Speaker 1: My Boris and this is straight talk. Well, you know
Speaker 1: Australians loved this company, Well they did love this company,
Speaker 1: Joe Aston. Well, straight talk mate.
Speaker 2: Ok, thanks for having me, and I'm glad I got
Speaker 2: the memo on the Morris uniform. But the pants fade, Well,
Speaker 2: you're shooting from the waste up. Correct, No one can
Speaker 2: see that you're George Orwell said. This is one of
Speaker 2: my favorite quotes. Journalism is publishing something that someone doesn't
Speaker 2: want to be published, and anything else is public relations.
Speaker 2: This book is about how Quantus influences all politicians because
Speaker 2: this has been going on for forty years. Quantus managed
Speaker 2: to rip two point seven billion dollars of subsidies out
Speaker 2: of the Morrison government. After that they convinced the Morrison
Speaker 2: government not to say Virgin Australia with the financial lifeline.
Speaker 2: They're the biggest recipient of Job Keeper and then they
Speaker 2: are legally sacked people. Their power is immense no matter
Speaker 2: who is in government, because I think it's important established
Speaker 2: Joe Eston.
Speaker 1: So I hope you don't mind me asking those sort
Speaker 1: of questions.
Speaker 2: That just got worse and worse.
Speaker 1: And well, straight talk mate, Mark.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me, and I'm glad I got the
Speaker 2: memo on the Morris uniform, but the pants made I
Speaker 2: got you're shooting from the waiste.
Speaker 1: Up correct, no one can see that you're actually and
Speaker 1: then making congratulations on your book has been like a
Speaker 1: I think it's a huge success. I mean, what does
Speaker 1: a huge success mean for you in relations to this book?
Speaker 2: Well, look, for me, a huge success would be if
Speaker 2: the public finally understood exactly what Quantus had done to
Speaker 2: the country, you know, to its customers, to its loyal customers,
Speaker 2: and you know it's a national carrier. Of course, if
Speaker 2: that sunk in, if everyone understood exactly how big and
Speaker 2: intentional and how much of it. Yeah, if that, if
Speaker 2: that became clear to the public, I'd be very happy.
Speaker 2: That's sort of what I'm trying to do.
Speaker 1: Of course, you're talking about today today we'll call the
Speaker 1: Chairman's Lounge, which I'll have to admit I'm a member
Speaker 1: of it, but I'm also I'm also in a verge
Speaker 1: of VRP one too, and you're also not a politician
Speaker 1: for politician and this, but I think what's in we
Speaker 1: will talk and park it a little bit of money,
Speaker 1: but we will talk a little bit about the alb
Speaker 1: and easy partner all this, but like that's to me,
Speaker 1: that's what I've been done to death. This is what
Speaker 1: you have underneath the heading is it says the inside
Speaker 1: story of how Quantus sold us out. And we've got
Speaker 1: lots of and there's lots of well known people like
Speaker 1: Adel Ferguson's et cetera and Kate McClement who have read
Speaker 1: the book I must have read before publishing, have given
Speaker 1: a big rap Quantus sold us out, Conus being a
Speaker 1: national carrier, Contus being a monopoly in Australia, you know,
Speaker 1: virgins sort of sort of competent but not really mooly
Speaker 1: effective monopoly. What was the objective? Mate? You know you've
Speaker 1: taken yourself. You were retired effectively from the AFR where
Speaker 1: you ran many many years and talk about a bit
Speaker 1: later the rear window. And you're great at the In fact,
Speaker 1: I think you're the best ever to write in that area.
Speaker 1: Took a couple of years off, got married to a
Speaker 1: couple of kids, I had a kid, wrote this book
Speaker 1: What's the Deal?
Speaker 2: So I didn't really plan to do I really didn't
Speaker 2: plan to do it.
Speaker 1: So it didn't stop working, to stop wing to write
Speaker 1: the book.
Speaker 2: And in fact, when the publishers came to me with
Speaker 2: a book deal around the time that I was pulling
Speaker 2: the pin at the AFL last October, I just straight
Speaker 2: away said absolutely no way. I didn't leave to do
Speaker 2: exactly what I've been doing for the previous twelve months,
Speaker 2: which is writing about Alan Joyce and Quantus. But you know,
Speaker 2: after a few weeks off, some people aren't very good
Speaker 2: at doing nothing. And you know, although I had every
Speaker 2: intention of resting and oh and obuse he's had a
Speaker 2: nice little break, but very quickly I was like, I
Speaker 2: need something, and it felt hard to be. What I
Speaker 2: then saw, I suppose is Quantus trying to just you know,
Speaker 2: PR wash the whole thing. Alan Joyce had gone, Vanessa
Speaker 2: Hudson had taken over. They just sort of tried to
Speaker 2: make out like nothing had happened. And I thought, this
Speaker 2: all needs to be put in one place so the
Speaker 2: public can not be hoodwinked into thinking that this was
Speaker 2: all just a bit of an accident, a couple of
Speaker 2: small mistakes and a bit of a bit of a
Speaker 2: bit of a PR storm that wasn't really based on
Speaker 2: anything I wanted. I thought, no, this has to all
Speaker 2: be done properly, because it's not like, you know, Quantus
Speaker 2: didn't burn its loyalty, it didn't burn its reputation overnight.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a couple of decisions in the last six
Speaker 2: months before Alan Joyce left. This is something that started
Speaker 2: to happen even before COVID and that's not been properly understood.
Speaker 2: So that was sort of my motivation, and I was
Speaker 2: just so happy that I had nothing else.
Speaker 1: To do well unfortunately for Quantus. But I guess I
Speaker 1: know I've known you when you're a Rewindow and you
Speaker 1: know you're an investigative journalist, but you also have a
Speaker 1: certain style of writing, which you would obviously be aware of.
Speaker 1: You have a style of writing that probably made rewindo
Speaker 1: one of the reasons most people bought the Aha. I mean,
Speaker 1: you're not You don't have to say yes or no.
Speaker 1: But I know a lot of people only buy it
Speaker 1: because today, especially or back then, back when you're writing,
Speaker 1: is because they wanted to either make sure they weren't
Speaker 1: being written about it, or terms they want to see
Speaker 1: who you were writing about and if in any way
Speaker 1: they had any shoe or form, any reputational risk, And
Speaker 1: effectively you're an investigative journalist. The way I look at it,
Speaker 1: you investigate issues or people and you start writing about it.
Speaker 1: Where does that drive come from?
Speaker 2: That?
Speaker 1: That process, the thinking process? I mean, what's behind that? Joe? Like,
Speaker 1: why do you like to do this? What is it?
Speaker 1: Do you look at something that's unfair or you think
Speaker 1: it's an issue needs to be raised, or someone's getting
Speaker 1: away with something and it needs to be put out there?
Speaker 1: What's the deal?
Speaker 2: It's a really good question. It evolved like I didn't
Speaker 2: get into journalism to sort of like being mister truth seeker.
Speaker 2: That was not I didn't have some sort of self
Speaker 2: righteous subjective. I got into journalism mainly because it looked
Speaker 2: like so much fun. You know, it looked like accurately,
Speaker 2: it looked like what you got to do is go
Speaker 2: out to lunch with people you know and get them
Speaker 2: to tell you things that they shouldn't tell you, and
Speaker 2: then write them. And you know, I've enjoyed making mischief
Speaker 2: and that suited me. But you know, over time, you
Speaker 2: would get bored, as anyone does in their career if
Speaker 2: they just keep doing the same thing, Like if you
Speaker 2: work for a big company, you might move around into
Speaker 2: different roles but I just was stuck on the one column.
Speaker 2: But I was thankfully given the creative freedom to go
Speaker 2: from sort of writing a column which was just like
Speaker 2: have a laugh at this person or being a bit
Speaker 2: of a hypocrite, to in a light way, or even
Speaker 2: just gossip about who was out with who and who's
Speaker 2: talking to who. But I was able to, you know,
Speaker 2: I was given the freedom to change that and to
Speaker 2: become more of a commentator and more of an investigative commentator.
Speaker 2: It was quite an unusual format. It's hard when like
Speaker 2: if I talk to journals who are mates in New
Speaker 2: York or in London, and they sort of you try
Speaker 2: and explain what real window is. It's quite hard because
Speaker 2: there's nothing.
Speaker 1: There's no other president, nothing well, there's not really anything
Speaker 1: overseas that you could absolutely directly compare it to because
Speaker 1: it's sort of it's sort of gossip, but increasingly it's commentary,
Speaker 1: but it's also news, and it's also satire, you know,
Speaker 1: or comedy, you know, so satires. In the writing the
Speaker 1: writing style, you're quite brilliant. I mean optoty before, but
Speaker 1: you're quite brilliant in the way you're writing style. It's
Speaker 1: very readable, but it's fun too. Like sat this sort
Speaker 1: of bit has to have a bit of fun associated
Speaker 1: with it.
Speaker 2: It's also quite an Australian thing to laugh at people
Speaker 2: who take themselves too seriously. You know, people who get
Speaker 2: laughed at, they don't like it. They call it the
Speaker 2: tall poppy syndrome. But actually what it's doing is just
Speaker 2: you know, holding a mirror up to people who are
Speaker 2: being pretentious or obnoxious or whatnot. And there's a little
Speaker 2: bit of it in Britain, but definitely in the US
Speaker 2: journalism they do not get it because they take themselves
Speaker 2: very seriously, the journalists, not just the people they're writing about.
Speaker 1: So do you think you're the rear window style when
Speaker 1: you're writing It was a fairly unique proposition relative to who,
Speaker 1: you know what other journalistic newspapers around the world, especially
Speaker 1: at the AFI level on a national level. Something that's
Speaker 1: so much impact is that what you would say that
Speaker 1: was unique. It got to that point where I think
Speaker 1: it was unique. And the reason that is is like,
Speaker 1: it wasn't just have a laugh. It was have a laugh,
Speaker 1: but underneath these laughs, look at the serious thing that's here,
Speaker 1: Look at all the data that's in there, Look at
Speaker 1: all the evidence and the research that's done, and that's
Speaker 1: what a lot of big businesses. Business people couldn't fight off.
Speaker 1: They couldn't laugh it off because you know, sure it.
Speaker 2: Was sure as humor, but behind it was really serious issues.
Speaker 2: And that's how I campaigned on big companies like Rio
Speaker 2: Tinto and Magellan and Alex Malley at the CPA and
Speaker 2: remembers him. And then of course there was PwC last year,
Speaker 2: which I was part of a team that was working
Speaker 2: on that. And then finally Quantus, and I think Quantus
Speaker 2: thought they could just laugh it off. It's it's just
Speaker 2: red window, it's just gossip, and that's what a lot
Speaker 2: of people try to do. But increasingly the columns had
Speaker 2: were pointing out with a lot of data stuff that
Speaker 2: was inconsistent about their behavior, particularly towards customers and staff.
Speaker 2: And they found that they that was an error that
Speaker 2: they thought they could just brush it away, try and
Speaker 2: shut it down, laugh it off. It was it stuck
Speaker 2: to them.
Speaker 1: So it's interest us. You say data, Joe, because what
Speaker 1: I think what you mean by data is you mean evidence. Yeah, proper,
Speaker 1: proper evidence. And a mutual front of ours told me
Speaker 1: once that many years ago when you were writing earlier
Speaker 1: that this guy referring to you is very good again
Speaker 1: these facts? How do how does someone like you get
Speaker 1: your facts? I mean, like, what's the process? How do
Speaker 1: you build? And like, let's say you've got to write
Speaker 1: a let's take this back to read window days and
Speaker 1: let's say you know, there's an expectation you've got to
Speaker 1: write a column every.
Speaker 2: Day five or six days a week five But you
Speaker 2: know I had quite a few days off in between.
Speaker 2: Don't worry. By the end I was not doing many
Speaker 2: weeks where it was five.
Speaker 1: But in the early days, Yeah, so you're got to
Speaker 1: get you've got to yarn out and you shared it.
Speaker 1: There was just just you, but there was a shared
Speaker 1: and another there's another journalist in that territory, and you've
Speaker 1: got to get a yarn out every day. That's like
Speaker 1: it would seem to me you've got to have at
Speaker 1: least five you might have to have ten or twenty
Speaker 1: topics going at once.
Speaker 2: What would you Yeah, because of course when you when
Speaker 2: you see it come out, that doesn't not I might
Speaker 2: have been working on that for three or four Days're
Speaker 2: sort of juggling all these balls because when will you
Speaker 2: be able to prove that one versus that one, and
Speaker 2: they're all bubbling away. It's like trying to cook, like
Speaker 2: a do a dinner party, a chess count once it's correct.
Speaker 1: So what's the process? Like, Like, I mean, where do
Speaker 1: you get your ideas from.
Speaker 2: A lot of the time, you've got to be talking
Speaker 2: to people all the time, and it's on the phone,
Speaker 2: and you've got to be face to face with people
Speaker 2: because people you got to build trust with people, and
Speaker 2: you know, people need you to prove that you can
Speaker 2: be trusted. You've got to have a track record of
Speaker 2: protecting people that you're just do with information, Yes, exactly
Speaker 2: the source, But I increasingly over time I moved more
Speaker 2: into like, let's get documents, let's look at financial documents,
Speaker 2: and let's let's look at what people say, look at
Speaker 2: transcripts of what things have been said versus now what
Speaker 2: they're doing, and look for the discrepancies between those things,
Speaker 2: because of course, relying on what someone says to you
Speaker 2: and what multiple people say to you versus what someone
Speaker 2: else says disagrees, and it all relies on human accounts
Speaker 2: of things.
Speaker 1: Also agendas and opinions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's always hard, right because you know, people
Speaker 2: are always calling you up saying guess what I'll tell you,
Speaker 2: and they tell your abs and you always have to think,
Speaker 2: what is this person's motivation? Are they acting because they're
Speaker 2: outraged that something something bad is happening here, or are
Speaker 2: they just trying to settle a score with someone that's
Speaker 2: happening all the time. And by the way, just because
Speaker 2: someone's trying to settle a score doesn't mean that the
Speaker 2: information they're giving you is wrong, so you might still
Speaker 2: use it. But you've got to really be twigged to
Speaker 2: people's real motivations.
Speaker 1: But how did you develop that skill? And what I
Speaker 1: mean by that is did you study something or did
Speaker 1: you just study someone else? Or did you have a
Speaker 1: mental sort of sitting there ago to just check this
Speaker 1: this sort of accounts out. Do you have other resources
Speaker 1: to your availability to say, well, can someone give me
Speaker 1: the lowdown on these set of numbers?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, I mean, the great thing about being in
Speaker 2: the AFI newsroom you've got some great, some really terrific
Speaker 2: reporters and subject matter experts analys Yeah, and guys who've
Speaker 2: been there, Guys and girls who've been there for a
Speaker 2: long time. They can read accounts. They know the industries
Speaker 2: that they write about. And then you also get to
Speaker 2: know lots of shareholders of companies and they really are
Speaker 2: riding the weeds of things. Again, you've got to figure
Speaker 2: out their motivations. Are they shortening the stock or are
Speaker 2: they long the stock? And therefore they're motivated, you know,
Speaker 2: to only tell one side of the story. It's everyone's
Speaker 2: you're always watching, but just being in that spot and
Speaker 2: as sort of became more high profile, you get access
Speaker 2: to the best people and they you know, the great
Speaker 2: thing about that job is you pick up the phone
Speaker 2: to like top top people and they answer and they're
Speaker 2: happy to talk to you mostly Yeah, and unless they're
Speaker 2: the subject matter, yeah, well even still a lot of
Speaker 2: the time they will. But that's the quality access to
Speaker 2: two experts that obviously that allows you to just supercharge
Speaker 2: your learning curve.
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you actually limit the more powerful you get
Speaker 1: or not the powerful probably not the right word. The
Speaker 1: more the more content that you've created and the more
Speaker 1: feathers you've ruffled, does that then start to create a
Speaker 1: bit of a chasm for you in that people going
Speaker 1: to say, oh, I'm not going to talk to him,
Speaker 1: because if I talk to him, I could be included
Speaker 1: in this story. Do you get people start to be
Speaker 1: scared of you or give you.
Speaker 2: That birth Yeah, I think that definitely happens. It's a
Speaker 2: hard job if you do it properly. And I've sort
Speaker 2: of said before you can't be a good journalist if
Speaker 2: you need to be popular or if you want to
Speaker 2: be popular. And that's hard because we all, I think
Speaker 2: naturally are wired to want to be popular. Yeah, we
Speaker 2: want to be like yeah and no one sort of
Speaker 2: some people do, but not many people are wired to
Speaker 2: enjoy conflict. But ultimately, your job is to publish. George
Speaker 2: Orwell said this is one of my favorite quotes. Journalism
Speaker 2: is publishing something that someone doesn't want to be published,
Speaker 2: and anything else is public relations. And so ultimately, if
Speaker 2: you're doing journalism properly, you're writing something that the person
Speaker 2: you're writing it about doesn't want out there, and so
Speaker 2: you're doing something that they don't want. And so I
Speaker 2: really struggled with this in the early years, because.
Speaker 1: You talk about pre Rewindow.
Speaker 2: Or during the early years of writing Rear Window, you know,
Speaker 2: I really struggled with sort of I was quite afraid
Speaker 2: to answer the phone to someone that was angry I
Speaker 2: was quite afraid to call someone up and say, I
Speaker 2: have this negative information about you, what do you say
Speaker 2: about it? And that led me to make mistakes.
Speaker 1: Are you timid? Naturally timid?
Speaker 2: At that point, I think I had a lot of
Speaker 2: false bravado, which means well, it means that I was
Speaker 2: pretending not to be timid. But I was very conflict avoidant,
Speaker 2: which is not unnatural. It was really quite overwhelming at times,
Speaker 2: but I got better at that, and if you lean
Speaker 2: into it, it gets better before.
Speaker 1: What makes you better at it then, so practicing.
Speaker 2: It, you know, instead of hiding under the doner, you
Speaker 2: just make yourself pick up the phone and have the
Speaker 2: hard conversation and look into someone's eyes and say, this
Speaker 2: is not personal. This is about the issue. This is
Speaker 2: not about the personality. Did this happen or did it
Speaker 2: not happen? This is what I think about this. Tell
Speaker 2: me what you think. Even if you disagree with me,
Speaker 2: tell me what you think, and I can still go
Speaker 2: away and say, no, I still think what I think.
Speaker 2: I disagree with your perspective. I'm still going to write
Speaker 2: it the way I was going to. But that process
Speaker 2: is important and really unnatural on a human level. Because
Speaker 2: you know, you walk around and you've said said lots
Speaker 2: of negative things about people, and people understandably hate you,
Speaker 2: and how do you not let that eat away at you?
Speaker 2: You just have to be really certain that you being
Speaker 2: fair and that you you know that your position is
Speaker 2: strong from where you're standing, and then you just have
Speaker 2: to let that for the rest of that go.
Speaker 1: Do you have to pick a higher order? In other words,
Speaker 1: sort of say, look, I'm doing this for a it's
Speaker 1: important that people know about this truth or these these facts,
Speaker 1: this content is data that that is important. Well the
Speaker 1: people read my column or is it more Australians whatever.
Speaker 1: You might have a different view on that, but tell
Speaker 1: me that I like that answer that who is it?
Speaker 1: Who is it that you're trying to take down the
Speaker 1: road to the truth. And when it comes to that
Speaker 1: as well, you have to take a view that it's
Speaker 1: so important that I don't care whether I upset the
Speaker 1: individual I'm unning.
Speaker 2: About exactly exactly, that's exactly what you have to do.
Speaker 2: And like there's a good bit in my book where
Speaker 2: Greg Hywood, who used to be the CEO of Fairfax,
Speaker 2: he was talking to Alan Joyce. Because Alan Joyce obviously
Speaker 2: went to war last year with the AFR and pulled
Speaker 2: the AFI at a LAM member. Yeah. But the thing
Speaker 2: people have probably forgotten is that ten years before that
Speaker 2: he did the same thing to the Citny Morning Herald
Speaker 2: in the Age and he pulled all those papers out
Speaker 2: of the airports and canceled the advertising of quantas in
Speaker 2: those newspapers because adel Ferguson had written that he should
Speaker 2: resign because he just delivered a record loss. And Greg
Speaker 2: high would called him. This is in the book, Greg
Speaker 2: I would called him when he found out that Alan
Speaker 2: was pulling the advertising, and he said, you know, do
Speaker 2: you realize that like this journalism that we reproduce is
Speaker 2: what keeps society functioning. And you know by pulling advertising
Speaker 2: like this, you're threatening. What you're doing is you're threatening
Speaker 2: the free press, which is how we keep this country together.
Speaker 2: And when you think about it, it all sounds so high
Speaker 2: and mighty. And I understand if people out there are
Speaker 2: rolling their eyes going, oh you think that you know
Speaker 2: what you do is so holier than now, because I
Speaker 2: would roll my eyes too. And we also all tell
Speaker 2: ourselves these stories about ourselves to make ourselves feel better
Speaker 2: about what we do. You know, so what I do
Speaker 2: is so important for the public, and so you know,
Speaker 2: I put my hand up there. But if you do
Speaker 2: think about it without journalism like Adele Ferguson's or Headley
Speaker 2: Thomas's or Kate mcclemon's or many others Neil Channelworth like you,
Speaker 2: powerful people do not stop and pause before they do
Speaker 2: something that they shouldn't do. You know, that's it's the
Speaker 2: existence of people like them who cause powerful people to
Speaker 2: go I won't steal, I won't lie, I won't cheat
Speaker 2: because I might get caught. And if there was no
Speaker 2: press holding them to account, there'd be all sorts of
Speaker 2: I mean, society would break down. So it is an
Speaker 2: important thing. Like so you've got to do it?
Speaker 1: Do you have to remind yourself of that? Because if
Speaker 1: you're just written a story about somebody and then on
Speaker 1: the phone they're blowing up and their wife rings you,
Speaker 1: and the p our agency rings you, and every other
Speaker 1: person rings you did it any stage when you go home,
Speaker 1: you think, oh my god, what a crappy night. This
Speaker 1: was a pre marriage because you know, when you're married,
Speaker 1: you have a partner, it's probably a bit easy. You
Speaker 1: can sort of feel a bit more comfortab your home,
Speaker 1: in your family. But let's say you go on home
Speaker 1: on your own or hanging out with whoever you're living
Speaker 1: with the time, do you ever get to the point
Speaker 1: where the fuck like this is this is this is
Speaker 1: so hectic? Yeah, just out of me. Oh.
Speaker 2: Countless times I've said what am I doing this?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 2: What is? Countless times I've said, like, there's got to
Speaker 2: be an easier way to make a buck. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: I let me assure you there is. And so it
Speaker 2: is sort of a toil of love. You wouldn't be
Speaker 2: a journalist if you didn't love love it, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: if you didn't love doing it, you don't certainly don't
Speaker 2: do it for other reasons because the pressure is high.
Speaker 2: And yeah, in the end, that's why I decided to
Speaker 2: leave the AFR. I mean, there were a few different reasons,
Speaker 2: but one of the big reasons was I just got
Speaker 2: to the point where I was like, there's a lot
Speaker 2: of just accumulated hostility. You walk into a room and
Speaker 2: everyone just wants to kill me, and you just think,
Speaker 2: might just I might just need a bit of a break.
Speaker 2: I might you know, I might just need acquie a
Speaker 2: life for a bit. Unfortunately, this book didn't this book, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 2: tell me about it.
Speaker 1: One of the things that probably results from prior to
Speaker 1: this book, that results from the position you're in, is
Speaker 1: that you will make powerful enemies and powerful friends. And
Speaker 1: I know that you have powerful friends. How do you
Speaker 1: manage the old no fear and no favor sort of
Speaker 1: position in relation to that? How do you in your
Speaker 1: own mind? How do you reconcile that? Do you just say, well,
Speaker 1: if something comes your way that you probably feel like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to have to write about this, good
Speaker 1: by as human hure, I would be that person you
Speaker 1: might do you hand it over somebody else? What do
Speaker 1: you do?
Speaker 2: Like? That's yeah, that's that's hard. And you know you
Speaker 2: can be the subject of criticism about this, so well,
Speaker 2: why an't you writing about this? Why you didn't say
Speaker 2: anything about that person? And you thought of sort of think, well,
Speaker 2: that doesn't necessarily mean that it's some sort of dirty
Speaker 2: favor or something like that, but you're.
Speaker 1: Allowed to make the choice signed you as a journalist.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't I think so, But I would also understand. Look,
Speaker 2: I just don't want to be a hypocrite, right and say,
Speaker 2: how do you criticize me I'm open to criticism on that.
Speaker 2: Like you do. You're still a human being. You still
Speaker 2: make friends, and the thing about being a journalist is
Speaker 2: you then develop sources, and at some point sometimes you
Speaker 2: get to a point where you've gone over that line
Speaker 2: where you're just in way too deep with someone. You
Speaker 2: have access to all of their personal life and secrets,
Speaker 2: and they trust you and they confide in you, and
Speaker 2: you sort of go, I'm beyond a journalists a journalist
Speaker 2: with this person now, and you just have to give
Speaker 2: it a wide birth professionally and.
Speaker 1: Give that personal why birth professionally.
Speaker 2: Well, that's what I have done, and I think there's
Speaker 2: people who do it differently and they continue to write
Speaker 2: about that person but only positively. And I have not
Speaker 2: done that or tried very hard not to do that,
Speaker 2: So you sort of but you still don't. You still
Speaker 2: get a bit of a hard time from people because
Speaker 2: you don't write it about the moment. What are you
Speaker 2: meant to do?
Speaker 1: Just attack them as hard as you can and you're
Speaker 1: not allowed to have any personal relationships. But I get
Speaker 1: the criticism. You know, like people are always looking for
Speaker 1: you to be inconsistent, and it is an inconsistency to say,
Speaker 1: you know, to hit this person, that person, that person,
Speaker 1: but not that person and that person. But it's sort
Speaker 1: of a been unfair to expect a person, someone like
Speaker 1: yourself or anybody to come home and come home on
Speaker 1: a front of yours like you've got to live them
Speaker 1: You've got to your journalist world, but you've got to
Speaker 1: live a life too, And all of a sudden, you've
Speaker 1: got your friends. You're not going to go around telling
Speaker 1: everybody what happened at the barbecue exactly, like why would you?
Speaker 1: And by the way, I don't think any journalists would do.
Speaker 1: You think there's an expectation there by consumers of your stuff, readers.
Speaker 1: The expectation is that if you're going to be that
Speaker 1: person on one occasion, you're going to be that person
Speaker 1: on all occasions. You're going to be consistently at it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. I think there probably are some
Speaker 2: readers who had unreasonable expectations about that, And I think
Speaker 2: then there would be other readers who understand that it's
Speaker 2: a human it's a human being, you know, at the
Speaker 2: at the tiller doing this, and so they're going to
Speaker 2: have some human needs and human weaknesses and human preferences.
Speaker 2: And like, not only do you need to have friends
Speaker 2: in the world, you also need to have sources, and
Speaker 2: that that is also a transaction in some ways where
Speaker 2: you go, well, is this a source relationship or is
Speaker 2: this a potential subject? And it's all a bit of
Speaker 2: a gray area.
Speaker 1: To be carevil. I'm burn it because it might be correct.
Speaker 2: But is it hypocritical not to burn it. Is it
Speaker 2: more important to burn this person because they've done the
Speaker 2: wrong thing than it is to maintain them as a
Speaker 2: source of information? That's a really hard transaction internally, which
Speaker 2: which you know I've grappled with many times.
Speaker 1: Did you ever get into the position where because clearly
Speaker 1: you're playing the man not the ball here, like.
Speaker 2: That's your job in the case, I mean, I would
Speaker 2: contest that. Okay, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm sure I've made mistakes where I have played the man,
Speaker 1: but when I'm playing I think I'm playing the ball
Speaker 1: and the person with the ball for what they're doing
Speaker 1: with the ball, you know, like I'm not right again.
Speaker 1: I can imagine someone's going to say, what about that time?
Speaker 1: And you know you've made I've made mistakes, but usually
Speaker 1: ninety nine times out of one hundred it's this person.
Speaker 1: I'm not attacking that person because they're fat or thin,
Speaker 1: or they're they're you know, Asian or Jewish or you know,
Speaker 1: like it's the idea is it's what they're doing in
Speaker 1: their job and what they're doing with shareholder funds or
Speaker 1: what they're doing in public office. So you know, okay,
Speaker 1: I put humor on top of that and have a
Speaker 1: laugh about it, and you know that. People then say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: then you're playing the man. But I don't know that
Speaker 1: that's accurate. Do you think people should get I mean,
Speaker 1: if it's just a one off story or with two
Speaker 1: off stories, as opposed to was The Champan's Lounge, which
Speaker 1: was a whole book, and by the way, that was
Speaker 1: that's just the book the comminator at the end of
Speaker 1: a process, because you'd already been going at Cornus for
Speaker 1: quite a while, as probably correctly you know, as you
Speaker 1: have done in the past with other entities of other groups.
Speaker 1: Do you think that most people who read your column
Speaker 1: when they're written about for example, I've been written about
Speaker 1: your column. I don't know if it was about by you,
Speaker 1: but by others. Do you think they shouldn't they should
Speaker 1: if it's just once or twice this dude, get over it.
Speaker 1: Don't worry about it. Like it's what do you think
Speaker 1: about that? What do you think people should say? Well,
Speaker 1: the subject should say, who cares? What do you want
Speaker 1: to do?
Speaker 2: Well? I mean I want them to look at the issue.
Speaker 2: You know, if you criticize someone.
Speaker 1: But it's just say as a fun thing, a bit
Speaker 1: of a oh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, then you hope that they laugh it off and
Speaker 2: it's all just a bit of light entertainment. But if
Speaker 2: someone is ripping off their customers, or they're saying one
Speaker 2: thing and doing another, they're being a hypocrite, then I
Speaker 2: would hope that what they do is look at their
Speaker 2: behavior and think about the criticism that's being made. But
Speaker 2: it's also hard to do that because when people are
Speaker 2: under attack, they switch quite often from rational to emotion.
Speaker 2: Cortersol jumps in yeah, and that's very hard to think straight.
Speaker 2: And so you sort of have to give people that
Speaker 2: that sort of what's the word I'm going for?
Speaker 1: Would I jo Asi could not think of a bloody word.
Speaker 2: You sort of have to give people that.
Speaker 1: Leeway's words I've ever met. I don't believe. I can't
Speaker 1: believe the word. Eventually if you're writing it to be written,
Speaker 1: or you're timing it a big twenty words out.
Speaker 2: Why I like writing because I can sit there and
Speaker 2: you know, craft the perfect sentence, and everyone thinks I'm
Speaker 2: so great with English language. But then when you get
Speaker 2: me in front of my microphone, you realize I'm just
Speaker 2: to crack a little camera, spressing myself.
Speaker 1: So so and just on that. Your style of writing, Look,
Speaker 1: I don't really remember you when you first kicked it off,
Speaker 1: but iert remember towards the end. Your style of writing
Speaker 1: was very fluid, easy to read, very easy to read.
Speaker 1: It was it was entertainment. Did you Is this something
Speaker 1: that you you worked on to become good at or
Speaker 1: was that something you've always been? Were you like at
Speaker 1: UNI doing this sort of.
Speaker 2: Stuff or at school? You're right in the end, I
Speaker 2: was a speech writer professionally. Before I write, I worked
Speaker 2: as a journalist and your speech right for so James Hogan,
Speaker 2: the SEO of Etty had Airways, the airline that I
Speaker 2: worked for. After I worked for Quantas and before I
Speaker 2: started at the APA, and I read a lot. So
Speaker 2: I spent my twenties buried in novels. Not so much nonfiction,
Speaker 2: but I just loved literature, and I actually dreamed that
Speaker 2: I could be a novelist. Unfortunately that was a pipe dream.
Speaker 2: But that is a really good basis, and if you
Speaker 2: continue to read, I really love other people's great writing,
Speaker 2: and I'm always underlining phrases and just thinking about how
Speaker 2: other people render the English language. But the other part
Speaker 2: of it is you just get good at something you
Speaker 2: do every day. You know, it's nothing. It's absolutely no
Speaker 2: different to going and benching four times a week in
Speaker 2: the gym. Progressive overload as sitting at your desk writing
Speaker 2: eight hundred words a day for the public for public consumption.
Speaker 2: Do that for twelve years, and you'll have a big
Speaker 2: chest and you have a great writing style.
Speaker 1: But Joe, you'll be very modest, because as long as
Speaker 1: my butt points to the ground, i could be pressing
Speaker 1: every day for the next ten years and I'll never
Speaker 1: lift one hundred and forty kilos. And you know that
Speaker 1: your style of writing is sort of one hundred and
Speaker 1: forty killo territory. And so there's got to be a
Speaker 1: talent in there as well. As I love it, you
Speaker 1: must love it. I must be lucky to have some
Speaker 1: natural talent. That's I'll probably admit that, yeah, yeah, because
Speaker 1: there's some guys down the gym made, you know, and
Speaker 1: they and I could start on the same day, do
Speaker 1: the same weights for the next ten years, and they
Speaker 1: definitely would be lifting more than me in the period
Speaker 1: down the track And do you run? Do you feel
Speaker 1: as though, sometimes though, in terms of language and style
Speaker 1: of writing, that the satire that you attached to these things.
Speaker 1: Do you ever think like I didn't get too hard
Speaker 1: on a person in a ridiculous like, I hope that don't.
Speaker 1: It was a feel ridiculed because when you're writing a book,
Speaker 1: it's more facts. You've got a lot more time. Totally,
Speaker 1: when you're writing a column, you've got to make it
Speaker 1: piffy and blah blah.
Speaker 2: I agree with that, and that's part of the frustration
Speaker 2: I'm just grappling with is that people understandably are pulling
Speaker 2: out little sections of the book now and really like
Speaker 2: obsessing about them. And that's all fine, but you sort
Speaker 2: of think if you really look at the whole thing,
Speaker 2: there's a lot more going on and a lot more
Speaker 2: you know, a lot of research and a lot of context,
Speaker 2: and definitely in a column you can't get anything you
Speaker 2: can't get everything in. It can be to dense either, No,
Speaker 2: because you want people to just enjoy it. So look, well,
Speaker 2: when your original question was do you worry that someone
Speaker 2: will feel ridiculed? It depends if they've done something ridiculous.
Speaker 2: And in many cases when I was writing about someone,
Speaker 2: they had done something ridiculous. And people should be laughed
Speaker 2: at if they do something ridiculous, especially with shareholder money
Speaker 2: or public money. So but yeah, look there are times
Speaker 2: where you go, I'll tell you what changed. At the beginning,
Speaker 2: I was trying to make a splash. I was young,
Speaker 2: I was immature, you know, I was writing about stuff
Speaker 2: that was just a bit yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It was a bit infantile, like I was, you know,
Speaker 1: making jokes about mummy bloggers and you know, getting involved
Speaker 1: in cultural crap around you know, whether Julia Gillard was
Speaker 1: you know, was being treated unfairly as a woman or
Speaker 1: wasn't being and treated unfairly. And I just looked back
Speaker 1: and go that that was not the most important thing
Speaker 1: that was going on in Australia, but it was. It was.
Speaker 2: It was that was just my level of competence at
Speaker 2: the time. I'm embarrassed a but I think as it developed,
Speaker 2: I was able to ensure and again there were exceptions, unfortunately,
Speaker 2: but I was able to focus on, you know, trying
Speaker 2: to punch up, you know, always make sure that if
Speaker 2: I was going after someone that was someone who was
Speaker 2: more powerful than I was.
Speaker 1: And I got.
Speaker 2: Better at that. Not perfect, but I got better at
Speaker 2: that as I went along.
Speaker 1: You've got to get onto the book because I think
Speaker 1: it's important established Joe Aston. So I hope you don't
Speaker 1: mind me asking those sort of questions because I saw
Speaker 1: your interviewed on seven thirty Report this week and I
Speaker 1: felt like, you know, I'm not having a go with
Speaker 1: Sarah Ferguson, but I just felt as though, given the
Speaker 1: times she had to interview you, I felt aso it
Speaker 1: was given that I know you, I thought it was
Speaker 1: an unfair discussion. I just and I actually felt like
Speaker 1: you were quite guarded in that.
Speaker 2: Mate, if you sit down with Sarah Ferguson totally, She's
Speaker 2: a tremendous interviewer.
Speaker 1: And doesn't work homework, and I get it, and I
Speaker 1: just didn't think that was a good expression of Joe
Speaker 1: of yourself. One of the things I do want to
Speaker 1: talk to you about, just quickly is that in the
Speaker 1: process of meeting lots of people, you have got lots
Speaker 1: of lunches. The danger of that is that you become
Speaker 1: a lush ye drinking eating, blah blah blah. I know
Speaker 1: you're five years sober. I think years five and a
Speaker 1: half years sober. Just take us through that, and what's
Speaker 1: that process like.
Speaker 2: Well, our mutual friend David Ginjol was the first person
Speaker 2: who said to me in twenty thirteen, which is about
Speaker 2: six years before I actually stopped drinking, that I needed
Speaker 2: to do something about my drinking.
Speaker 1: He was a boss Channel mine.
Speaker 2: Then it was yeah, yeah, exactly before the merger with
Speaker 2: I was still doing stuff. We had the fin Review,
Speaker 2: had a TV show and Channel nine at that point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember that.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, look, I actually sort of got into journalism.
Speaker 2: Now now that I can be honest with myself and
Speaker 2: I have enough distance between it and I can now
Speaker 2: see that I got into journalism because it appealed to
Speaker 2: me that it was a job where I could start
Speaker 2: drinking in the daytime. You know, before that, I'd been
Speaker 2: in office jobs and you had to at least stay
Speaker 2: sober during the day. And then I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: you could just go out and get people drunk at lunchtime,
Speaker 2: and it was so it's unsurprising that I fell into
Speaker 2: that profession. And yeah, it just got worse and worse.
Speaker 1: But was that a process that was so in other words,
Speaker 1: did you do that to sort of soften yourself relative
Speaker 1: to the person you're having lunch with by maybe having
Speaker 1: a couple of gin and tonics earlier straight up? Or
Speaker 1: was that to get them off guard? Was that to
Speaker 1: get them into the mode?
Speaker 2: Well, the thing is it was both. But usually what
Speaker 2: happens when you become addicted to something is that you
Speaker 2: make excuses for yourself, you know, so you say, I'm
Speaker 2: doing this so that I can get the other person
Speaker 2: a bit loose, But really you're lying to yourself. What
Speaker 2: you're doing is you're just drinking because you're addicted to alcohol. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and you're doing it to cope with all the pressure
Speaker 2: that you know, you're not dealing with in a healthy way.
Speaker 2: So that just got worse and worse, and eventually I
Speaker 2: just sort of it got so bad that I had
Speaker 2: to stop or howd you do that? I just I'm
Speaker 2: sort of lucky I didn't sort of go to rehab
Speaker 2: or anything like that, but I just hit the fence.
Speaker 2: I was sick. I just got really you know, I
Speaker 2: was feeling really unwell all the time, you know, bloated,
Speaker 2: was losing my I remember, I was getting to the
Speaker 2: point where I could barely even really write anymore. And
Speaker 2: that really scared me. You know, I was sitting there,
Speaker 2: I couldn't remember what words meant, and you know, I
Speaker 2: needed a dictionary to start put together a sentence by
Speaker 2: the end, and I just realized that it was going
Speaker 2: like this really rapidly. And so it's actually in New
Speaker 2: York on a work trip, and I called my editor
Speaker 2: in chief and I said, I'm really sorry, but I
Speaker 2: need a break. I just need, I need. I'm about
Speaker 2: to disappear and for health reasons, and I don't know
Speaker 2: when I'll be back. And I came back to Australia
Speaker 2: and went and stayed at a friend's house on the
Speaker 2: Central Coast for a couple of weeks in dried out,
Speaker 2: and then just just got on with my life, trying
Speaker 2: to do it myself and with friends, surrounding myself with
Speaker 2: the right people. But work was really amazing, you know,
Speaker 2: they were very supportive. That that year, in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: they gave me a lot of time off and let
Speaker 2: me just get better slowly, because that's the only you
Speaker 2: don't get better fast, you know, if you do, if
Speaker 2: you thrash yourself the way I was for ten years,
Speaker 2: you don't sort of just have a day off drinking
Speaker 2: and all of a sudden year back to healthy. It takes,
Speaker 2: you know, it takes a long time for your brain
Speaker 2: to recover and for your body to recover. And now
Speaker 2: I just like life's just changed so much, and I
Speaker 2: just feel so lucky because I know lots of other
Speaker 2: people who have what I have, who don't make it.
Speaker 1: And you got married during that period or just a
Speaker 1: little bit thereafter. Yeah, later, Yeah, and you're married how
Speaker 1: many years now? Two years? And you've you've got a child?
Speaker 2: Yeah, six months old?
Speaker 1: Six months old? Congratulations, thank you. I must have to
Speaker 1: said when I first met you, I didn't think that.
Speaker 1: I just never imagined you settling down, so to speak.
Speaker 1: But I mean neither. Yeah, you were like pretty young.
Speaker 1: I don't even how old you are, but you still
Speaker 1: look really young. But forty one, well, so then this
Speaker 1: would have been I probably looked about fifty five five
Speaker 1: years ago.
Speaker 2: That's the thing.
Speaker 1: You look great at the moment. So let's god and
Speaker 1: so we got onto the book, right, So this week,
Speaker 1: you know the time, we're doing the podcast. But at
Speaker 1: the end of the week, it's all been about alban
Speaker 1: Easy and it's all been about did he make a call?
Speaker 1: Did he make a cook? And we just get some
Speaker 1: stuff cleared up straight away before we get into the
Speaker 1: rest of the book, the important part of the book.
Speaker 1: He's denied it. He said didn't make a phone call.
Speaker 1: Regaci's never really received any favors. I watched Paul Murray
Speaker 1: keep putting up on the Code of Conduct, the Parliamentary
Speaker 1: Code of Conduct, which is you know, Julia Rudd's go
Speaker 1: to conduct, Julie Gillard's co to conductor, Kevin Rudd's cod
Speaker 1: to conduct, and also Albanese co to conduct. Is the
Speaker 1: issue that he shouldn't have accepted free flights? What is it?
Speaker 1: What's the issue? What is the issue? Yeah?
Speaker 2: The reason Albanese's upgrades in particular are the focus of
Speaker 2: attention in that section of the book is because it's
Speaker 2: sort of context to understand how or sorry, it's context.
Speaker 2: How nobody can understand the Katar decision that happened last year,
Speaker 2: where you know, Quantus was in the toilet, worst customer
Speaker 2: service ever, highest airfares in living memory, and nobody none
Speaker 2: of the airlines were flying enough seats, so there was
Speaker 2: really high travel demand, really low supply of seats, and
Speaker 2: Katar puts their hands up and says, we'll fly more.
Speaker 2: We can bring in more flights right now and that
Speaker 2: will bring prices down. And by the way, Kata kept
Speaker 2: flying to Australia right through COVID when all the other
Speaker 2: airlines had packed up, and it's all on track to
Speaker 2: be approved. You know, the Transport Department's in favor of it.
Speaker 2: Catherine King verbally who's the Transport minister, verbally says, indicates
Speaker 2: to Virgin that she's in favor of it, because of
Speaker 2: course Virgin's a partner of Kata. And then all of
Speaker 2: a sudden something changes. And so that is that the
Speaker 2: relationship between alban Easy and Quantas and Alan Joyce in
Speaker 2: particular is fair game and absolutely of high interest. The
Speaker 2: thing is, there's lots of questions, like he declared those upgrades,
Speaker 2: and in some ways ironically he's being punished for being
Speaker 2: transparent about the fact that the upgrades happened. The argument is,
Speaker 2: has he been transparent about how they happened. He only now,
Speaker 2: I mean, has taken a lot of days to finally
Speaker 2: now say he didn't seek those upgrades. That's inconsistent with
Speaker 2: what I've written and inconsistent with what I know. But
Speaker 2: the fact is he was Transport Minister, so that's the
Speaker 2: unique thing. He had unique powers over the airline industry
Speaker 2: and so was that appropriate. I don't think it was.
Speaker 2: But having said that, this book is about how Quantus
Speaker 2: influences all politicians and both sides of politics, and that's
Speaker 2: really the big issue because this has been going on
Speaker 2: for forty years. And like rod Eddington says in my book,
Speaker 2: he was the CEO of Cathe Pacific in Hong Kong
Speaker 2: British Airways when they owned a quarter of Quantus, and
Speaker 2: also Anset. He was chairman of Anset before they went
Speaker 2: down the tubes. And he says, you know, Quantus is
Speaker 2: the best lobbyist in Australia, Barna. He can't think of
Speaker 2: anyone who's ever been better. And he competed with Quantus
Speaker 2: for the vast majority of his career. So many people
Speaker 2: except that Quantus has had this really powerful influence over politicians,
Speaker 2: Liberal labor, national everyone for a long time. And so
Speaker 2: you know, I'm a bit amused. I mean, it's just
Speaker 2: alb An Easy as Prime Minister today. There's nothing we
Speaker 2: can do about that. But I am a bit amused
Speaker 2: that that's the only angle that anyone's talking about, because
Speaker 2: I mean a lot of it is about how Quantus
Speaker 2: managed to rip two point seven billion dollars of subsidies
Speaker 2: out of the Morrison government. After that they convinced the
Speaker 2: Morrison government not to say Virgin Australia with a financial lifeline.
Speaker 2: So their power is immense no matter who is in
Speaker 2: government in Canberra.
Speaker 1: And is this but Jose, is it a corporates sort
Speaker 1: of have a responsibility or they definitely have a responsibility
Speaker 1: the shaholders under the corporation's law. And part of the
Speaker 1: responsibility of the shaholders under the corporations law is to
Speaker 1: make sure that they can always survive they outsurpprivors everybody
Speaker 1: else as a business, that they can maximize a profit
Speaker 1: totally in order to pay differdends back to the shoholders.
Speaker 1: And if you're given an opportunity to put yourself in
Speaker 1: a position of power or influence, whether it it's under
Speaker 1: Richard Gordon's chairman and or you know anybody else previous
Speaker 1: chairman's going right back for the last forty fifty years,
Speaker 1: you would probably do it because it's like a risk
Speaker 1: management process. What is the objection to a corporation, let's
Speaker 1: call it managing politicians the way Quantus is done.
Speaker 2: Well, there is the responsibility to shareholders, but there is
Speaker 2: the politicians responsibility to US citizens to make good policy
Speaker 2: that's good for the country and good for consumers as well.
Speaker 2: And so the problem is when Quantus is saying you
Speaker 2: can have you can all have the chairman's lounge and
Speaker 2: we're going to give you upgrades, or they get asked
Speaker 2: for upgrades by politicians, which they do often, and they
Speaker 2: give them to them. And then that what that fosters
Speaker 2: is an environment where Quantus is able to make politicians
Speaker 2: create bad policy for us as travelers, and that Catart
Speaker 2: decision is a great example. They Quantus managed to convince
Speaker 2: the government to defund the A Triple c's airline monitoring
Speaker 2: powers last year, which was again an unbelievable decision when
Speaker 2: prices were sky high. Service was terrible. REX was basically
Speaker 2: in the process of being destroyed and bonds are. So
Speaker 2: that's the issue that Quantus is absolutely entitled to and
Speaker 2: should do the best for its shareholders. And no one's
Speaker 2: saying Quantus should not make money, but it's the way
Speaker 2: they go about it is there.
Speaker 1: But today, on today's standards, do you think there's a
Speaker 1: level of at Quantus, at least from Quantus's point of view,
Speaker 1: Quantus obligations that there is a social license for them,
Speaker 1: given we give them a social license to train people,
Speaker 1: give them a social license through the government, given that
Speaker 1: there are sort of effectively their major au the only
Speaker 1: airline here, particularly when it comes overseas trouble domestically, do
Speaker 1: you think they also have a social license on top
Speaker 1: of their profit obligations in total, on top of their
Speaker 1: looking after shell obligations that they mustle of the socializnse
Speaker 1: relative to their customer base. Definitely, And because that's a new,
Speaker 1: relatively speaking, new concept socialized like banks, is that an issue?
Speaker 2: It is new in a corporate sense. However, Quantus has
Speaker 2: been more than just a company for a long time,
Speaker 2: and part of this is a hangover from the fact
Speaker 2: that it used to be owned by the government. It
Speaker 2: was only privatized in nineteen ninety five. But it's also
Speaker 2: the way they monetize the loyalty of their customers. You know,
Speaker 2: they all their advertising is about being the national carrier,
Speaker 2: the spirit of Australia. So they're very happy to use
Speaker 2: the sort of social part of their brand to make
Speaker 2: more money and to sell us tickets that are more
Speaker 2: expensive than on any other airlines for service that is
Speaker 2: quite often inferior. But then when they're expected to meet
Speaker 2: the responsibilities that come with being the national carrier not
Speaker 2: just a profit making corporation, they sort of go, oh,
Speaker 2: just a company, So they can't have it both ways,
Speaker 2: and Quantus did try and have it both ways. In COVID,
Speaker 2: you know, they shut down internationally, other airlines kept flying
Speaker 2: to Australia and there were, you know, many many Australians
Speaker 2: stuck overseas. They took COVID subsidies, lots of them, not
Speaker 2: more than foreign carriers, like American carriers got more from
Speaker 2: the American government. European carriers got equity injections from their governments,
Speaker 2: but they got big amount of subsidies, and they took
Speaker 2: job Keeper, especially they're the biggest recipient of job Keeper.
Speaker 2: And then they illegally sacked people while those people were
Speaker 2: on job keeper, and so it's the way they acted.
Speaker 2: They also started paying share buybacks, so they started returning
Speaker 2: hundreds of millions of dollars to their shareholders right after
Speaker 2: they just received billions in subsidies. And they were instead
Speaker 2: of like, instead of reinvesting in the products so that
Speaker 2: the standards were good enough, so they had their priorities
Speaker 2: all out of whack. That's not even just social license.
Speaker 2: That's just if you treat your customers so badly that
Speaker 2: you destroy your brand, then your shareholders will ultimately suffer.
Speaker 2: And even in the book, Quantus's largest shareholder says a
Speaker 2: lot of stuff, but one of the things he points
Speaker 2: out is that they were so focused on making this
Speaker 2: record profit out of COVID to prove that it was
Speaker 2: the turnaround of all turnarounds. But actually, if they just said,
Speaker 2: let's make you know, two or three hundred million dollars
Speaker 2: less this year, put that back into catering call centers,
Speaker 2: you know, putting more frontline staff in the airport terminals,
Speaker 2: you know, all those kind of things that would have
Speaker 2: made things better for customers. The share price wouldn't have
Speaker 2: collapsed as much because they wouldn't have been a public uproar.
Speaker 2: So you can try it. You can actually almost make
Speaker 2: too much money if you're too single minded about it.
Speaker 2: And that's what Quantus had under Alan Joyce before COVID.
Speaker 2: They were at this point where they had this I
Speaker 2: call it the holy trinity, which is very original, I know.
Speaker 2: But you know, customers, shareholders and staff, and they were
Speaker 2: all in this perfect balance. Quantus was making lots of money.
Speaker 2: Staff loved the company and its customers loved the company.
Speaker 2: And COVID After COVID, Alan Joe, it's just allowed that
Speaker 2: to fall completely out of whack.
Speaker 1: Do you think it's a single minded brilliance though? But
Speaker 1: the single mindedness wasn't like good, oh.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a big character study and yeah.
Speaker 1: And I'm talking about the character which is all and
Speaker 1: Joyce was, yeah, a single minded brilliance. The single minded
Speaker 1: part of it wasn't right.
Speaker 2: It wasn't. It was became problematic because his single mindedness
Speaker 2: was probably a great strength until it was no longer
Speaker 2: a strength, you know.
Speaker 1: Become an obsession.
Speaker 2: Well look I don't I wouldn't go that far, but
Speaker 2: not for you. For him, Yeah, his.
Speaker 1: Single mind us to make profit, to profit at all cost.
Speaker 1: It certainly became his overriding priority. And that's also because
Speaker 1: of his incentives because the bigger the profit, the higher
Speaker 1: share price, well theoretically, and his his pay was mostly
Speaker 1: in shairs, so he was his incentives were get the
Speaker 1: share price ramped right, And so it is a really
Speaker 1: interesting character study because it's over I go into you know,
Speaker 1: Alan Joyce turned up Quantus was sort of collapsing financially
Speaker 1: its results when he took over in the GFC. You know,
Speaker 1: he just chipped away, tried to make Quantus more efficient,
Speaker 1: got it into this pretty good position before COVID, But
Speaker 1: by the time COVID had hit, he sort of started
Speaker 1: to lose his judgment a little bit. And that happens
Speaker 1: to people like again, there's this great man theory of
Speaker 1: history and people go, well, you know, that's all a
Speaker 1: bit made up. But I think Quantus is a great
Speaker 1: example of someone who really he was there for so long,
Speaker 1: he came to dominate the organization. His chairman changed in
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, so he went from having this really very
Speaker 1: commanding chairman in Lee Clifford, who'd run Rio tinto and
Speaker 1: really you knew who was boss between those two. Then
Speaker 1: he leaves.
Speaker 2: In twenty eighteen, Richard Goider comes in and he's a
Speaker 2: far more deferential, nice man.
Speaker 1: And hands off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think plus, Alan Joyce was much more
Speaker 2: confident by that point. He'd been there for more than
Speaker 2: a decade and he was like, no one was questioning
Speaker 2: his judgment. But the thing is with power, and this
Speaker 2: is a really an interesting psychological study. Power affects people.
Speaker 2: If you're in a powerful social status or professional status
Speaker 2: for a long time, it actually starts to affect you,
Speaker 2: just like a traumatic brain injury, as in judgment. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because you know, like normal people, I probably am not
Speaker 2: very normal, but just say I could consider myself normal.
Speaker 2: You know, we're not very important or powerful. We sit
Speaker 2: around with each other, we talk, say we're in a meeting.
Speaker 2: We're looking to each other subliminally. This isn't conscious, but
Speaker 2: subliminally we're looking to each other to coregulate each other's responses. So,
Speaker 2: you know, you laugh when I laugh, and I'll you know,
Speaker 2: grimace when you're grimace, I'll look at my shoes at
Speaker 2: the right time. And that's how that's how humans communicate.
Speaker 2: But powerful people, over time, they become detached from that
Speaker 2: process because they don't have to care what other people think.
Speaker 2: Because they're in charge.
Speaker 1: The don't have a part of the community. They form
Speaker 1: the community.
Speaker 2: They just drift away and they are not co regulated
Speaker 2: by other people, especially because everyone is inferior to them,
Speaker 2: so nobody would not laugh at their joke. Nobody says
Speaker 2: that's not funny. No one says, boss, you're full of shit.
Speaker 2: People stop saying that to them, so that the longer
Speaker 2: they're in power, it affects them progressively. And you've seen
Speaker 2: that in lots of politicians that stay in office too long.
Speaker 2: CEO should not be you know, nobody should be CEO
Speaker 2: of a large Australian company for fifteen years. It's too long.
Speaker 2: And I reckon, you know, I don't want a verbal
Speaker 2: Alan Joyce, but I reckon he would wish that he
Speaker 2: left in twenty nineteen, when he'd been there eleven years,
Speaker 2: was right before COVID hit. You know that the share
Speaker 2: price was really high. Everyone loved him, he was a
Speaker 2: hero over gay marriage, and instead the board offered him
Speaker 2: a contract extension and instead of leaving them, he stayed.
Speaker 2: And then COVID happened and the rest just got out
Speaker 2: of control.
Speaker 1: But whose responsibility is that of the board's responsibility one
Speaker 1: hundred percent the board's responsibility in relation to what the
Speaker 1: CEO is doing, because when you said something interesting, there
Speaker 1: were a moment ago. When someone's been in the role
Speaker 1: for a number of years, what they tend to do
Speaker 1: is they actually put people around them and sift out
Speaker 1: those people who are around them who don't fit into category,
Speaker 1: who are actually not gonna they're gonna laugh at their jokes,
Speaker 1: They're not going to sort of especially the business is
Speaker 1: doing well or making money, and the end will the
Speaker 1: share prices as they're going to everyone's gonna play the
Speaker 1: game sort of thing. And it seems to me, then
Speaker 1: what you're talking about here in the book, which you're
Speaker 1: you're sort of revealing, is maybe regulators need to take
Speaker 1: a great role in these things. Do you think regulators
Speaker 1: have a need to sort of say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe there's a tenure period or I think that's making
Speaker 1: excuses for bad performance of boards, Like maybe the regulators
Speaker 1: got to talk to the good I think the boards
Speaker 1: need to do their jobs, and then you don't need
Speaker 1: regulators to do anything that they're not already doing, you know,
Speaker 1: like a good board at Quantas would have in twenty
Speaker 1: nineteen said eleven years is enough, it's time. Instead they
Speaker 1: gave them another contract extension. A good board would have
Speaker 1: more importantly, you know, you can argue the toss on
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen should have been twenty twenty. And then if
Speaker 1: it was twenty twenty, COVID happened and he couldn't really
Speaker 1: change the o's in the middle of a crisis. So
Speaker 1: you know, you could argue the toss on that. But
Speaker 1: what you can't argue the toss on is when Quantus
Speaker 1: was running off the rails, you know, they were in
Speaker 1: a brand crisis. They'd become toxic and because Alan Joyce
Speaker 1: had been there for so long he had come to
Speaker 1: inhabit the Quantus brand, people just he become the flying Kangaroo.
Speaker 2: Well he became the devil of you know, he almost
Speaker 2: became the devil incarnate and people hated him so much,
Speaker 2: fairly or unfairly, that's how people felt that and that
Speaker 2: wasn't just that's not not me saying I reckon. That's true.
Speaker 2: That's in the brand consumer research from Roy Morgan, rep Track,
Speaker 2: all the big research houses were finding this. What you
Speaker 2: can't argue the toss is that at that point the
Speaker 2: board of directors a quantus should have said, Alan, we
Speaker 2: need to fix some things here now, if not to
Speaker 2: get rid of him immediately, at least to say all
Speaker 2: these things need to change. COVID credits not good enough.
Speaker 2: You know, we've got to pay. We've got to settle
Speaker 2: with the bag of chandlers who we sacked illegally. Let's
Speaker 2: pay the money now and apologize, you know, a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of stuff they could have done, but instead that
Speaker 2: was just they kept Alan just kept fighting, which was
Speaker 2: his instinct, over powering instinct was always to fight. He's
Speaker 2: a real street fighter. And the board was just, well,
Speaker 2: Alan Joyce is he knows better than we do. We
Speaker 2: can't second guess him, how do you?
Speaker 1: That's interesting. So the balance between a board and the
Speaker 1: balance between the personalities on a board and the CEO.
Speaker 1: Often CEOs, generally, if they're powerful, can select them on
Speaker 1: board and or work over the chairman, whichairperson. And I'm
Speaker 1: suggesting this happened with Richard Gorder, but generally a really
Speaker 1: good CEO who's bringing good results. Put aside what happened
Speaker 1: in post COVID with the sort of demise of the brain,
Speaker 1: et cetera, and the things that were going on, and
Speaker 1: they don't want to challenge the CEO. How do you
Speaker 1: how would you say? I mean, you've you've written the book,
Speaker 1: and you know you've obviously observed a lot of stuff Midlander,
Speaker 1: great depth of anybody else in relations to this particular case
Speaker 1: study quantas, how do how do the shareholders? Then? Is
Speaker 1: it up there to shareholders to recognize what's going on
Speaker 1: and then go and say make them change themselves at the
Speaker 1: board level, because yes, the board is responsible for the CEO,
Speaker 1: the shareholders responsible for the board.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they own the company. And then very good point,
Speaker 2: very good point.
Speaker 1: And then the CEO usually knows the big shareholders. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: And it was sort of got to sort of get.
Speaker 2: They're all members of the chairman's lamp as well.
Speaker 1: So it's a not an unholy alliance, but it's it's
Speaker 1: a circle of a clever process. Because that's what I'm
Speaker 1: saying about Alan Joyce's single minded brilliance around himself.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think that's fair.
Speaker 1: And he's worked every every aspect of every angle, and
Speaker 1: he's including governments. It's not just government, shareholders, board senior staff.
Speaker 2: He raised the sort of the capturing of strategically important
Speaker 2: people to a high art, and that included his board members.
Speaker 2: And definitely I think he was very good at investor
Speaker 2: relations because he was very focused on that issue, and
Speaker 2: they trusted him because he had got quantus from where
Speaker 2: it was. You know, the share price was bumping along
Speaker 2: the ground at a dollar a share for a long time.
Speaker 2: By twenty nineteen, before COVID, it was seven bucks forty,
Speaker 2: so he'd, you know, more than you know, some bagger. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a seven bagger, I mean, amazing investment.
Speaker 1: Ridiculous.
Speaker 2: But of course, what anyone should know about the airline
Speaker 2: business is it cyclical. It is the most cyclical business
Speaker 2: of all ciclical businesses.
Speaker 1: So she tells us about it. It tells us about
Speaker 1: a new trend before anything else.
Speaker 2: Yeah, anyone knows that if the share price gets to
Speaker 2: seven bucks, then the next place is going to get
Speaker 2: to his three bucks. Like that's what airlines do. And
Speaker 2: now it collapsed to like five bucks last year when
Speaker 2: all of this stuff was blowing up and Allen resigned,
Speaker 2: and guess what, it's back to eight bucks. And everyone's
Speaker 2: thinking it they're really smart, but you know, eight at
Speaker 2: eight bucks. I mean, this isn't investment advice, but at
Speaker 2: quite clearly it's a topy and it's going to fall
Speaker 2: again like it's a bit of a trading stock, so
Speaker 2: lots of people trade in and out because you know
Speaker 2: it's just going to be like a rollercoaster all the time.
Speaker 1: So have you spoken to Alan Joyce about the book?
Speaker 2: I have not. I tried to approached him. There's a
Speaker 2: statement from him in the book which I thought was
Speaker 2: a bit amusing, where he complains that the book will
Speaker 2: not be balanced or fair towards him. I don't know
Speaker 2: if he's read it and whether he still thinks that
Speaker 2: it wasn't balanced or fair. I tried hard to give
Speaker 2: him credit for what he did well, but what did
Speaker 2: he do well.
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 2: What he did really well was the hard graft of
Speaker 2: making Quantus more efficient, because you know, today maybe it's
Speaker 2: too efficient. But back in twenty twenty eight, when he
Speaker 2: took over and I worked there, then it was a
Speaker 2: very fat, lazy company. And in fairness to Jeff Dixon,
Speaker 2: who was the predecessor to Alan, it was much less
Speaker 2: fat and lazy than when Jeff took over. But that's
Speaker 2: the sort of thing when you take over a government business,
Speaker 2: it's so fat and hierarchical, and you just got to
Speaker 2: do the slow, hard work of making it more efficient,
Speaker 2: pulling costs out year after year after year. And that
Speaker 2: that's boring, unsexy work that no one's going to give
Speaker 2: you tarraft I give. That's a pain in the ass.
Speaker 2: And he where do you go wrong?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I was just going to try and give him credit
Speaker 2: for something else, because he's done a lot of other
Speaker 2: good things. But where did he go wrong?
Speaker 1: Because what did he do? There's lots of e Yeah
Speaker 1: he did, but it comes to start.
Speaker 2: One thing he did wrong was he's just the one
Speaker 2: thing that that led to all the other things was
Speaker 2: that he allowed Hubris to take over. And there was
Speaker 2: a moment when COVID hit where Quantus was worried that
Speaker 2: they were in trouble, but very quickly they realized that
Speaker 2: they had a very strong balance sheet and that they
Speaker 2: could survive without any government help. They said publicly, no
Speaker 2: we should, we don't need money. We're fine, and so
Speaker 2: Virgin shouldn't get any money because they calculated that if
Speaker 2: they didn't get any money and Virgin didn't get any money,
Speaker 2: Virgin would fall over and they and it fell over right,
Speaker 2: So next thing you know, they've got through that they've
Speaker 2: knocked over their competitor, and then they changed their mind
Speaker 2: and say we do want money, but it's easily forgotten that.
Speaker 1: That's pretty clever though, very.
Speaker 2: I mean exceptionally clever. Yeah, yeah, he was. He was
Speaker 2: a very good strategic thinker. And by June twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: like they had got their costs down. They really big
Speaker 2: achievement to like contract the business into this tiny dormant
Speaker 2: thing in Mothballs where it was only burning forty million
Speaker 2: dollars a week, and they said they could survive till
Speaker 2: for eighteen months like that without a dollar of revenue
Speaker 2: coming in the door.
Speaker 1: So they they never thought they were going to collapse,
Speaker 1: even though they later started saying, oh we were almost
Speaker 1: going to collapse, they never thought that would happen, truly.
Speaker 1: But so what Conscious did at that point was they
Speaker 1: raised more than a billion dollars from shareholders when the
Speaker 1: share price had been covered. And they didn't say, oh,
Speaker 1: we need this billion and a bit dollars to survive,
Speaker 1: you know, just as working capital. They said, we need
Speaker 1: this money to sack ten thousand people and pay a
Speaker 1: billion dollars in redundancy payments, and that was too many
Speaker 1: people to sack. But what clearly Alan Joyce saw was
Speaker 1: an opportunity. COVID became an opportunity to supercharge Quantus as profits,
Speaker 1: and he went for gold. He was clearly seeing, we
Speaker 1: can basically turn Quantus into Jet Star, you know, with
Speaker 1: higher prices. I mean, that's an exaggeration, but you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, like, really savagely cut the costs and
Speaker 1: reduce the quality of the customer experience and push the
Speaker 1: prices and push and keep the prices high, and the
Speaker 1: profit margin will just get fat. And so if you're
Speaker 1: a fund manager and Alan Joyce is proposing such a
Speaker 1: capital raising, you're going to say that sounds great. And
Speaker 1: they all did and and surprise, surprise, they did make
Speaker 1: the superprofits when they came straight out of COVID. But
Speaker 1: what they also did was they felled to pieces operationationally,
Speaker 1: Because if you sack ten thousand people from a thirty
Speaker 1: thousand people company, it's one third almost. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: from twenty nine thousand to twenty one thousand, So it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're twenty five six percent or something like that. A
Speaker 1: huge number, and you come back and how do you
Speaker 1: really think you're going to operate properly? You know the
Speaker 1: wheels are going to fall off because you know so
Speaker 1: far fewer people working in the airport terminals or working
Speaker 1: in the engineering department, and you haven't kept your pilot
Speaker 1: training or your cabin crew training fresh because you wanted
Speaker 1: to save money. There's so many areas where they were
Speaker 1: just threadbare. And of course they say, oh, but it
Speaker 1: was COVID sickness. We couldn't have expected that. And it
Speaker 1: was supply chain disruption, we couldn't have expected that. And
Speaker 1: the thing about this story, it's why it needs to
Speaker 1: be a book instead of an article, is those things
Speaker 1: are partly true, but they use those things as if
Speaker 1: they're wholly true. And so, of course COVID sickness in
Speaker 1: the staff and supply chain disruption for parts that made
Speaker 1: an impact and made it worse, but it is not
Speaker 1: the reason why Quantus's performance in twenty twenty two and
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three was so horrific. And we all remember
Speaker 1: how bad it was. I mean, anyone who tried to
Speaker 1: travel in twenty twenty two, it was hellish. And that
Speaker 1: was all because Quantus was being greedy. Someone told me
Speaker 1: that they A pilot actually told me, one of the
Speaker 1: captains told me that Cornis sent a whole lot of
Speaker 1: planes to the US and moth bolled them efectually put
Speaker 1: them in the desert. Yeah, Vegas desert. Yeah, just because
Speaker 1: it's dry there and things don't rust as much. And
Speaker 1: in fact, he was also saying to me, when the
Speaker 1: border's reopened and Cornis is going to be flying in
Speaker 1: and out, they won't have the planes to do it.
Speaker 2: No, no, they still don't have. So those A three eighties,
Speaker 2: a lot of their craft went there, but all their
Speaker 2: eight three eighties were shut down properly, like really put
Speaker 2: into proper storage. And there's there were twelve of them
Speaker 2: that went up there. They ended up scrapping two of
Speaker 2: them for metal, and so that they reduced the eight
Speaker 2: three eighty fleet to ten. And then there are still
Speaker 2: two that have never come back because it's taking that
Speaker 2: long to get them through heavy maintenance. So there are
Speaker 2: a lot of short sighted decisions. Now by the way,
Speaker 2: Quantus doesn't really want them back because there's such big
Speaker 2: aircraft that they bring prices down. So Quantus now post COVID,
Speaker 2: is playing a game of keep the number of seats
Speaker 2: that we fly constrained, and then we can keep our
Speaker 2: airfares much higher.
Speaker 1: But that the assumption around that, there is a presumption
Speaker 1: in that model, that business model, is that that people
Speaker 1: feel compelled to flow quantus. So where does the you know,
Speaker 1: the platinum member and the Champman's Club membership, maintenance and
Speaker 1: keeping my miles up, you know, all the other memberships
Speaker 1: and all the loyalty programs. Where does that fit into
Speaker 1: that business model.
Speaker 2: It's a huge part of it.
Speaker 1: Explain that.
Speaker 2: So it's funny there's a double status points promotion on
Speaker 2: this week. Well, by the time you go to air
Speaker 2: it'll be over. But you know, I'm as guilty as
Speaker 2: the next person. I'm booking all these flights, you know.
Speaker 1: But Joe, why do we do that? Why are we
Speaker 1: so interested in our flying status? Oh?
Speaker 2: That's such a good question, And I'm guilty of it myself.
Speaker 2: I mean, especially once you actually get to the platinum
Speaker 2: or Platinum one or whatever status or Chairman's lane status,
Speaker 2: and you go, what is the value of these benefits?
Speaker 1: Really?
Speaker 2: Is it really that good in this lounge or would Yeah,
Speaker 2: in the airport terminal, you can get just just as
Speaker 2: good good, probably a better coffee and a better sandwich
Speaker 2: than you can in here. Anyway, is because.
Speaker 1: You're in the air. Because when you're in the champans Landrew,
Speaker 1: you're rubbing shoulders with all these powerful.
Speaker 2: People, correct, and you it tells you that you have arrived.
Speaker 2: You know, this is an ego massage. I am one
Speaker 2: of the inner sanctum elite members of Australian society and
Speaker 2: people want to feel that way.
Speaker 1: And people because you'll go over there as a prime minister.
Speaker 1: Well there's the treasure.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and that we've been, we've been. Western culture
Speaker 2: has has conditioned us to be like this. And that's
Speaker 2: the same reason why people wanted to pay ten grand
Speaker 2: a year to have a black Amex in the day
Speaker 2: before credit cards were all on your phone. I mean
Speaker 2: it's the same concept. You know, you want to pull
Speaker 2: that card out where people go, oh he's somebody, right
Speaker 2: or she's somebody.
Speaker 1: Is there a certain amount of flattery deserving for someone's
Speaker 1: marketing bullins?
Speaker 2: Hell? Yes? Oh full credit and the Quantus Frequent Fly
Speaker 2: program is the great success story of the Joyce era,
Speaker 2: I would say, and I think when I worked at
Speaker 2: Quantus in two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine,
Speaker 2: that sort of period, I think there might have been
Speaker 2: like about six or seven million members of the Quantus
Speaker 2: Frequent Fly Program. There's now sixteen well now they're not
Speaker 2: all active, superactive members, but there's sixteen million members. There's
Speaker 2: only about twenty million adults in Australia, so that would
Speaker 2: be the equivalent as if the United or Delta or
Speaker 2: American Loyalty program in America had like two hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty million members, which they don't.
Speaker 1: So there's no proportional equivalents. Hell no, it is globally unique.
Speaker 1: So ration he has on a Britaint job or somebody.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean he was a CEO. You got to
Speaker 2: give him the credit.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And the thing is, it is what is underneath all
Speaker 2: of the of you know, competitors of Quantus. They scratch
Speaker 2: their head, they try everything. They you know, they try
Speaker 2: their own lounges, they drop their prices, they change their roots,
Speaker 2: They lobby in Canberra and they go, why can't we
Speaker 2: beat them? You know, not not only can't, why can't
Speaker 2: we beat them? Why can't we even come close to
Speaker 2: even competing with them? And what's underneath it is that
Speaker 2: loyalty program because it's got such deep penetration people value
Speaker 2: it so much. It's also like the sunk cost theory,
Speaker 2: like I'm in this deep I've been a place for
Speaker 2: this long, or a Sham's lange member for this long.
Speaker 2: I can't let it gain, I can't let it go now.
Speaker 2: It's part of how my Vesta's part of how my
Speaker 2: life works. You know, I've got all these points. If
Speaker 2: I if I switch now, then I'll never be able
Speaker 2: to use them. It's genius. And that's why no matter
Speaker 2: how badly Quantus treats its customers, they know Quantus will
Speaker 2: never admit this, but they know we will keep coming
Speaker 2: back for more punishment.
Speaker 1: So and therefore you can build a business model off that.
Speaker 2: So therefore they can treat you poorly. And so there's
Speaker 2: no incentive for them to compete on the quality of
Speaker 2: their product. I shouldn't say there's no incentive. There's a
Speaker 2: lower incentive for them to compete on the quality of
Speaker 2: their product, like other airlines have to do in other
Speaker 2: parts of the world. So that's why they calculate stuff.
Speaker 2: It will make the catering crap. We'll let the planes
Speaker 2: get old, We'll let the lounges deteriorate to the carpets threadbare,
Speaker 2: because it won't make a difference because the suckers will
Speaker 2: just keep rolling through the door.
Speaker 1: And how much of that is when they call them corners,
Speaker 1: is called the spirit of Australia, which is in my view,
Speaker 1: is absolutely brilliant. I agree with the lad's so good.
Speaker 1: In fact, I had on my mental podcast the family
Speaker 1: who did all the flying Kangaroo, the whole thing for
Speaker 1: corners and also launched Vergin Blue for that matter, whore
Speaker 1: in Australia and the brilliance of their program, their market
Speaker 1: their externals, but but the brilliants of their marketing program
Speaker 1: was just amazing.
Speaker 2: That was one of singers like that was Pete John
Speaker 2: Singleton when he was the great adman you know in
Speaker 2: the day. Him and Jeff Dixon cred those those choir
Speaker 2: ads around the Sydney Olympics and they are the greatest
Speaker 2: Australia home. I think the greatest advertising campaign Australian advertising
Speaker 2: campaign ever period. Like there is nothing as good as that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: well maybe a common come on, but that type of thing.
Speaker 2: But yeah, well that's another one. Yeah that's another.
Speaker 1: But we're talking about iconic music, iconic lyrics, iconic imagery,
Speaker 1: and I want to be a member of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'll do anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to be that. I want to be
Speaker 2: one of the most valued customers of that company, you
Speaker 2: know's Yeah, I want to associate my own life with
Speaker 2: that brand. Because people do. They they identify in ways
Speaker 2: with brands, and they align with them and they use
Speaker 2: them as proxies for themselves.
Speaker 1: That's who I am. I'm a spirit of a Australia
Speaker 1: sort of thing. And then we tend to think and
Speaker 1: so therefore Quantus sort of has done us, not anyone
Speaker 1: in particular, but Quantis as a group, as a corporation
Speaker 1: has done quite a brilliant job as a corporation edging
Speaker 1: everyone else out of the system, like you're out, you're out,
Speaker 1: I'm in. Help said that were you know, the first
Speaker 1: airline here ever in the country. But they've done quite
Speaker 1: a brilliant job of maintaining the position and actually enhancing
Speaker 1: their position overall overall.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they've made it into a fortress. Yeah. One
Speaker 2: of the ways.
Speaker 1: That's a good way of just scrobing fortress.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, you know, good businesses have motes, Yeah, as
Speaker 2: you know very well, and you know, how do you
Speaker 2: get over the moat into the fortress to compete with them?
Speaker 2: And very hard once you have such a dominant competitive position,
Speaker 2: and Jetstar them created Jeft Dicks and created Jetstar and
Speaker 2: he appointed Alan Joyce to be the first sea of
Speaker 2: jet Star. Right, yeah, and that's that was a globally
Speaker 2: unique thing as well, Like no full service airline had
Speaker 2: ever said, let's create a budget carrier to compete with us,
Speaker 2: because that was considered like cannibalizing yourself. It was like
Speaker 2: latest Steve you never do it well. Steve Jobs created
Speaker 2: the iPhone which destroyed the iPods sort of like that.
Speaker 2: It was very against the grain thinking. And to this day,
Speaker 2: airlines around the world have tried and failed to replicate
Speaker 2: the Quantus Jet Star thing. Duel brand strategy they call it.
Speaker 2: And it's so it makes it impossible for Virgin to
Speaker 2: ever really get a It makes it very difficult for
Speaker 2: Virgin to ever do anything other than really get the scraps.
Speaker 2: And certainly for a Rex or a Bonds or another upstart,
Speaker 2: it makes it very difficult for them to ever have
Speaker 2: a chance. If Quantus, Virgin and Jetstar were three different
Speaker 2: companies and they were competing with each other. That would
Speaker 2: be a much more competitive market for consumers and would
Speaker 2: there be better outcomes. But that's never going to happen.
Speaker 2: I mean one, no government's ever going to force Quantas
Speaker 2: to sell jet Star. But it's the way they do.
Speaker 2: They can just squeeze everyone from both ends. So you've
Speaker 2: got Quantus with all the highest paying customers paying the
Speaker 2: highest fares, and then you've got jet Star, which just
Speaker 2: rakes up all the cheapest travel, all the leisure holiday travelers,
Speaker 2: and they have the lowest costs so they don't have
Speaker 2: to make a huehuge amount of money. Jet Star the
Speaker 2: real creams made by quantits. But they just take all
Speaker 2: this traffic, the cheap end and the expensive end, and
Speaker 2: they squeeze their competition in the middle. So Virgin stuck
Speaker 2: in the middle, trying to be a little bit premium,
Speaker 2: a little bit like budget. And so what are they
Speaker 2: They're just sort of a bit of a blamonge and
Speaker 2: and like again and again. They they just dominate by that,
Speaker 2: and they really got Rex that way too.
Speaker 1: They've squeezed everyone out.
Speaker 2: And by the way, no one should be no one
Speaker 2: should should blame Quantus for being a really aggressive competitor,
Speaker 2: Like that's what shareholders want them to be, and no
Speaker 2: one should take that away from them. But it's where
Speaker 2: does aggression crossover into anti competitive and like if you
Speaker 2: dump the protect that's the point anti competitive. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So whose responsibility is that?
Speaker 2: That's the governments? Well, the a triple C is part
Speaker 2: of the government, and the government, the political part of
Speaker 2: the government also is in charge of sort of setting
Speaker 2: the powers and the budgets of the policies. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: it's the government in totality that sets aviation policy. But
Speaker 2: but it's always that.
Speaker 1: Therefore, why governments sort of compromising themselves, of putting them
Speaker 1: in a position where their position can be questioned or
Speaker 1: and or possibly compromised. Is that your whole point? Yes,
Speaker 1: Because you know, his his mob who become extraordinarily powerful,
Speaker 1: done a great job for the shoholders, et cetera. Blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. You the government should not put yourself in
Speaker 1: a position where you're going to have to second Someone's
Speaker 1: going to be said, we're all going to be second
Speaker 1: guessing your decision. Because the only way that their power
Speaker 1: can be managed by virtue of their great success is
Speaker 1: through you the government who we voted in. Is that
Speaker 1: your whole point?
Speaker 2: It's exactly right. Yeah, it's exactly right. That's the thesis
Speaker 2: of the book. Yeah you've knowed it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well and it doesn't really matter whether it's alban
Speaker 1: Easy or.
Speaker 2: Because it was a politician.
Speaker 1: People before that.
Speaker 2: Scott Morrison sucked up to Alan Joyce as hard as
Speaker 2: albo ever did.
Speaker 1: And the next person after, Margaret.
Speaker 2: Jackson and Jeff Dixon before Alan Joyce came along, were
Speaker 2: just the most phenomenal lobbyist. They long time ago, Singapore
Speaker 2: Airlines wanted to launch flights between Australia and the US
Speaker 2: and compete with Quantus, and Jeff and Margaret at Quantus
Speaker 2: killed at Stone Dead and John Howard blocked it. There's
Speaker 2: been like example after example. This is not a this
Speaker 2: is not an elbow thing, it's not a scomo thing.
Speaker 2: It is a system thing.
Speaker 1: So do you think that's but that is that apologician
Speaker 1: reading the two leaves saying well, you know, Australians loved
Speaker 1: this company and they did love this they he correct.
Speaker 1: But if I go back there, it's like the Kuala bet.
Speaker 1: We can't have anything that's going to challenge our icons
Speaker 1: what we love.
Speaker 2: But that's why Quantus was being so ingenious by branding
Speaker 2: itself that way. That also was not only did it
Speaker 2: make us want to travel with them, it also allowed
Speaker 2: them to effectively blackmail governments and say, well what about
Speaker 2: all the jobs? You know if you let like, all
Speaker 2: these people will have to sack. In my book, Margaret
Speaker 2: Jackson said to Howard government minister when she was lobbying
Speaker 2: against the Singapore Airlines thing. She brilliantly she said, well,
Speaker 2: you can allow Singapore Airlines to compete with us on
Speaker 2: the Pacific to America, but you'll just have to explain
Speaker 2: to the people of Tamworth why they're now catching the
Speaker 2: bus to Sydney. Right, that's just it's blackmail, right, yeah, brilliant.
Speaker 2: I'm giving her credit for that. And they're they're terrific
Speaker 2: lobbyists and government's time and again have fallen for their
Speaker 2: stuff on jobs in particular like protecting Australian jobs. But
Speaker 2: then the problem with that argument under Joyce at the
Speaker 2: end was that he was sacking so many Australians and
Speaker 2: not just sacking them, but offshoring jobs like at now
Speaker 2: a lot of crew on Quantus are based overseas. That's
Speaker 2: all happened under him, So that argument gets gets diluted.
Speaker 2: And the unions, even though it's a labor government and
Speaker 2: sort of the Albanese's really pro Quantus, you've also got
Speaker 2: the unions in the Labor party who are very anti
Speaker 2: Quantists because of what they did to employees. So it's
Speaker 2: sort of a complicated story. Again, why it's frustrating that
Speaker 2: the whole thing gets boiled down to just albo Quantis.
Speaker 2: It's even in the Albanese government they were very very
Speaker 2: anti Quantus on industrial relations. They change the laws so
Speaker 2: that Quantus has got to pay a lot more for
Speaker 2: its for its crew than it did.
Speaker 1: So there are some branding points for the government in
Speaker 1: relation to the way they've managed course as power.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure. I mean that's giving them maybe more
Speaker 2: credit than I want to give them. But what I
Speaker 2: would just say that it is nuanced. You know. That's
Speaker 2: why again why this needs to be a book and
Speaker 2: not an article.
Speaker 1: It's why this needs to be like a longer conversation
Speaker 1: and not a ten minute conversation, which is why I
Speaker 1: should it come on the show, because like I think
Speaker 1: that we Australians who going to read this book. We
Speaker 1: need an opportunity to get the context around it. And
Speaker 1: I think it's really important that we all get context
Speaker 1: around what it is, because otherwise, Joe asked me, becomes
Speaker 1: the devil ink in it himself because it will be
Speaker 1: fifty fifth. Yeah, some are going to say good on you,
Speaker 1: well done. If someone saying, why are you're pulling? Pulling
Speaker 1: the organization apart? I mean and and to some extent
Speaker 1: you're going to get You're going to get caught up
Speaker 1: in this funeral. I mean, have you been handling?
Speaker 2: Uh, Well, you just put one foot in front of
Speaker 2: the other and focus on on on the work and
Speaker 2: the and the issues, you know, not the emotion or
Speaker 2: the politics. It's just it's just.
Speaker 1: Your front and center at the moment. You're you're the
Speaker 1: most controversial journalist at the moment. We have an election
Speaker 1: coming up with elbows struggling at the polls. He bought
Speaker 1: a house recently. That didn't help him. It's really like
Speaker 1: the time of your book's perfect in terms of the
Speaker 1: book relative to elbow. It'll blowover and your journals. You
Speaker 1: know how this works. So what do you reckon will happen?
Speaker 2: Well? I don't I don't know. I can't tell you
Speaker 2: how the Albanesi government will respond, but I do think
Speaker 2: in terms of the political narrative, people move on. And
Speaker 2: the thing is, these stories morph, so everyone just attacks
Speaker 2: elbow for a few days, and then then it turns
Speaker 2: out that you know, other politicians were doing yeah you know,
Speaker 2: oh woop Swede didn't disclose our upgrades or we and
Speaker 2: then that all becomes a story. And then they quickly
Speaker 2: realized nobody can win from this because they all really
Speaker 2: just want to stay in the chairman's lounge and they
Speaker 2: want to still be able to keep getting their upgrades.
Speaker 2: And they all realize that and go, let's just stop
Speaker 2: talking about this because I mean, nothing will change. I
Speaker 2: have very low expectations of change. I mean punters, I
Speaker 2: mean punters I think are hungry for change. They're sick
Speaker 2: to death of this stuff. Not just in Australia, like
Speaker 2: the UK Prime Minister Kirstarma is getting absolutely killed over
Speaker 2: the free concert tickets that he accepted and the free
Speaker 2: football game tickets, and there's just a real tiredness from
Speaker 2: the public, not internationally in Western democracies of politicians that
Speaker 2: are just seen to be in it for the for
Speaker 2: themselves and for the trappings of office. If if If
Speaker 2: Albanezi came out and said, I get it, I get
Speaker 2: it all right, let's not quibble about this. I'm ending
Speaker 2: by am ending chairman's lagch membership for all politicians. I'm
Speaker 2: ending upgrades for all politicians. They are forbidden. I think
Speaker 2: his polls would go up, and that would be a
Speaker 2: smart thing to do. However, Howard is popularity to go
Speaker 2: in the party room. Politicians really care about this stuff.
Speaker 2: But there's a good sorry if I'm talking too long,
Speaker 2: there's a good parallel with John Howard in two thousand
Speaker 2: and four, and you might remember Mark Latham was banging
Speaker 2: on about how politicians getting their lifetime pensions was an
Speaker 2: outrage and arguably there was some outrageous examples in the system.
Speaker 2: So John Howard came out and he just ended it.
Speaker 2: Even though that was that good policy, I don't know,
Speaker 2: but it was, he screwed over every incoming politician after that.
Speaker 2: He just got up and he said, I'm taking this
Speaker 2: issue off the table and I am ending all life
Speaker 2: pensions now from now on, when you're elected to Parliament,
Speaker 2: you get fifteen four point four percent superannuation, which is
Speaker 2: still more than most people. But that's what the public
Speaker 2: service gets, and that's it. There's no pension when you
Speaker 2: leave that. That is it. And if Albo took the
Speaker 2: same approach and said, all right, we're all going to
Speaker 2: get our snouts out of the trough, no more upgrades,
Speaker 2: no more chairman's lounge, that would be a really smart
Speaker 2: and similar approach. You just have to think maybe it's
Speaker 2: gone too far now too well, Either it's gone too
Speaker 2: far or maybe it's blown over. And he's hoping and
Speaker 2: everyone's hoping that no one gets back to it, and
Speaker 2: that no one can that they've sort of survived and
Speaker 2: they can cling on to their goodies.
Speaker 1: Does he give you Does he pick up the phone
Speaker 1: and say, hey, Joe, what the hell's going on in.
Speaker 2: That?
Speaker 1: Would you? Well?
Speaker 2: Last year I tried to engage with his office when
Speaker 2: I wrote the fact that his son had been had
Speaker 2: been put in the chairman's lounge and his office was
Speaker 2: impossible to deal with. Would not return phone calls for days,
Speaker 2: repeated phone calls over and over again. Would not respond
Speaker 2: to emails, repeated emails, which is just pretty crazy given
Speaker 2: these people are paid by the public to respond to
Speaker 2: questions from analysts. So the only communication was when he
Speaker 2: would call my editor in chief to complain your boss, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and wanted to kill the story. And luckily I have
Speaker 2: an editor in chief who doesn't do that if a
Speaker 2: story is true. So and only last only this week
Speaker 2: he finally admitted that, yes, his son is in the
Speaker 2: Shaman's land. So that was something that was written a
Speaker 2: year ago. He's never even acknowledged it or he's refused
Speaker 2: to even answer whether it was true. So now he's
Speaker 2: finally sort of come out and it's been a bit messy. Obviously,
Speaker 2: I don't No, I don't have a direct relationship with him.
Speaker 1: What about Alan Joyce?
Speaker 2: No, I tried to As I said, I tried to
Speaker 2: contact Sorry, I did reach out to Alan Joyce repeatedly.
Speaker 2: I asked him to talk to me for the book
Speaker 2: I was keen.
Speaker 1: On before his exalt, before he exoled himself from Australia
Speaker 1: back to Ireland.
Speaker 2: Or No, this was this year, you know, when the
Speaker 2: process of writing the book. Again, Alan Joyce was not
Speaker 2: someone who ever tried to engage with me directly. He
Speaker 2: also complained about me to my boss.
Speaker 1: What do you do? You know, my boss?
Speaker 2: It's all it's all written about in the book. You know,
Speaker 2: my boss repeatedly said to him, if you can point
Speaker 2: to me, you know the facts here that are wrong,
Speaker 2: and we'll we'll fix it. But you know last year,
Speaker 2: at that time, Joyce was unable to identify those and
Speaker 2: so he was just frustrated because he just didn't want
Speaker 2: to be criticized. And again that was that was his
Speaker 2: judgment had gone astray. He was he was no longer
Speaker 2: able to say, I'm being criticized by this person. Maybe
Speaker 2: I should think about the substance of those criticisms and
Speaker 2: are they accurate. But he was just so so black
Speaker 2: and white, so self blind. You know, it was if
Speaker 2: it was my way and any other way is wrong.
Speaker 2: And that's the point that he got to and that's
Speaker 2: what did him in.
Speaker 1: Do you think we've lost much by Alan Joyce leaving
Speaker 1: the country and he has permanent.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, he's he lives here, he lives. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he went away immediately to escape the fuor And yeah,
Speaker 2: he left the country and so the Senate couldn't call
Speaker 2: him as a witness.
Speaker 1: Sorry, we don't know if that's the reason. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: he wasn't able to be to attend. Yeah, and look,
Speaker 1: the thing about Australia is and this is why I
Speaker 1: was sort of disappointed he didn't talk to me, because
Speaker 1: I suspect it probably changed the book by not having
Speaker 1: his voice in it. I'm not saying that it would
Speaker 1: have become a really pro Allen Joyce book if he
Speaker 1: had spoken to me, but I think it would have
Speaker 1: had more of his perspective. And the thing is, Australians
Speaker 1: actually like a comeback story.
Speaker 2: You know. It's like we like really hammering people who
Speaker 2: do the wrong thing or you know, even perceived to
Speaker 2: pop their head up too high, but equally those people
Speaker 2: who turn things around or they come back. The redemption
Speaker 2: tale is a bit of an Ozssy favorite. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 2: I wouldn't be surprised if Alan Joyce is back in
Speaker 2: the future. It's not like he's not not a quant
Speaker 2: but like, you don't sort of just lose all of
Speaker 2: the experience and valuable knowledge that you have from from
Speaker 2: a company or running in such an important company for
Speaker 2: such a long time, and potentially after a period in
Speaker 2: the wilderness, he gets better perspective as well on the
Speaker 2: mistakes that he's made. I'm sure he wouldn't agree with
Speaker 2: everything that I've said, but I reckon probably over time
Speaker 2: you start to say, yeah, probably just did that wrong,
Speaker 2: Probably could have done that better. I'm not in the
Speaker 2: business of like trying to bury people, and I don't
Speaker 2: want Alan Joyce to be gone banished, you know forever.
Speaker 2: That's not my intention anymore that it's my intention to
Speaker 2: try and destroy Anthony Alberaneesi. I mean, this is just
Speaker 2: I'm just trying to put the facts out there and
Speaker 2: put together what happened at Quantas and let other people
Speaker 2: make their judgment.
Speaker 1: Just so it would be clear on this, so that
Speaker 1: there was a bias that that's been lead to the
Speaker 1: media that that you remember the Liberal Party and et cetera.
Speaker 1: Can we just put that into context now.
Speaker 2: Well, that I was a Liberal Party staffer, which is
Speaker 2: all in the book.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's just closed. Can you just express it now?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Sure. So I started out as a political staffer
Speaker 2: for Bruce Baird and Joe Hockey in the Howard government.
Speaker 2: That was the last time I worked in politics too,
Speaker 2: the great politicians. But that was the last time I
Speaker 2: worked in politics. I mean that's almost twenty years ago.
Speaker 2: I don't think I then worked as a journalist for
Speaker 2: twelve years and so I still talk to lots of
Speaker 2: people in politics on both sides. That's what journalists do.
Speaker 1: Are you political? That?
Speaker 2: No, far from it. I have no interest in politics,
Speaker 2: and actually I much prefer writing about business and politics
Speaker 2: again because the responses tend to be rational instead of emotional.
Speaker 2: So it was sort of it's sort of expected that
Speaker 2: you're going to get attacked. You know, that's playing the man,
Speaker 2: not the ball to say, well, you know, he wasn't
Speaker 2: addressing the substance of the book. He was sort of
Speaker 2: suggesting that I had improper motivations, and I don't think
Speaker 2: that's well, I can tell you that's not right. There
Speaker 2: was even a story in the news dot com where
Speaker 2: I had been pictured having lunch with Peter Dutton like
Speaker 2: nine months ago or something like that, which I thought
Speaker 2: was quite funny really, which was true. I mean, there
Speaker 2: I am in the photo. But you do, you catch
Speaker 2: up with politicians, you talk to them. But that's even
Speaker 2: even that that's been painted as a conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: We Peter certainly didn't say, look, Joe, could you just
Speaker 1: in and write a book about and mention Anthony el.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, no worries. No, wire's Peter, I'll just go
Speaker 2: down a rabbit hole for ten months just for you.
Speaker 1: Can I just peak your journalistic sort of interest, et
Speaker 1: cetera for a moment. One of the things you mentioned
Speaker 1: quantus being sort of a monopolist or having too much
Speaker 1: control in relation or having a lot of control and
Speaker 1: relation to one aspect of Australian business. But if you
Speaker 1: think about Austraian business generally, were we've got you know,
Speaker 1: three or four major insurance companies, three four big banks,
Speaker 1: were you know, three or four big telego market supermarkets
Speaker 1: as well. It's sort of like a symptom of Australian
Speaker 1: economy at the moment because of its size. Wide enough,
Speaker 1: that's the reason, but that could be the reason. Perhaps
Speaker 1: it is. But do you think that we will never
Speaker 1: solve these issues because I mean, like CBA, for example,
Speaker 1: it was owned by the government, one of the most
Speaker 1: love banks in the country, probably got fifty three percent control.
Speaker 1: But they'd have seven eight million customers for sure, and
Speaker 1: had a good bank. Dude, Yeah we're wrong, go a
Speaker 1: good bank, ye, and good competition and plenty competition sitting
Speaker 1: around them. Macquarie in particular has come out of nowhere
Speaker 1: as a tremendous retail bank. Yeah, totally, totally, but still
Speaker 1: it's now five concentrated, five hands perhaps, but five it's.
Speaker 2: Pretty good for a population of twenty five million people.
Speaker 1: But it's not. But do you think it's good though,
Speaker 1: if there's another twenty two others who don't really get
Speaker 1: a looking like in other than twenty two banks building
Speaker 1: societies in smaller banks, regional banks sea But it's sort
Speaker 1: of and then therefore you get pricing oler gobblies is effected.
Speaker 1: What I'm trying to say here, and I don't want
Speaker 1: you to reflect on any particular industry, but do you
Speaker 1: think that that is a symptom of Australia and that
Speaker 1: maybe not. We're not going to solve quantus or anything.
Speaker 2: It's hard to see how well the problem is. There's
Speaker 2: no simple answer to that. Like one part of is
Speaker 2: the population a big Australia. People won't like hearing this,
Speaker 2: but I'm in favor of Australia having high immigration intake
Speaker 2: and getting to a much bigger population and building up
Speaker 2: the urban density of the East Coast. Not the city
Speaker 2: is necessarily, but all of the other regional cities along
Speaker 2: the way could be much bigger, But of course that
Speaker 2: means that the state governments have to keep up with
Speaker 2: the infrastructure requirements. But if you import skilled migrants who
Speaker 2: bring who come here with money, with qualifications, who pay,
Speaker 2: who earn good money and good jobs, and pay high taxes,
Speaker 2: then that should over time work and then that will
Speaker 2: solve a lot of the competitive issues in the economy
Speaker 2: and make it a more dynamic economy because it's very
Speaker 2: hard to You need scale as a business and you
Speaker 2: need what we call TAM total addressable market really the
Speaker 2: banking sector to have sort of as you say, five
Speaker 2: players plus a whole bunch of smaller ones, and sure
Speaker 2: they can't get a look in, but they would get
Speaker 2: a look in, more of a look in. They'd be
Speaker 2: more sustainable if there were sixty million people in Australia CRET.
Speaker 2: So that's part of the problem. On the airline side,
Speaker 2: it's a part of the problem, but it's not the
Speaker 2: whole problem. And the just as big a problem is
Speaker 2: that Quantus and Jetstar are one company and to take
Speaker 2: them on when they've got an established sixty five market
Speaker 2: position is not impossible, but it's close to impossible.
Speaker 1: Because do you think the gunner should be doing with
Speaker 1: One of the considerations of the recent quarranty the retails,
Speaker 1: the big retailed big grocery retailers was that they should
Speaker 1: be made or should be encouraged to sell off part
Speaker 1: of the businesses. Should corners beencourage yourself?
Speaker 2: Just well, you could encourage them all that all you like,
Speaker 2: They're not going to do it. They would you have
Speaker 2: to be forced to do it. Would I don't think
Speaker 2: they should be forced to do it, But put it
Speaker 2: this way, they should be threatened with it. It should
Speaker 2: be possible that it could happen. And if that was
Speaker 2: even hanging over them as a possibility, it would change
Speaker 2: their behavior. You know, they would think twice about you know,
Speaker 2: how much they drop their prices and threw large numbers
Speaker 2: of seats into new markets. You know, things that can
Speaker 2: be on the borders of anti competitive versus aggressive, that
Speaker 2: that sort of behavior would definitely be curtailed.
Speaker 1: Can be this diuger when it comes to governments encouraging
Speaker 1: us to change our behavior. Dumbmans encourage us as individuals
Speaker 1: consumers en rules, just individuals voters constituents to change your
Speaker 1: behavior is a good example. That is of course during COVID,
Speaker 1: but they encourage us to change your behavior, and the
Speaker 1: Reserve Bank, the Reserve Bank encourage you to stop spending
Speaker 1: by putting interest rates up. Sure, and they have no
Speaker 1: trouble doing that. And in fact it's a fundamental of
Speaker 1: Australian the Australian system and by the way global systems
Speaker 1: works everywhere around the world. Why is it then governments
Speaker 1: are nervous about trying to change the behavior of corporation
Speaker 1: like Quantus by saying listen here a cell or if
Speaker 1: you don't, we're gonna we'll do something about it. You've
Speaker 1: got to do something about your behavior, otherwise we will
Speaker 1: force you to sell get star.
Speaker 2: For example, politicians have experience with trying to tell businesses
Speaker 2: what to do. They try to tell the miners to
Speaker 2: pay a mining tax.
Speaker 1: That was a major disaster.
Speaker 2: And the miners destroyed the right government they did. So
Speaker 2: you take on big business, it's the lobby. You take
Speaker 2: on big business at your own risk. And I think
Speaker 2: if you chip away at them on the fringes, they
Speaker 2: might copy it on the chin. You know, they will complain,
Speaker 2: they lobby, but they won't actually go to war with you,
Speaker 2: because ultimately, you know, a big corporation can justify spending
Speaker 2: tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars on
Speaker 2: public advertising, campaign mining tax because it's existential to their
Speaker 2: profit totally, you know. But a political but a government
Speaker 2: can only spend so much, and a political party they're
Speaker 2: quite poor, and in fact they rely on companies to
Speaker 2: give them money in donations.
Speaker 1: So that old horse self, that old horse called self interest,
Speaker 1: which is in every race, emerges again. So it's political
Speaker 1: self interest. And so the smart people at the places,
Speaker 1: like those places where they are creating old goblies et cetera,
Speaker 1: or end or monopolies and youobolies. The smart people in
Speaker 1: turn that inside those places that actually whilst they know
Speaker 1: their behavior is maybe not perfect, they also know the
Speaker 1: behavior of the people who may will be able to
Speaker 1: change their behavior. That is a government. They know that
Speaker 1: self interest and so maybe this will never be solved.
Speaker 1: I have, again, as I say, I have very low
Speaker 1: expectations of change. Would you expect an inquiring Maybe a
Speaker 1: new government picks it up and says let's have an inquiry.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not off the back of Joe's book, they just
Speaker 1: wanted to go away made finally and it's a good read,
Speaker 1: and I commend anyone who's listening just to go and
Speaker 1: by the book. It's a bloody good is it. By
Speaker 1: the way, to do the audiobook I did. I narrated
Speaker 1: the audiobook. How long does it take?
Speaker 2: I think it's twelve hours, so you'd have to do
Speaker 2: yours quick.
Speaker 1: I couldn't speak for more than two hours.
Speaker 2: Oh no, I didn't do it in one take. I
Speaker 2: did it over about four or five days. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I took my two weeks or something. And when you're
Speaker 1: doing it where you're reading things go my god, right
Speaker 1: did I say that? You know that? Well?
Speaker 2: I found it a good way of finding errors.
Speaker 1: So like, but once you publish it, you've got to
Speaker 1: read what you wrote.
Speaker 2: I know it's annoying because you go that was that's
Speaker 2: the wrong word, or same as me.
Speaker 1: I was going to I was freaking out because I
Speaker 1: did my audio many about four years after three or
Speaker 1: four years after wrote the book, and it was some
Speaker 1: stuff was a little bit out of date. So if
Speaker 1: you buy my book, and any way it's about Joe's books,
Speaker 1: I don't worry cross from importantly, they what where to
Speaker 1: from here?
Speaker 2: Mate?
Speaker 1: Your book's out? You know you're batting things back. I
Speaker 1: know you're going into Christmas time. We're going to see
Speaker 1: Joe emerging again next year in journalism.
Speaker 2: I hope. So yeah, Look, I don't have any news
Speaker 2: to share about that.
Speaker 1: But breaking news is always welcome on this.
Speaker 2: Show, and I'm not being coy by any stretch either.
Speaker 2: But ye know, journalism is what I'm good at. Well,
Speaker 2: some people will disagree, but I don't have any other
Speaker 2: core skill. Really, It's what I've been doing for a
Speaker 2: long time, and I enjoy it most days. So I think,
Speaker 2: you know, I've been off on the you know, I've
Speaker 2: been down my rabbit hole for a year now and
Speaker 2: I do miss it, and I think I'm leaning towards
Speaker 2: going back to journalism, but look, I just don't know
Speaker 2: what that looks like yet. I've I've just finished the
Speaker 2: book and I've been out there talking about it, and
Speaker 2: now I need to sort of talk to some people
Speaker 2: about who might be interested in my services, and maybe
Speaker 2: I'll find nobody is journalism.
Speaker 1: World has changed, It's not changed. It's sort of morphed
Speaker 1: and lots of different things. So there could be lots
Speaker 1: of exciting sort of opportunity for someone like you, because
Speaker 1: I think people still want to listen to you and
Speaker 1: or read you so to speak. YEA, When I say lint,
Speaker 1: I mean read what you've got to say, perhaps even
Speaker 1: listen to you, like verbalize something over a microphone. So
Speaker 1: I mean, I know because some people when they launch
Speaker 1: a book, we know it, you know, I know it.
Speaker 1: They're sort of an effectively without saying announcing a new
Speaker 1: career or a new business venture or something. And because
Speaker 1: you know the PR people, they say, do a book,
Speaker 1: establish yourself in the marketplace. So do a book. And
Speaker 1: I wonder when I when I found out you're writing
Speaker 1: the book? Though I won I've Joe's got something. He's
Speaker 1: trying to do this as a precursor to what he
Speaker 1: wants to do in the future.
Speaker 2: Or is this only because I don't have it figured
Speaker 2: out exactly? But I didn't speak to any PR people
Speaker 2: about writing the book. I just did it because it
Speaker 2: was the subject that I felt really passionate about and
Speaker 2: I had command of, and I felt, you know, this
Speaker 2: is my big opportunity to I've always wanted to be
Speaker 2: an author. You know, I can tick that box and
Speaker 2: see how I go. And that was a rewarding experience.
Speaker 2: But yeah, no, it wasn't sort of some strategy to
Speaker 2: pump like surprise, big reveal, but I mean eventually I'll
Speaker 2: hopefully have a big reveal, but I don't have it
Speaker 2: right now. Unfortunately, it's only Joe, so good to have
Speaker 2: you mate. Thanks man.
Speaker 1: It's a great read. Here it is, go get it,
Speaker 1: and it's on the front page of every newspaper for
Speaker 1: the last week and a half, so you better read it.
Speaker 2: Jeff