By government lets also say a combination of federal and state, it doesn't really matter who. The advice has certainly been to not travel for holidays.
If the government(s) doesn't let them operate its completely unreasonable to say they should have planned for this and offer no support.
Thank you for some sanity.
I’ve added this comment here after having the misfortune of reading the comments sections of SMH and The Australian.
Arguments seem to be:
1) Branson should fix it - it’s his airline (!)
2) Those bloody foreigners we should Not Bail Them Out.
3) Private sector welfare is bad. Lots of silence when I mention private health insurance, aged care, subsidies to private schools and various taxation schemes.
4) cabotage will fix the issues. Silence again when I ask when Etihad is flying A380s to Launceston or American Airlines to Tamworth.
5) they should have prepared for this - I ask why do we need Jobkeeper shouldn’t every company prepare for standing down its entire workforce with no revenue?
6) they’re debt laden - true but was being worked on with hard decisions being made
7) the the execs earn too much - have a look as Alan Joyce!
8) that another airline will pop up - it’s not that difficult to get an high capacity RPT license surely, just a few planes!
9) the white knights of NZ and SQ
10) they don’t pay tax. I point out how many years QF haven’t paid tax. Also that 10k employees pay tax and GST, plus all the people who have their income supported by the airline.
11) my personal favourite that QF will be nice and just charge us a decent fare it they’re a monopoly, or that the ACCC will regulate them effectively. I ask them to have a look at fares in regional Australia to see what monopoly non regulated fares are.
The Australian comments is in a complete torment as they don’t want to support Alan Joyce as he’s too progressive for them but they don’t want to support Virgin because of their ideology.