Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My grandfather was one of the people who put a lot of money behind a little fledgling airline called Qantas, and I recently wrote a letter to them in which I said that Alan Joyce might be gone but his spirit lives on in Qantas, and one thing is for sure: it ain't the spirit of Australia. Joyce has been blamed for everything, as rightly he should be, but the board has got clean away with this. I'm going to name the board, because people have got to go after them. I will name the sins of this board and how they represent the exact opposite position to those people who founded Qantas to overcome the tyranny of distance. Two of the three Katter boys died as a result of the tyranny of distance, so we didn't regret putting our money behind them.

Let me list them. They had their workers, their baggage handlers, sleeping on concrete floors with blankets over them. This went on national television three times. These board members did nothing about it. The aero engineers association claimed that over 1,500 aeromechanic positions have been offshored, putting a question mark over the safety of this airline but also meaning that 1,500 people were sacked. Qantas have outsourced their cleaning and maintenance services to companies employing extremely low-paid foreign workers. They've jacked up the price of airfares for regional and remote areas. (Time expired)