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Qantas has indicated it will support the Yes campaign for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, CEO Alan Joyce said announcements would be made on the details of Qantas’s support but affirmed that the Flying Kangaroo would throw its considerable weight behind the Voice.
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“Our position has been clear for some time on that. We are one of the companies that supported the RECOGNISE campaign back in 2014, we had an aircraft with a RECOGNISE logo back then,” he said, referring to a QantasLink Q400, VH-LQM, which had a large R painted on the side to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander recognition in the Constitution.
“We supported the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for a Voice, so we will be supporting the Voice. How we’re going to go about doing that, we’ve still got some announcements to make about how that will actually take place.”
The Voice to Parliament is not the first national vote in recent years that has won Qantas’s support. Joyce and the Flying Kangaroo famously came out in favour of the Yes campaign for marriage equality in 2017.
Joyce was among the 20 chief executives at some of Australia’s largest corporations who signalled their support of marriage equality in a letter to then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in March of that year, including the heads of the Commonwealth Bank, Holden, Telstra and Wesfarmers.
His stance drew criticism from figures such as then-Minister for Immigration Peter Dutton, who accused the Qantas chief executive and others who signed the letter of using shareholders’ money to “throw their weight around in these debates”.
However, Joyce said it was part of his role as Qantas’s chief executive and “part of every corporate leader’s role to have a view on social and community issues”.
