder’s statement before the weekend that the board was ‘fully engaged’. The chairman joined the call from Perth; former Cathay Pacific CEO Tony Tyler joined from his home in the south of France; Maxine Brenner was also overseas. The meeting was convened so hurriedly that former American Airlines CEO Doug Parker, who’d only joined the Qantas board in May, was fast asleep in the United States. Parker was ropeable when he woke to discover that Joyce, a long-time industry peer, had fallen on his sword without the genuine consultation of the full board.”
― Joe Aston, The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

“Minutes after I’d put the fact of Nathan Albanese’s Chairman’s Lounge membership to the Prime Minister’s Office for comment, Anthony Albanese called AFR editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury. As Stutchbury recalls, the PM ‘made the case that politicians’ families should be off limits, but he came away knowing we weren’t going to kill the story, so he was pretty unhappy about that. I think he’s still unhappy about that.’ Stutch had already sense-checked my story with other senior heads in the AFR newsroom, concluding, ‘No one was necessarily saying it was a terrible thing, but there was a public interest in knowing that.”
― Joe Aston, The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

“knowing”
― Joe Aston, The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

“As a young revenue manager at Irish carrier Aer Lingus in the early 1990s, Joyce had – with the help of his younger brother Anthony, an actuary – designed the mathematical model for overbooking flights on the basis that a percentage of passengers never turn up. ‘That’s how he made a name for himself at the start of his career, and he’s ended it the same way,’ I wrote in the AFR. ‘He’s optimised revenue to the point where it’s now the planes that don’t show up for the flights. It’s a logical extension.”
― Joe Aston, The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

“Joyce did not return to Qantas headquarters that day. That evening, he headed to Sydney airport to catch Emirates’ last flight to Dubai and onwards to Dublin. He was captured by a Daily Telegraph photographer rolling his suitcases through the departures hall, an image that was emblazoned across the next day’s edition. ‘Australians all let us REJOYCE’ went the headline – the same pun I’d deployed on the front page of Qantas’ staff newspaper when Joyce started the job all those years ago. The popular joke that day in TV news bulletins and newspaper columns was: finally, Qantas had managed an early departure. But the gag was flawed. Joyce’s grand miscalculation was to leave four years too late.”
― Joe Aston, The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

“Mistakes were made’ was a phrase popularised in the Nixon era as a device to evade personal responsibility for mistakes. American political scientist William Schneider described it as ‘the past exonerative tense’, and it was also the subject of a terrific book by two eminent social psychologists called Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me). The singular, first-person pronoun was deployed by Goyder only in self-justification: ‘I have always sought to act in the best interest of Qantas.’ He might have sought, but he had failed. It takes a lot to accept that the problem is you, and Goyder just couldn’t get there. Collective, deidentified responsibility was the most he would cop to. His denialism was understandable on a human level: he didn’t want his failure to be true. Who among us would easily give up the chairmanship of Qantas, the honour of a lifetime?”
― Joe Aston, The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

“That afternoon, Qantas advised the Senate committee and the media that its total outstanding balance of COVID credits – including Jetstar and foreign customers – was $570 million, a lazy $200 million more than the number Joyce had been using publicly, and $50 million higher than even its admissions in the Senate hearing.5 The furore ratcheted up another several notches. ‘CON AIR’ screamed the next morning’s Daily Telegraph. ‘The Lying Kangaroo’ roared Melbourne’s Herald Sun. There was now a gigantic snowball rolling downhill in Alan Joyce’s direction, and sprinting away from the impact radius were Anthony Albanese and his senior ministers. Jim Chalmers called the ACCC’s allegations ‘deeply concerning’, while the PM was at pains to remind everyone, ‘Something I called for in recent days was [for] Qantas… to not have those credits expire.’ But distance between them couldn’t suddenly be manufactured. The Qatar decision, the Voice launch, the Chairman’s Lounge affair, defunding the ACCC’s airline monitoring, its steadfast inaction on slot hoarding: the perception firmly prevailed that the government was in Joyce’s pocket.”
― Joe Aston, The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

“Fronting the announcement on the bonuses, Mullen said he had no wish ‘to throw Alan under the bus… but he’s captain of the ship, and unfortunately that’s what comes with the territory’. (Had he thrown in mention of Joyce derailing Qantas, Mullen would have covered every mode of transport except aviation with his mixed metaphor.)”
― Joe Aston, The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

“Finch’s tour de force was not yet over. ‘Chair, it’s 6:30pm. The last flight to Sydney leaves in about 35 minutes. We have been here since three o’clock.’ Australia has a cottage industry in ex-government staffers whose role is solely to coach company executives for these parliamentary hearings. The first thing inculcated into witnesses is that they’re on the MPs’ turf and are governed by their rules. ‘You can’t just walk out like it’s a play you don’t like,’ says one regular consultant. The other universal rule: never, ever be a smartarse; it worked once for Kerry Packer and then literally never again. ‘I guess you’re delayed, Mr Finch, at the discretion of the committee,’ McKenzie said. ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘We’ve still got questions, and we will be pursuing them until we’re finished.’ As Simon Birmingham put it to me later, ‘There’s often one moment when hours of disciplined effort by those around you is undone, where you lose the room in an instant. [Finch] worrying about the time of the last flight was that moment.’ ‘I’ve never seen anyone express the arrogance that Finch expressed on that day,’ says Tony Sheldon. ‘To say, “You’re all wasting my time, I’ve got better things to do, I’m catching my flight” showed so little respect to the Australian public.’ The committee excused Goyder, Hudson and Finch at 6:40pm. Theirs was a long drive back to Sydney.”
― Joe Aston, The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

“Joyce came off the board hook-up into a snap meeting of the group management committee to break the news. It was late, so most of the group dialled in, but QantasLink boss John Gissing, Loyalty CEO Olivia Wirth, and PR boss Andrew McGinnes had stayed back with Joyce. When the meeting ended, they were joined by Joyce’s executive assistant of twenty years, Jenny Borden, while Andrew David returned to the office for the impromptu wake. The Qantas wine cellar was raided – one would hope for something superior to the vinegar Qantas had been serving its customers. A quiet shock prevailed, although as one attendee recalls, ‘Alan was stoic, kind of unshakable.”
― Joe Aston, The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

“Several weeks later, Hywood learned from his subordinates that Qantas was terminating its $2 million advertising spend with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and removing complimentary copies of the papers from domestic boarding gates and onboard flights. He called Joyce for an explanation and Joyce told him there was no point running Qantas ads in newspapers that carried negative stories about it. ‘I asked him, “Alan, do you believe in the freedom of the press?” He said, “Of course I do.” So I said, “Well, the thing about the press is that it asks questions of institutions and people in power that they can’t or won’t ask of themselves and by doing so, keeps the community cohesive and civil and prevents it from breaking down. Government and the commercial world must understand that it’s to everybody’s benefit, including theirs, that this system is sustained, and it’s sustained by advertising. If every advertiser pulled their ads because there were negative stories, the system would simply fall apart. So what you’re doing is jeopardising the underlying principles of the freedom of the press.” ’ Unsurprisingly, Joyce didn’t see it that way. In response to Qantas’ advertising boycott, Fairfax shifted its $2 million corporate travel account from Qantas to Virgin Australia. In turn, Virgin”
― Joe Aston, The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out