Flying Kangaroo took us for a ride
RUNNING a corporation and wondering how you can get your hands on some easy money courtesy of the Queensland taxpayer? It’s not difficult. Just threaten to move your business interstate. It’s a tactic that has worked an absolute treat for Qantas, which has just played state treasurers off each other in a brilliant piece of corporate bluff.
The precedent has been set. Merely announce you are seriously considering taking your bat and ball and moving to another state and Treasurer Cameron Dick will send his lackeys scurrying after you waving the government cheque book.
“Stay,” they will plead. “Name your price. Please don’t leave.”
Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce must still be laughing at how he played us for absolute mugs and how easy it all was.
First you announce that you are reviewing all your options, including moving your corporate headquarters. Obviously, you have no intention of doing this because there were very good reasons for putting it where it is. The very mention of this, however, creates panic in the state in which you are based and causes other states to salivate at the prospect of luring you to their own patch.
All options in the case of
Qantas included moving its Queensland facilities, which were built where they are because it made good sense, but apparently this never occurred to anyone in Queensland Treasury.
Then all Joyce had to do, without uttering a syllable of commitment to change the status quo, was sit back and watch the states try to outbid each other.
If these same states had thought to collaborate and say to each other: “This is a stitch up. We won’t play the game if you won’t,” they could all have saved themselves a lot of money, but this was the stuff of which footy matches are made – state against state.
Joyce would have known that the respective state egos would triumph over rational thought and so the financial “incentives” rolled in as they paid him to do what he had always intended to do in the first place, which was essentially nothing. Brilliant!
It was even rumoured at one stage that Joyce was considering moving his headquarters from Sydney to Brisbane!
What a coup this would have been for the Sunshine State, allowing Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to give the metaphorical finger to her bete noire, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, and text: “Queenslander!”
We fell for it, of course, and you wouldn’t need to be the sharpest shovel in the shed to work out where this rumour came from. Qantas HQ, of course, remains firmly anchored in Sydney.
How much money did Queensland throw at the poor, struggling Flying Kangaroo, which, in the pre-COVID financial year, made an underlying profit before tax of $1.3bn and which saw Mr Joyce, according to the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors, achieve a realised pay of $23.88m? This company has received $726m in JobKeeper payments, $248m in other government assistance packages and hundreds of millions in subsidised airfares.
Treasurer Dick has hailed his negotiations with Qantas as a win for Queensland, saying he has saved the jobs of those employed at the Brisbane heavy maintenance facility – the same facility that was
YOU HAVE TO ADMIRE JOYCE AND HIS TEAM FOR THE WAY THEY CONNED THE STATES. IT WAS NICE WORK, BUT WE PICK UP THE TAB
never going anywhere, any time.
You might think that if it was such a fantastic deal for Queensland taxpayers, Mr Dick would be only too happy to share the details of his clever financial manoeuvrings with us. Wonder you might, but you would do so in vain because it’s a secret between Mr Joyce and Mr Dick.
You have to admire Joyce and his team for the way they conned the states. It was nice work, but we pick up the tab. As for the secrecy, it’s now standard practice for a government that was elected on the back of a pledge to be open and transparent with the people who elected it.