Qantas resists change

National carrier posts $3b turnaround

QANTAS chairman Richard Goyder highlighted the airline’s $3bn turnaround at the annual general meeting and reinforced its opposition to multi-employer bargaining.

Promoted by unions as the key to wages growth, Mr Goyder said multi-employer bargaining would effectively lead to centralised wage setting.

He said Qantas workers were on average paid more than $100,000 a year, and 85 per cent were covered by agreements negotiated with unions.

“We’re concerned that the proposed changes effectively dismantle the enterprise bargaining system that has served Australia well for decades,” Mr Goyder said. “This kind of system will have little regard for the fact different companies have different needs. And that will have a massive impact on productivity, growth and (in the longer term) the ability to pay more.”

He echoed other big employers in asking that more time be taken for “the legislation and its consequences to be genuinely debated”.

Multi-employer bargaining would allow unions to negotiate wage deals for workers of several companies in one industry.

Mr Goyder also highlighted Qantas’s $3bn turnaround, with the airline expecting to post a half year underlying profit of up to $1.3bn.

Qantas Group chief executive Alan Joyce focused on the improvements to service made after a horror few months of flight delays and cancellations, and mishandled bag rates balloon. Mr Joyce said it wanted to make sure that when people travelled they had “lots of reasons to choose Qantas and Jetstar”.

“Reliable service is one of the biggest factors (and) for several months this year we weren’t living up to the service standard people rightly expected,” he said.

In an effort to show how much had changed, Qantas released performance data for October.

Flight cancellations were at 2.2 per cent of services, down from 6.2 per cent in July, and the rate of mishandled bags was “steady” at 6 in every 1000, down from 12 in 1000.

It said on-time performance had lifted from 69 per cent of departing flights in September to 74 per cent in October.

“Qantas aims to keep on time performance in the mid-70s for the remainder of the calendar year, factoring in the forecast for more extreme weather events in some parts of the country,” the statement said.

“This aligns with the circa-75 per cent on-time performance recorded by the national carrier in November and December 2019.”

The October figures took in Qantaslink as well as Qantas but not low fares partner Jetstar, which has struggled with high levels of flight cancellations and delays in recent months.