I travelled in Business on a VA flight this morning and the lead FA on the flight was quite talkative.
One part of the conversation was relevant here - the gist being they are going to move to Doha for a year on secondment to Qatar Airways to train/be trained on QR 777 aircraft and then ply the routes to/from Oz.
They're not flying exclusive on the Australian routes. It's the entire network. Secondment has been done before with VS/EY so don't know why they're acting like it's new.