Although there are definite failures of QF management and poor decisions made, be careful not to ascribe everything negative as a result of management.
For instance this sentence from the article:
It's worth remembering that while the pandemic losses of the past three years have been huge – around $4.5 billion – they pale into insignificance with the own goal Joyce kicked in his debilitating fight with Virgin's Borghetti a decade ago.
For almost three years, as Qantas attempted to obliterate Virgin, it refused to concede market share to its domestic rival, constantly slashing fares. It was terrific for customers but running at a loss has its limits
This makes it sounds as the capacity war that culminated in 2014 was mostly Joyce’s fault, and he should’ve surrendered to VA. Didn’t mention that VA were also running at a loss in that period as their capacity losses were funded and egged on by Air NZ, SQ and EY to hurt QF. Easy to say Qantas should have keeled over and let 3 foreign carriers destroy their market share.
Also fails to mention that AJ turned QF to multi billion dollar profits from 2016-2019, whereas Borghetti could barely turn a profit and was mostly loss making from 2014 to 2020. But that article implies Borghetti mostly did a good job at VA which certainly wasn’t the case.
I think if you were writing an article about the man you’d have to begrudgingly mention that, there is a reason the board keeps him on. It’s why when Covid hit VA was in administration within weeks, whereas QF had some rough times but mostly survived.
.
