No love lost

Borghetti is the 37-year mailroom to GM success story of Qantas, who was overlooked for the top job that was given to the mathematical low-cost whiz Alan Joyce.

And in another twist, it may well be that Joyce was given the job because the board thought his low-cost zeal would work to break down Qantas’s decades of institutionalisation, which it has not.

Spurned Borghetti is on a mission to make good on his warning to Qantas pilots in 2008 that if Virgin was to introduce business class it could tear Qantas apart.

Joyce on the other hand, with all the right intentions, is held in a headlock by unions that seem to be refusing to embrace the reality of today’s aviation world.

Joyce will not cede his 65 per cent marketshare strategy, even though it is destroying his yields and IATA says it is a flawed strategy.

However, Borghetti has leapt all those union minefield issues, landing on the “union peaceful and realistic Virgin flightdeck”, and found the passion and zeal he only dreamt of at Qantas. The combination is irresistible and reflects where airlines should be today.

What he lacks in scale, he makes up for in friends with deep pockets that are also out to stick the boot into Qantas. This is personal and it’s going to get worse.

Qantas has treated Air New Zealand shabbily and with contempt for decades; Singapore Airlines is no friend either, while Etihad has global ambitions.

Just as civil war, arrogance, madness and death engulf Shakespeare’s ambitious Lady Macbeth, so this modern-day tale may go the same way, with the eventual death of Qantas. Make no mistake, Qantas has the ingredients of a Shakespearean tragedy about to happen.

Blunders that are decades old, arrogance, egos, bureaucracy on a US civil servant scale and union leaderships that are in a parallel universe are a cocktail that the witches of Macbeth could never have dreamt up for their cauldron.

And because of this, every section of Qantas can rightly blame the others, and that in itself is a large part of the problem. The blame game solves nothing and will just confuse politicians, who are showing every sign of being bewildered.

Alan Joyce needs to step away from his 65 per cent line in the sand because the tide – read tsunami – of change is about to wash it away. That would immediately signal to the market that profit not marketshare is the driver for Qantas.

There is no place for personalities and egos when it comes to Qantas. Remember what happened to Pan American.