 Good evening, everybody, and welcome. For those of you I don't know, my name is Caroline Evans, and I'm Vice-Chancellor of Griffith University, co-host of tonight's event along with our partner, Hota. It's such a great pleasure to welcome you here for our inaugural Creating a Future for All conversation. Allow me to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of land on which we meet today, paying my respects to their elders past and present, and extending that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Could I also acknowledge our Chancellor, Mr Henry Smurden, members of the Griffith Council and Executive, Karina Gurke, the CEO and Ned Pankhurst, the Chair of the Home of the Arts, Sam O'Connor, member for Bonnie, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Opposition Leader, and many members of the Gold Coast City Council, colleagues, students, friends, alumni and partners, both those of you who are here with us tonight, which is lovely, and over 800 people who are joining us on the livecast. Tonight is the first of our better futures for all series of conversations held in partnership between Griffith University and Hota. In these conversations, we aim to present you with really outstanding thinkers and leaders, people who can help us think in complex, thoughtful ways about the future that we want to create, and perhaps also warn us about the futures that we might be creating in the post-pandemic world. We knew that as a university, we wanted to ensure that this great community of which we're part played a prominent role in these important national conversations. Griffith prides itself on being an active member of the Gold Coast community. We create jobs, including knowledge economy jobs, for our staff. We undertake life-changing research in anything from vaccines to artificial intelligence to advanced manufacturing. We create a home where locals can stay on the Gold Coast to study a wide variety of disciplines, and in normal years, we attract a wide range of students nationally and internationally to this great part of the world, enhancing both our society and our economy. A particular point of pride tonight, we have the highest-ranked tourism and hospitality program in the world, no, the best in Australia, but the third best in the world, which actually ain't bad. We also have one of the largest aviation schools in this country with over 800 students currently enrolled and wonderful partnerships in tourism, hospitality and aviation, and many of those partners are represented here tonight. It's wonderful to have you here. Now, I first sat down to discuss this idea with Kerri O'Brien, brokered by the wonderful Julianne Schultz, to discuss this series last year. Oh, none of us had any idea, of course, what 2020 would bring us. But we were concerned. Concerned about the degradation of public debate, its polarization, its trivialization, with complex important long-term issues just reduced to soundbites, tweets, or Instagram feeds. Today, with significant new economic, political, social, cultural, and indeed even personal challenges brought to us by COVID-19, the need for conversations that are detailed and thoughtful and challenging on the issues of the day are only more acute now than they were back in December. I was just delighted in those circumstances that Kerri O'Brien, one of Australia's foremost journalists, commentators and writers, agreed to be one of the driving forces behind these conversations. He'll be known to many of you through trailblazing ABC current affairs programs like This Day to Night, Four Corners, being the first presenter on the groundbreaking program, Late Line, the editor and presenter of the National 730 Report for 15 years. The quality of his work was recognised with six Walkley Awards, including a Gold Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism. We really just couldn't ask for a better person to lead us through these conversations. We're also delighted to have our first guest, Alan Joyce AC. As I think you all know, Alan's the chief executive of Qantas Airways, a role that has held for over a decade. He's had a lot of challenging times in those roles, but I suspect not many as challenging as the current one. He's a member of the International Air Transport Association's Board of Governors, a director of the Business Council of Australia, a member of the Male Champions of Change, a supporter of Indigenous education and patron of the Pinnacle Foundation, an organisation that works with disadvantaged and marginalised LGBT Australians. You can tell from that brief overview and from many of us having heard him speak before, his passion, of course, about his role, about aviation, education and technology, but he's also a firm believer in the importance of diversity in the community and the workplace and has been an advocate for that in our broader society. It's a terrific way to kick off a series that will include in coming months Sally McManus and Bruce Pascoe, as well as many others that we're looking for to share in conversations with. So without further ado, I invite Kerry and Alan to the stage. It's going to be very difficult to get thunderous applause tonight, I can see. I'm looking out there. They can do thunderous applause. It's a really fun one. Alan, welcome to the first conversation of this new series. Thanks, Kerry. It's been 10 years since we've spoken. That's right. I'm surprised you came back. Now, you're here tonight, not just as one of Australia's preeminent corporate leaders, but also because your industry is absolutely in the eye of the pandemic storm, like no other, particularly when you add tourism to aviation. And on that score in the past 24 hours, your international industry body, IATA, has revised its figures on full international recovery to four years instead of three, 2024. And that just to me underscores how incredibly unpredictable and deeply uncertain the experts are about bringing the pandemic under control. I think it's, oh, we have a microphone problem. Can everybody hear me now? Yes, okay. I think you're absolutely right. There's a huge amount of uncertainty on this. And even when we're looking at our projections over the next few years, it's very hard to fix on one potential outcome. And that's why we've always said flexibility is really required, the flexibility to adapt to changes as they occur. And I think even in the short term, we'll talk about the long term, even the short term with the announcements that were made by the Premier up here, yesterday, that meant one third of our schedule published for August we needed to take out. So we needed to adapt to that and move on that very fast. We know things will change like this over the next year, but we are confident about the long term, the medium term and the long term future. I think people are getting more confident about a vaccine and treatments. And we've said in our three year plan, and we have a three year plan to turn the airline around, it needed to be ambitious, it needed to be aggressive, it needed to make sure that we turn the business back to where it was before COVID-19. And that three year plan, I think will allow us, we believe, to have an operation that can get us into doing things like Project Sunrise, the ability to fly from the East Coast back to Europe. It'll allow us to take aircraft that we are planning to take delivery of, it'll allow us to start hiring people again. But in order to get there, we have to make some dramatic and drastic and very heartbreaking decisions, which is letting 6,000 of our people go, standing down 15,000 people for nearly a year, returning the 747s earlier, putting the A380s, the Super Jumbos, into the desert, into Mojave for at least three years, and radically changing everything we do in order that we can come out of this strong enough to be able to invest for the future and grow again and recruit people again. We've done it before, we did it in 2013. This is a lot bigger, it's a lot bigger crisis, it's a bigger crisis that the aviation industry is ever seeing, and it's gonna take a lot more effort to get everybody through it, but Qantas is probably the best position, their line, in the world to get through this crisis. So you were talking, before these latest I-Artifigures, you were talking about three years, as with A, are you now in agreement with them that it could easily be as much as four years on the global traffic? It could be on the global, but we've always said that there's gonna be different speeds on different markets, and you could see in the domestic markets that before Victoria had the second wave, we were making really good progress more rapidly than other countries. We talk before Victoria had the second wave, we'd have 45% of our domestic capacity up and running this month, and potentially up to 90% by the end of the calendar year. I don't think any other country in the world is getting close to that, and I added, did say in the forecast that domestic will come back before international. Well, you'd hope so. Yeah. You'd hope so, because you were hoping by the end of this year. We are, and I still think the leaders in each of the states are taking the action that they need to get the COVID-19 under control, so we're still optimistic that by the end of the year, we can see growth, and I can take it here in Queensland in the interest state travel, as an example. We've seen our capacity get back to 40% to 50% already of what it was pre-COVID. Some routes are going gangbusters. Perth to Brune, Brisbane to Cairns, we are seeing Sydney to Ballina. Markets where people in the state can travel with the borders closing, and we heard this week that Air New Zealand as far as just about eliminated in New Zealand are getting back to 70% of their domestic schedule this month. So there is optimism there in our minds that that will happen here, and the research we've done has shown there's a huge pent-up demand, and the actions we've done when we put Jetstar on sale for the recovery sale, they sold the biggest day of bookings in their history. $19 airfares went in the space of 50 in minutes, 5,000 of them here to the Gold Coast, and there were another 35,000 airfares within an hour at $39 to the Gold Coast as an example. There's huge pent-up demand for people wanting to travel when they feel it's safe to travel and they have certainty about traveling, and we need all of them to kick in and we could get to those numbers. So when you see, A, the Victorian numbers search the way they have, then you see Queensland say not just no to Melbourne people, but no to Sydney people. I mean, there's 10 million people wrapped up in one hit. That doesn't phase you is what you seem to be saying because you know that whether it's in three months or six months or nine months, that when you do come back, things are just gonna be fine. I think what we'd like to see, and I think everybody in the tourism industry would like to see is real certainty over what's gonna happen with borders, and I think there's different approaches being taken by different states, that's clear. And we know in other industries, certainly it's being given of what happens, what needs to be seen for gyms to open, cafes to open, events to have actually have more people. And with aviation, we seem to have borders that are different rules for different states. So we'd like to see. But different states are in different circumstances. They are, but some states are fairly similar. And I think the principle we all agree that health has to be the top priority. But we always said, and I think it's the national cabinet's view, that we're not after elimination, we're after suppression. And if we're after suppression, we're going to have the outbreaks that we've had in New South Wales, but they are managing it. And the numbers were still less than 20 with 30,000 tests taking place in New South Wales. So there is questions about well, what's the criteria for closing a border down? And what's the criteria again for opening a rope if we're going after suppression, which is the strategy? Let's go back to when years of COVID-19 actually first began to develop to a point where we started to take notice of it. When did the sheer enormity of it first really hit you? When did it dawn on you how big this was going to be? Well, we've had, and I think every airline would have a history of knowing that pandemics could be really bad. So SARS in 2003 cost Qantas over $200 million. Now, there were, if you remember back then, there were 8,000 people infected by SARS, 800 people died, and that was always a worry. And this is a different scale. So we had on a risk register the potential for a pandemic, it was there. And when MERS occurred, when H1N1 occurred, it always came onto a radar screen, there's a risk here because of that 200 million impact before. And it was, but it was a little bit like the frog in the hot water. The temperature just started increasing and probably we didn't notice until we got there how bad it was. And we had- It didn't start at the boil. It didn't start at the boil. And it was, it was in essence, our planning departments had the plan that this could occur if it goes out of control, international borders closed bit by bit. There may be domestic borders if the state gets badly impacted and then we have the grounding of the entire airline. So we had that plan or that forecast, but we thought it would take six, nine, 12 months. It happened in weeks instead of months. So the speed of this caught I think everybody by surprise. I remember in January, so we were so worried about this as a potential impact. In January, when it started coming out of China, I rang our chairman and he said, that was the first he'd heard of it, saying we are worried about this. We think it could be an issue. But we thought the worst case was something like SARS, nothing like what we had today. So you've since taken the decision, as you said, 6,000 people sacked, 15,000 laid off. Now how did you arrive at the figures of 6,015 and how do you determine which 6,000 you're going to lose? So what we have to do, which we did a lot of research asking people about the propensity to travel, we've looked at what we think are the changes that are going to take place because people have gotten used to doing things differently like video conferencing. We've looked at what we think are the potential for substitutions, people wanting to travel domestically instead of internationally, and we've looked at our best plan over this period of time of what that could mean. So out of that, we think the entire industry, like I add, is going to shrink. We think we're going to shrink less than a lot of other airlines. So Air Canada, as an example, are forecasting a 50% reduction in their size. Air New Zealand, 30%. We've got airlines in Europe are all in the 30% to 40% category. We said, given domestic, given the fact we have a loyalty program, we have Jetstar, given some of the opportunities we think are here for us, we need to shrink by 20%. And that's where we came up with the 6,000 and that meant retiring aircraft like the 747 and that means scaling down a lot of the things that we were doing. We also figured that international is going to take a lot longer to recover and the research tells us that. So that's why we parked the A380s for at least three years in the desert. We are going to bring them back, but it's going to be later. And then that came up with the people that we need to stand down for an extended period of time. Because the ramp up is probably not going to be linear. It's going to be patchy, but it will take time to get to those levels. And that's why the 15,000 people were the estimate. And then what we're doing, the way we're selecting, we're asking expressions of interest for people to take voluntary redundancy. We know in each group, given there's a certain amount of cabin crew that won't have jobs, a certain amount of pilots that won't have jobs, we're asking for expressions of interest. And then we'll see if we get people wanting voluntary redundancy. If not, we'll have to go to compulsory redundancy. So is there an element of opportunism about this? That it could be seen as an opportune moment that you felt there was too much fat in the airline anyway. And so this becomes, in a sense, a convenience for you to lose some of those people. No, because, I mean, again, I go back to 2013 and we lost a lot of money in 2013. We had to make big changes to the airline. We took a lot of the fat out back then because the airline needed to survive. And then over the next six, seven years, we recruit people. We were planning, we were literally weeks away from ordering the A350s, which would have created huge employment and huge growth. So we were on a trajectory all the way through of growing. People, aircraft, investment and network. And this knocked us for six and it's put us backwards and this is us coping with that environment, not taking, this is what's needed to survive. This is less than nearly every other major airline in the world is doing because we are in a stronger position but this is what survival looks like. So how confident of you, of those 1500 that you've stood down, 15,000 that you've stood down, how confident are you that all 15,000 of those will be back in the fold and within what timeframe? So in our plan, we have that, we are hopeful that we can get international up and start flying in July next year. We think most of those stand-downs are related to international. If international gets delayed, we don't have a vaccine, it's not under control in a lot of countries, we don't get bubbles, then the stand-downs may have to last longer. If it happens earlier, we'd be calling people back earlier but it's our best guess and the prime minister even said nobody knows. The government doesn't know when the borders can open up, we don't know, but we have to plan on something to give our people some level of certainty and then say we need flexibility around this. Things could be different and things could be better than we think and then we'll activate the 380s earlier, things could be worse than we think and we may have to push things out for a while. So tell me about the bubbles. You'll have the possibility of kind of capsule travel between Australia and particular countries. Do you think that that is the way it'll come back? So we think... Particularly if you've got... I mean, it seems to me we don't really know what's going on in large parts of Africa, we don't really know what's going on in large parts of Asia and we can see the mess that's going on in North and South America. It's hard to find a bright spot anywhere amongst that, except possibly New Zealand. And that's where I think this will start and I think the government, both governments have been talking about the opportunity to open up New Zealand and we know it is the largest they have from Australia, the largest tourism market, they are Aussies going to New Zealand. And into this country, it's the second largest market after the Chinese. So that's a big prize. It gets tourism kicking in again and it's a big economic activity between the two. And what seems to be clear on the premises around the bubble is that the countries which sign up to it have to have a similar level of COVID-19, exposure, infection rates, and have to have at the same level of control. So we know that that's a prerequisite, but then there are places in Asia that also seem to be getting close to that level as well. So you could see this if people have the same border controls and you could see this being a collection of countries over time. And that's probably before a vaccine the only way we're gonna see significant increases in international and hopefully New Zealand, we're optimistic and I think our colleagues in Air New Zealand are optimistic that that will happen potentially before a vaccine. Now we've actually got a local question because as I think Carolyn mentioned, there are 800 students in the Griffith Aviation School and we've had several of those students send pretty much the same question. What's the future for us? And I've been in the aviation industry 32 years and my old boss in Air Lingus told me get used to having a crisis every seven years because that's typically what occurs. He was precisely right I think over that period of time. And I found out and most people that are involved in it, it's a great career to have. It does go through in some cases boom and bust and in Qantas we've been trying to take the boom and bust out and diversifying the business and that's helped us be one of the strongest, if not the strongest airline in the world. There's still huge growth forecast in aviation. So we will take us potentially to 24, 23 to get back to where we were in 19. But every forecast from Boeing, from Airbus, from Iata has aviation industry growing in the next, doubling in the next 30 years. So we have always said as an example, worldwide there's a need for over 900,000 new pilots over that period of time. That may get delayed a bit, but it's still there because when economic activity increases, people purchasing power increases, there is the need for those jobs. And we've invested in a training school in Twamba and that we think is still a great investment and we'll need that eventually. We also have the replacement of pilots because pilots are aging, pilots are retiring. We'll probably have a few hundred pilots from Qantas retiring in the next few years and eventually those jobs will come back and if we need to recruit for project sunrise, there'll be a lot of pilots needed in the business. Before COVID-19, I think we recruited Andrew Davids here, a thousand pilots in the space of a year or so. So we were on a massive road when it came to this and I think we'll get back to that. Now there's been so much talk about how the post-pandemic world is going to be a new world. Things are gonna be done differently, new ideas and certainly new ways of working and so on. So is it really going to be a new world for aviation apart from as you say that the aviation companies, the airlines are gonna be smaller? I think with all of this there are opportunities and they're gonna be challenges and I think we know that a lot of people are saying technology like Zoom and Microsoft Teams has meant people will probably travel less and there may be some element of that but I've talked to a couple of our biggest customers and one of the CEOs of one of our largest customers actually had a good analogy which I like. He said that for his suppliers, his customers and his employees, over the decades he's built up a reservoir, a reservoir of knowing them, a reservoir of those contacts. He's relying on that now through these video conferencing and doing business. Eventually he needs to build that up again and we know personal contact, people interacting with each other has a huge difference from doing over social media over the internet. In fact our head of Qantas Domestic is here. He was stuck in New Zealand for a few months, couldn't get in and we said to Andrew you need to get back and since he's been back, it's made a massive difference having him on the ground. Talking to people, dealing with people, we are a people organization, most companies are so I believe that that will come back. Maybe it'll be a hit but it will come back substantially. I think there are other opportunities as well because I think we are changing the technology of the way we do things. So for example, when I checked in today, when I saw everybody at the airport, people were using the app. I moved to actually doing it themselves and not having contact with people using technology and there'll be a lot more use of technology. Some of the airports are looking at how they use technology completely different. Western Sydney is talking about how everything below the wing could be automated. A lot more efficient. Now that means, it does mean that jobs will disappear because technology will replace them and what we have to do is find the other jobs that are going to replace those jobs and there are plenty. Before COVID-19, Qantas was nearly at the stage where I had more programmers and data technicians than I had pilots because that's the way of the future. We need people to do STEM subjects. We need people to be investing in it and having that technology, having that investment in technology is really key and we need more people to do that and I'm sure as we get back into growth, we'll be looking for those skillsets again. So in terms of the new world, it's only months since you were on those first big ground-breaking long-haul flights from Sydney to London and Sydney to New York and the passengers were guinea pigs and they were being tested all the way over and all the way back on how they were reacting to these long flights and so on. That seems like a very long time ago. Now is that still very much a live ambition for you? Very much so. I actually think the business case is probably even stronger. People will want to get directly to their destinations. They'll want to get to the destinations without having to stop. So we're big believers in it. We still have the aircraft available for Airbus. Nobody's ordering aircraft so we have a bit more time to make the decision. We had an agreement with our pilots and when we did the research and those research flights, the reaction was unbelievable. It went around the globe. I mean, CNN told us it was the biggest story CNNs run that year. BBC the same thing. So it got people's imagination. People know it's actually a great business concept. People know that to visit Australia, this is the way to do it. So I'm a big believer in it. I think we need to strengthen our balance sheet. We need to get back to profitability. But once we do that and we have the confidence that the market's returning, we'll invest in it. I will point out, Pert London, again, I mean, it was the highest customer satisfaction ratings, the longest route on our network, highest customer satisfaction ratings and the most profitable international route nearly from day one. And that shows that people are really, really interested in this. So the 747s were kind of on the way out anyway, weren't they? And is it a case that the pandemic simply hastened their demise? They were. For us, we'd already planned that they were going to be retired in six months. For other airlines, not the case. Now they've accelerated it. British Airways was probably going to keep them until 24, 25. And two days after our retirement, they said that they were going to take the aircraft out. So I think it's accelerated. It is old technology. It's four engines. The two-engine aircraft of the 787 is a lot more efficient. Has a lot bigger range. The economics are a lot better. The maintenance costs a lot better. It's more reliable. And that's the way of the future. It was heartbreaking doing it. I did an event last week and I have to say, people sometimes say to me, why does Qantas have this passion? And you could see it in our people. Why does this brand do this to people? And you could see it last week. We had in a huge hangar where we usually have thousands of people doing these events. We had 150, mainly our employees. And I was talking to them as we were saying goodbye to the last of our 747, the Queen of the Skies, as we called it. And I was taken aback when I was given my speech by everybody being in tears. The emotion they had for that aircraft leave was phenomenal. And this was part of their lives. It was part of Australia's life. It was there for the highs and lows of Australia. It took every Olympic team that won medals since 1984 home. It took every sporting trophy home. It took the Queen here a few times. As a Republican, maybe I should mention that too many times. It took the Pope here. And that aircraft, it was the first aircraft we had with an indigenous color scheme on it, which promotes the longest continuous culture in the world around the globe. It was groundbreaking at the time. And it was there for the really tough moments when Darwin needed rescuing after Cyclone Tracy in 1974. It had 674 people on it. A world record still to this day of the amount of people on an aircraft because we needed to get people out. It was there in Cairo. And I always remember the thing that sticks in my mind about it was that woman on the radio when I was CEO back when the Arab Spring happened. And she was saying for two weeks she felt that her and her kids were going to die in Cairo. She's seeing people being killed on the street. She's seeing people being shot. And she said on the way into the airport in the van, she saw the kangaroo at Cairo Airport and she and her kids were in tears because they knew they were safe. And a whole other piece of metal would have that emotional link for people. And that 49 years of that amazing aircraft that we had, the 65 we operated, had so many stories. I could have talked for hours about how much it meant for Australia, meant for people. So it was bittersweet saying goodbye to it because I could see the future from a businessman is great but saying goodbye to that history was heartbreaking. Heartbreaking for probably all of us. You know, one of the, it's funny the things that catch your attention, particularly for a journalist who's used to thumbing through stories daily, you know, endlessly, God knows how many hundreds of thousands over the years I've perused. But one of the things that really caught me about this whole, the aviation saga with the pandemic is the thought of all those thousands of aircraft just parked in the deserts around the world, in America, here, wherever. I mean, and I've seen almost nothing reported on the mother than the fact that they're out there, somewhere. I mean, are they being turned over? I mean, what, is someone gonna have to blow the sand out of the engines when they? Well, I tell you what, we had our oldest living employee who's 95 at the event and he worked on the flying boats in Rose Bay in 1942. And he said his first job was cleaning out the spark plugs at the time. And I said, luckily we don't have spark plugs so we don't have to turn them over at the moment. But we do have, in LA, we have a big hangar with a huge amount of engineers where we did A380 maintenance. And so the Mojave Desert, where they're parked, is two hours away. So they drive out, it's better to have it there because it's humid air and so they don't deteriorate as much, non-humid air, dry air. So they don't deteriorate as much and the engineers can get out there and they do turn them over. But there's a lot of them that go into a part of the desert that's like the Elephant's Graveyard. It's the aircraft graveyard. That's what it sounds like. That are just there. If you've never been to Mojave Desert to see them, it's a sight, it's a tourist attraction, I think, in itself. But one of the advantages that we had, we scrambled to find parking areas for 220 aircraft, which is what we grounded. And it's not 220 parking areas because they're usually in the air. But one of the advantages we did have is none of the runways were being used. So the aircraft are essentially being parked on unused runways. So Lucky Brisbane built a third runway. It's a great parking spot for aircraft. That was a joke. Now on the domestic aviation front again, my move to the Byron District 10 years ago coincided with your decision to seriously shrink the Qantas Gold Coast service and leave your interest there largely to Jetstar, which I have to say drove me into the seductive arms of Virgin at the time. Is there cause now for Qantas to come back to the Gold Coast with a much bigger presence? Yeah, and even before COVID-19, we were building up our presence in the Gold Coast. And we figured that Qantas for a long time couldn't make money in the Gold Coast because the airfare has become so low. And Virgin changed that dynamic against the onset when they took over. And so we needed to put Jetstar in to keep a presence and to make a contribution. But with the great changes that were made in Qantas all the way from 13, its cost base was a lot lower, its product was a lot better, and we started making money with Qantas and the Gold Coast. So the plan was to do both brands and build Qantas up quite significantly. Now with the changes of Virgin, they're likely, we're reading in the press and we don't know, they're likely to move back down market a bit to more where Virgin blue was. And so that gives I think Qantas even more opportunities for the corporate market and the SME market and places like the Gold Coast once this recovers is a place for us to really significantly grow. We're also finding places like Hamilton Island, Marucci Door, we put Qantas back in and nearly overnight it's been making money on them. So the dynamic has changed and I think it'll change even more so when Virgin comes out of administration. So of course tourism is at the heart of the Gold Coast economy and at the heart of a lot of other regional economies around and the major economies around Australia. How smart is Australia's tourist industry and how heavily do you engage in it? Yeah, so we have, I think Bob from Tourism Australia is here today. So we work very closely with the tourism organizations, TA, the state tourism organizations, Paul Donovan from Gold Coast as tourism is here, Paul. So we do work very closely. We're the largest private supporter of tourism to Australia. I mean, when you're Qatar Airways or Emirates, you have hundreds of destinations you're promoting. We're really promoting one destination internationally here. So we put all of our eggs into that basket and really go out there and very heavily promote it. I think there is an opportunity in the short term while COVID-19 is happening because we had roughly a million bubble, correct me if this is wrong, but a million overseas visitors coming into Australia each year. We had 11 million Aussies going overseas. So in theory, those Aussies, if you can get them to do domestic tourism for a period of time, we'll fill that gap. And we need to get them to go to places like the Gold Coast, like Herons, the love international tourists were coming to and to fill that gap. And I think there's a real good opportunity on that because a lot of those international visitors anyway, were coming to Sydney and Melbourne as well, where a lot of the Aussies are from Sydney and Melbourne and want to go to these destinations. So we should look at this as how do we get there. And I think that's why we have this optimism about domestic getting back and domestic responding to it. There is, it is getting very competitive internationally. You know, we can see some of the other destinations that people go to, like Jetstar, I think is the largest international carrier flying into Bali. And we could see Aussie numbers growing and growing and growing because you get a great sun holiday, with great accommodation for very cheap prices and you can drink a lot in Bali. And there's a lot of Aussies going, there was a drop of Aussies going there. So we know there are places that are very competitive. So raising the game with the product on the ground, raising the game with things for people to do, creating more experiences, we all know is something that we have to continually work on and continue to promote the natural advantages we have, the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, Ningalil Reef. I mean, there's so many places most Australians haven't been to as well, the Bungal Bungals, that we just need to keep in plugging them, giving people ideas, giving people options for domestic holidays. Listening to your description of Australians arriving in Bali, I'm not quite sure how many Balinese would see that as an attractive picture, going there for a cheap holiday and to get on the piss. But... It's good for the economy, though, I have to say. In those terms, how good are we in this country at protecting our social and ecological environments as we exploit them, being careful not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg? I think very good. I mean, I'm on the Great Barrier Reef Chairman's panel, which has been... It really has had a lot of big corporates working and helping. What do we need to do to help protect the Barrier Reef? And there's a law that is dependent on world CO2 emissions, world carbon, that we can't do much about. But there's a lot we can do in order to help them. There's a lot of projects that are going on at the Great Barrier Reef. Like, for example, one of the projects that Qantas is involved in, we have the biggest carbon offset programme of any airline in the world, over 10% of our customers offset their carbons. And a lot of that projects go back into cases in Australia. And we were at one in Babinda, south of Cairns, where we're planting true the offsets that everybody here is doing. We're actually planting a rainforest again, which has two benefits. It's taking CO2 out of the atmosphere to compensate for the flying. But it's also stopping the runoff from the sugarcane crops, the fertilizer, getting into the water, which was promoting the growth of the crown of thorns, which is killing and impacting the barrier reef. So it has a number of factors, because it's cleverly designed to try and help that. And what we want to get to as an organisation, which I think a lot of Aussie companies are trying to do, is we gave the commitment, the first airline group in the world, ourselves and the British Airways Group, to be carbon neutral by 2050, because we want to minimise our impact on the environment. And we agree before COVID-19 that we're going to get rid of single-use plastics this year on the aircraft. 100 million, that's how much Qantas was using, 100 million pieces of single-use plastics. We were eliminating them from our aircraft by the end of the year. So I think everybody has to be socially, environmentally conscious. It's what our shareholders are looking for. It's what our customers are looking for. It's what our employees are looking for. And we have to do our fair share to minimise our impact on the environment so we can protect what actually generates our business, which are these natural, amazing natural wonders. Of course, impact on the environment. And this also comes into, I mean, it's a very practical aspect of the Qantas picture, but also it goes to corporate social responsibility, which I want to get onto in a minute. Let's talk about climate change now. I mean, you talk a lot about Qantas' contribution to reducing carbon emissions, and of course airlines have a huge carbon footprint relative to the rest of the world. Firstly, how hard is it to actually deliver on what you're doing? Is that really a tough challenge? Is that really a tough response? Has it really cost Qantas all that much to do the things that you are sprucing about reducing your carbon footprint? So to get there, I mean, it is a stretch target out there, but we've always achieved the stretch targets we've given, because at the moment, unlike other industries, like the car industry, there isn't a technology solution for aviation. Batteries don't work on aircraft for long distances. So, give you an example, Melbourne, Sydney would need 32 times the weight of the fuel in batteries to fly it. So it's just not there. Now eventually, maybe we'll get there, but we are a long way away from that technology working. So what are the solutions? They are offsetting, which I do believe can make a big difference. They are sustainable aviation fuels, fuels that are coming from other, and we are testing and have been testing a number of different fuels, one from a mustard seed that can be produced and can work on an aircraft, can give the per ratio needed to actually operate a jet, which we thought may be the problem, but you can grow mustard seeds. So what we're trying to do with sustainable aviation fuel is to get to a producing of potentially a crop or an algae that doesn't have unintended consequences, i.e. take away from food stocks and increase fuel prices for everybody because airlines are buying it. And the mustard seed was interesting as an example because it could be a rotation crop used in between crops. So we got very interested in that. There's also one, the Nazis had had a mechanism, a fish or trope, which was actually taking city waste and converting it into jet fuel and fuel. And it's an old technique from the 30s. British airways have invested heavily in the plant plant in the UK to do that. We're keen on that as a potential option and there may be multiple sources. And if you could get to a very high level of your fuel being sustainable, you can get to those targets. And what's really key is this new technology because the emissions from a 787 compared to a 74 is 20% below it. So we're already making those changes by just replacing the fleet. It's a lot more fuel efficient and a lot less CO2 coming out. So how, what kind of time, do you have any sort of timetable in your head of when you can see these fuels actually kicking in, taking over? Yeah, so we're all, there is at the moment a possibility and we do buy, you could buy fuel in LA, see your flights on the way back and we flew a flight from LA to Melbourne. That was pure sustainable fuel. The Californian government have invested very heavily in helping subsidize that industry because the cost at the moment is three times, the normal aviation fuel, but once you get volume, every projection has a coming down to maybe at the level or even below normal aviation fuel. So it needs investment and it's scale and we're putting in, we wore before COVID-19, putting in tens of millions of dollars of our own money to help develop it and working in partnership with some universities and some states. Some of the states are very keen on it. We buy before COVID-19, we were buying 4.6 billion of fuel each year. If we could create that as an industry here in Australia, we talk about the jobs of the future where we're growing crops as rotation, giving the money to the farmers, then having plans because they'll have to be local to produce and convert those crops into sustainable aviation fuel. That creates jobs and a significant amount of jobs and it means what is actually as importing 4.6 billion worth of product could be a natural industry here in this country. So there's a lot of benefits and we're trying to work with governments to try and get that started and established here and we think we can within the next decade get to a few percent initially but up to 10% in sustainable aviation fuel. We need to be at like 60 to 70% by 2050 in order for that target to be met. So it needs a very big growth profile and that's why we've given ourselves the time in order to get there. So do you personally as an individual as a now Australian citizen but as an individual you have a strong personal commitment to seeing the climate change challenge responded to credibly and quickly and if so, how frustrated are you by the pace at which Australia is dealing with the challenge? I'm a believer in man impacted climate change and I think we all need to do something to fix that and to improve things and even if you don't, though, I'll do the counterfactual even if you don't, there are a lot of people in the markets where we're encouraging we know tourism is a big part of what happens here. There are a lot of people in Europe that will not travel at the moment on flights because they and they call flight shaming in Europe because they believe the CO2 damage is actually too much and Greta Thornberg actually started the campaign. So we know- Did you support her? In the privacy of your own mind, I wonder whether you saw the appeal in what she was doing regardless of, yes, airlines were the target but the attraction of this dynamic young person taking a stand on something that governments, many governments were half turning their backs on arguably including our own. I think no doubt she's an impressive young lady but I think we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater is the way I always put it. So you have a problem and it is the CO2 emission of aviation but the aviation positive benefits are massive. They've made the world a smaller and better place. They've allowed people and cultures to understand each other. They've made a huge difference to Australia. I wouldn't be here. A lot of Australians wouldn't be here about aviation. They've improved trade and commerce between countries. They've probably been helped keep the peace for a long time because of that interaction and that understanding. That's too much of a positive to throw that baby out with the bathwater. So I would disagree that the solution is to stop flying. I think the solution, of course I would but I do fundamentally believe it and I think most people would. It's how do we fix that? How do we get that so you don't have to make a choice between the environment and all those positive benefits and that's what the aviation industry is doing. It's the only industry in the world that's committed to a price on carbon from 2022. It's the only industry in the world that's given itself targets that it will get to having half, the whole industry as a whole wants half of the CO2 emissions of 2050 that I had in 2005. Can corporate Australia do more? I think every company could do more. It's like everything. I don't think you can always rest on your laurels. I would take safety as a big thing. You'd say Qantas has been voted the safest airline in the world for five years. Do you think Qantas can't do more? Of course it can. It can never rest on its laurels. It has to be paranoid and always has to be in continuous improvement. That's what the best businesses, the best organizations do. And I think in all of these issues there's more that we all can do. We can do more. We have a plan to do more. We have a plan to get the carbon neutral by 2050. And I think a lot of companies, Telstrich has said this year, they've gotten the carbon neutral. So they're doing more and getting there. Everybody has aspirations. Everybody's trying to get there. Nobody's there quite yet. So that's the ecological environment. What about the social environment? We were talking about the ecological and the social. What do you think is at the heart of the image that we project abroad about the quintessential Aussie? Look at my history, as you know. I left Ireland in 1996 because I was not an openly gay man. A gay man that felt a country that had a ban on homosexual acts was not a place for me. And I wanted to come to Australia because I felt this was an egalitarian open society. And you had this image of Mardi Gras and how open people were of being gay. And I have to say, I have not been disappointed because I'd say, where else in the world would an openly gay Irish man be the CEO of the leading iconic brand in the country? That is the definition of egalitarian. That is the definition of being a fair and open society. Now I have to say, I'm also really proud of my homeland. So since I left, it's gone through a dramatic transformation. It's gone through a transformation that had marriage equality two years before Australia. I never thought that would happen. And it has a dramatic transformation where the Prime Minister for the last three years with high rankings has been an openly gay man and had had a massive support from the community. And it'll be Prime Minister does a break, Irish politics is weird, they share the Prime Minister's ship, but become Prime Minister again in two years, two and a half years time. And where else would you have seen that transformation? So I'm probably very, well, I'm more than probably, I'm very proud of my two nationalities, my Australian and my Irish one, because they're both phenomenal countries. And sometimes we talk things down. We have to celebrate the positives and how well our society is actually moving, how well it's changed. And one of my proudest days was on the stage in that park in Sydney when I found out that 62% of Australians voted in favour for the quality of the LGBTI community and 80% voted. It would have been the biggest electoral victory for anything in Australian history. How proud could you be of that? How proud could you be of the Australian people? Our politicians didn't get us there, the people did, that was amazing. Okay, so this is the context in which I want to talk about corporate social responsibility through your eyes. And in that, and how you go about identifying the social issues affecting Australians that you believe quantists should engage in and even take a stand on. So with marriage equality, if you had not been gay and had not wanted to marry your partner, would the issue have been as important for you wearing your corporate hat? So I think two things brought us to the forefront of that campaign. One is that I signed a letter with 32 other CEOs and that letter was written to the government, asked the Prime Minister, from 32 other CEOs as well, to move on marriage equality. Peter Dutton picked on my name out of that and said Alan Joyce should stick to his knitting. So that grew me up. Nobody remembers the other two 32 people. And even using the term knitting had a bit of a load to it. I think, yeah, it did. Not that I know anything about your knitting, but we know what I mean. I'm a very bad knitter, I think. But then the other thing was on a stage like this, in part, our breakfast meeting, to talk about a project, Sunrise Equivalent, a man who was homophobic, did a homophobic attack and put a pie into my face and it was because of his support of marriage equality. But corporate Australia was behind this. Marriage equality had 1,600 companies in the ad showing that they were supporting it because all these companies felt the same way. I believe that there was a business case for it. I wasn't doing it. I mean, personally, it was the right thing to do, I felt. But I also believe there was a business case because we could see in the research our customers were really behind it. And when you look at the vote post this, places like the Eastern suburbs at 78%, they're quantist customers in favor of it. Our employees, we have a huge LGBTI community, as you can imagine. They were behind it. And we had a lot of our shareholders. I went around the globe on a review as we do of shareholders and I had one big shareholder in Boston saying when he was reading all the clippings on what we were doing, you were not doing enough. You're not putting enough behind this because that's why we invest in companies like you because we think companies that have ESG, environmental, social and governance capabilities and are very socially conscious outperform and we think you need to be doing more in that space. So we knew there was a business case with all of our stakeholders. And I think that proved to be right. I have to say what really confirmed it for me was when Richard Branson came down here and he came down when we're in the midst of all of this and he said in an interview he was giving, I was in support of marriage equality before Alan Joyce was. Virgin are actually really the biggest supporters here. So he's a smart businessman. So he knows when it's right. I had to say at the time Margaret Court was doing a bike off of Qantas because we were supporting it and somebody asked her, how are you gonna get from Perth now to anywhere because Virgin are in the same boat. And soon after that, Greyhound buses came out and they also support marriage equality. So I don't know how Margaret got to the tenors open last January. I'm still surprised that that. So sticking with the question of how you choose your issues. What about an issue like poverty? Does it bother you that 3.2 million Australians are living on or below the poverty line? And these figures were before the pandemic, including 775,000 children. Is that an issue that corporate Australia should be concerned about? I think it is and I think people know that we need to continue to grow the economy and to grow wages. And I think good companies, I would say, look at my background. My grandfather grew up in a tenement building in Dublin with 35 people there. Both my parents had to leave school when they were 12 because they couldn't afford to go through even finish secondary education. I was the first one in my family to finish secondary education, let alone tertiary education. So I know what it's like coming from that type of background but I also know what can help you out of that. And education, we're here to talk about education. The thing that got me and my family out of it is education. We need to get the skills, we need to get the training, we need to get that right to fix it. And business is talking about and is investing in how we get there. We need to, and good companies, have to actually look at all of their stakeholders. I think this focus that some have just on shareholders is wrong because there is a virtual circle that benefits shareholders immensely when you get it right for your employees, get it right for your customers and get it right for the community. And before COVID-19, we were given pay increases above inflation at 3% but we were also given bonuses outside of EBAs and we gave bonuses of nearly $300 million because the company was doing well and we wanted to give that income to our people so everybody shared in the benefits of a good company doing well. And when things were tough for certain communities, when the bushfires happened, we raised and donated $3 million to people affected by that and our people have the social conscience which I think is really important when people are knocked by it. So absolutely. And I think, but we know, I mean, we talked earlier, Kerry, I mean, I don't think we all know the way of going back to fixing this is not a communist model because that doesn't work. So capitalism is the best way but it needs to benefit everybody and we need to figure what are those mechanisms that get people there. It's helped my family, it got us out of poverty and I think education, getting companies to have this social responsibility that are doing the right thing by its people, I think, is key. Well, there's a logic to all of this and when I was interested that you picked out egalitarianism as a big attraction for you in Australia because three million poor people out of 25 million, it's not egalitarian from where they stand. What about the increasing gap between rich and the rest? Former Liberal leader John Herson, still a practicing academic economist, has pointed out that the top 85 billionaires who could squeeze into a double-decker bus own as much wealth in the world as the bottom 50% of the world population, that's 3.5 billion people. A double-decker bus of billionaires, the same wealth as 3.5 billion, a similar picture is true for Australia. While the wealth of the top 1% has been growing continuously, the wealth of the bottom 50%, 50% has been falling. Now is that healthy for this country, the country that's supposed to be about a fair go for all? But I think everything that we talk about is relative. We do have here, so in Australia, because I think it is egalitarian and there's still a huge amount of positive, we do have a social welfare system that a lot of other countries don't have. I mean, America, the wealthiest country in the world doesn't have a health system or a social welfare system that rivals anything that we have here, which I think is great. And I think we need to continue to improve that and continue to invest in it. I think we're the same in Europe. Ireland invested very heavily in free education, in its social welfare system that's helped a lot of people out of poverty. And we've moved in this country and in Europe, a lot of people out of poverty. Now, have we got more to do, of course? It's like everything we've talked about on the environment. I don't think these are anything that you can rest on, but I think there's not one silver bullet to fix these things. There's policies across everything. But if you're looking at a contribution or a lead that corporate Australia could and some would say should display, I dug some figures out of a book I wrote two years ago showing that in 2017, salaries for the top 100 chief executives in Australia rose by an average of 12%, while average weekly earnings rose by 2.4%. So a CEO on, say, $3 million a year would have copped a pay rise of $360,000, and a worker on $80,000 a year would, on average, have got a rise of $16,000. And worker salaries, as you know, have been stagnating ever since, while executive salaries have continued to go up, including yours. So do you think that that model can genuinely, seriously sustain a healthy democracy into the indefinite future? Well, I take the quarters example, which I do believe that's what we were doing again before COVID-19, we're in a different world. We were recruiting people. We were growing wages above inflation. We were given bonuses on top of that, and we had done significant promotions. I take with pilots, with cabin crew, the average pay increases we were given were way above any of those numbers that you've said. So you do what you can do in your control. And I think if you're a good company like Juan does, you make sure if you are doing well, everybody does well. If you're doing badly, everybody does badly. I haven't taken the salary for four months now. My senior team haven't, because of what we're going through at the moment. How hard did you personally find that, compared to say somebody who's lost their job? I absolutely agree, but it was the least I could do to say that this is the right thing that everybody should be demonstrating it. I think I'm pretty proud of my guys that did the same thing, because they've worked as hard now as they've ever done. A lot of people could, because the salaries you've talked about could retire and leave it. They're not, they're dedicated to fixing it and trying to get those people back to work, trying to get people, it wasn't our fault, it wasn't our people's fault what happened. We're trying to do our best to get them back to work, to get them employed, to get the salaries going. What else can we do? That's what we can do. And we have to, at the end of it, when it goes well, do what we were doing before COVID-19, give the people those bonuses, give the people those pay increases. We can't afford them today, we're gonna have to make tough decisions today, but we want to get back there. We want to order the aircraft for sunrise so we can give those pilots promotions, get those people back in jobs. That's what we're after. But let me come back to the broader question, which is, when you look at that disparity, when you're talking about the differences in those percentage increases, broadly speaking, and you know that the gap is continuing to widen between those at the top and the rest, not just those at the bottom, but the rest, is that a long-term sustainable model? You, as you say, communism has collapsed as a credible alternative. It's the only ism we have. Do you really think that that is a sustainable model where you have such discrepancies and those discrepancies are continuing to grow? Well, you have to improve on it and you have to do better. Do you have any ideas how we can do that? Well, we talked about it. I mean, I think I'm a big believer in education and there's a lot of jobs, a lot of the problems we have are, a lot of jobs are disappearing and a lot of jobs, technology is changing a lot of things and we have a big task of training people and the skills of the future. I'll take one example. We talked about the pilots that we have. They're high-paid jobs. They are extremely well-paid jobs and they're a big road opportunity. So at the moment, we'd like to get to pick the best pilots in the world. We'd like to get to a stage where we could have equal male and female applying. We've only 14% of females, I think the stats was, that are doing STEM subjects. So they're not training in the right jobs. So when I look at the average pay I give as an example, so it's an area of inequality in the system and the men are getting paid a lot more than the women in quantas. Why? Because I have a lot more pilots than I have and I've got the women and flight attendants. So how do you fix an equality like that? And it's the same in the economy generally. You need to train people in where the high-growth jobs are, where the high-income jobs are and they're in technology at the moment, they're in coding, they're in pilots, they're in engineering. They're in areas that we're not training people right at the moment, so that's part of the solution. The solution will take a while to get there and that's what we need to do. Because in the interim you've got young people coming out of universities with as many as two degrees, with masters, with doctorates and not able to get jobs that have anything to do with the skills that they have been studying up on. I'm not sure if you saw the figures from the Productivity Commission overnight showing that young Australian workers have suffered a decade of lost income growth. Young workers from age 35 down have been losing, well they're young, 35 is young if you're my age. Young workers from age 35 down have been losing income year by year since 2008. For under 25, the trend is worse going all the way back to 2001. And this is all before we face the worst economic slowdown since the Great Depression. Now do you think that is sustainable? What are we doing for a whole generation of young workers? So averages can disguise a lot of things, Kerry, as you know. And well, I can say, because my experience of it is that we were hiring, again, before COVID-19, programmers and having difficulty getting them, data analysts and the salaries that we were talking about in those groups were growth and they were growing rapidly. And we were fighting against tech companies, banks to get those people. And I was seeing growth in those areas because that's where the skills are and where the jobs are. So if you train people in jobs that don't exist, if you train a person to actually manufacture what would it be, something antiquated, a gramophone, and that was their jobs, are they gonna have a decline in income when they come out? Yes, because the technology of today is completely different and we need to make sure people are adapted to that and get that. One of the two... Do you think there's been something of a con? And I don't mean a deliberate one, but a con on the young people coming through the schooling and education system, that they are being encouraged into tertiary education because they're told that without a tertiary education, they're buggered, that this is the new world, but the tertiary education that they're getting is still leaving them without a job in many cases or with low paying jobs. I think it's up to all of us to talk about what the careers of the future are, what the skill sets of the future are gonna be and making sure that people when they're picking the courses, picking the training are actually picking the right things that companies, businesses, and that the government is after, that's really key on all of us to get there. And that's why we made a big deal as an example about pilots. I think it's a great career to get into. And I talked about the 900,000 that's needed. Are we getting enough people doing the skill sets needed to do that now? And a pilot, I mean, a pilot, once you go through the ranks and it is a seniority system. But you keep talking about the pilots. I mean, the pilots are at the top end of the pay scale in your industry, apart from the top executives. But I mean, when you look at those Productivity Commission figures that the wages of the young have been going backwards year by year by year by year. That's not because of education. Isn't that because of stagnating wages generally? Isn't that because of the nature of the modern workforce and casualization? So I'll say that that wasn't the case at Qantas. We were recruiting and growing. We weren't giving people bonuses. Our EBAs were paid 3%, which is above inflation. So there was wages growth across the board. And can I say, yeah, you're right, pilots are at the top. I mean, I'm interested in talking to you now, not just with regard to Qantas and the airline industry, but you as a senior corporate leader in this country, does that picture generally disturb and worry you? Of course it does, but you have to figure out how we fix it. And you fix it, it's bit by bit. You have to fix it with these different activities. And every company has to contribute to what they need to do in order to make a difference. And that's the way we'll get there. It's not just saying this problem is too big. It's gone backwards. There's a lot of stats. We talked about the environment as well. We know that's gone backwards. Companies like ourselves are trying to fix that. We have ideas about how we're gonna get there. The best thing you can do to promote secure jobs and wages growth is have successful businesses as well. So the other thing we also have to do is ensure that we continue to have that and continue to have that investment in it. And there are, again, on the stats, you could go through each of the individual segments and say, is the mining industry seeing big wage growth? Has it seen big growth? Yes, and are the young people involved in them? They're a relatively small workforce. Yeah, but now it's still, I mean, we've seen huge growth in the fly and fly out market in Western Australia. It's still growing that where it is today. And I can pick pilots because there's young kids coming into pilots and they have a huge growth opportunity in wages that's laid out for them. It's in the agreements. It's there until they retire. So there are differences to that. And we have to have more of them that make the difference and get people encouraged to do them. I know that you support the government's current formula of business tax cuts and industrial relations reform to lead an economic recovery after the pandemic, presumably accompanied by spending cuts to other arms of government because they'll be focused on over a long period now, much longer than it was going to be, of reining in the deficit to some degree. But is that the best we can do in this country? We talk about new ideas, new ways of doing things. We know that at the heart of any growth in Australia, there has to be productivity gains. And those productivity gains are not just about replacing people with machines. They're not just about being delivered by technology, are they? So is it really the trickle-down theories of the 80s that we've got to rely on to find our way out of this next big recession? Well, there's a lot you could do. We are competing in the global world. And I'm a big believer that the corporate tax rate is an issue for this country. And I've said that before because when we look at the corporate tax rate that we see in the UK and in the US, there is global money and it's going to be invested where the people think they can get the best returns. And I'll give you an example at the moment. Project Sunrise is a great one for us. It's going to take billions of dollars in aircraft investment, billions of dollars in capital. Now, if I was British Airways or American Airlines, I'm paying a lot less tax on that return. So all things being equal, who's going to get the investment? It's going to be those carriers at the other end. Now, the only advantage we have is that we've developed a unique IP about flying ultra long haul. That's compensating, I believe, because the other carriers are saying they don't want to do it. But in my mind, if there's so many different examples like that in Australia, which there will be, where the company's deciding, do I base it in London? Do I base it in New York? Or do I base it here in the Gold Coast or in Sydney? It can make that difference. And what does that mean? That means jobs are going overseas. That means less people are going to be employed. And when big companies get impacted by it, like Quantas, we have thousands of little suppliers. I think we have 13,000, again, before COVID-19, small companies that buy services for us. So if Quantas is not growing, Quantas is not investing for the future. The microcosm of Australian industry is not growing. It's not getting jobs. It's not getting the investment. And that's what happens when you have a disadvantage like this. So you need to generate that investment, those jobs. And on the industrial relations environment, we know that there is significant inefficiencies that get built in over time. So we've looked enough, we've had an agreement with our pilots to change the agreement on the 787s. You keep coming back to the pilots? I know, because it's a good example. But the pilots beforehand, we were making a decision about what do we buy those aircraft. And the pilots sat down with us and did an agreement that gave us same pay, but gave us a 30% improvement of the productivity. It made the business case to invest in those aircraft and it created those 1000 promotions that were there. So saying that productivity doesn't come from industrial relations, it can. And can it generate benefits? Yes, the Tesla pilots got a promotion and got growth out of it. Did it give wage increases? Yes, did the pilots fly more? Yes, they went from 600 or so hours a year to something like 800 hours a year. So we got that productivity benefit, but nearly every airline in the world already had that productivity benefit. So you could see in those two examples of why I think it can create jobs in this country and benefit small and large businesses if we fix the tax issue and we fix some of the IR issues. So on the tax stuff, I saw the respected Keynesian economist, J.K. Gelbraith, quoted on tax cuts the other day saying, if you feed enough oats to the horse, enough will pass through the feed, pass through to feed the sparrows. Now I guess that's why it was called trickle down in its day. And I ask again in that context whether that's the best we can do because every time there is a tax cut, a corporate tax cut, you can bet that almost within hours the campaign starts for the next tax cut and the same is true in other Western economies. And I would have thought that there were other issues on which you could sell Australia to foreign investors apart from corporate tax cuts. I mean the stability in the country? The stability in the UK? The stability in the United States? Well, maybe you have to make the next election. Stability in America, do you want to talk about that? But can I say, there's also a bigger thing than the tax revenue directly from companies through corporate tax. So because of our losses back in Turkey and we didn't pay corporate tax for a couple of years, a few years. But did we pay taxes? Yes, $2 billion a year. What were they from? They were from GST in generating activity. They were from employment and generating employment which generated PAYE. They were from stamp duties. They were from all a range of taxes that we contributed to the economy. So just looking at one dimension of corporate tax is just wrong. But it does have an impact for investors. But the impact of a large company being successful in an economy is broader than that. It's bigger than that. And we need to look at the whole spectrum of what it contributes. That's how you judge whether this works or not. And that's why I'm still a believer because it would be those 13,000 small businesses that will really benefit out of this. It's not just the big business. It's the ecosystem that benefits. It's the employees that benefits. And then the country benefits. And when we talk about this, the unions talk about trickle down. It's bigger than that. And it's more important than that. OK, so we've come to the end here. But I have a last question. What would you once said about you when you're gone? Not gone from this room or gone from Qantas, but gone from this mortal coil. What would you most want to be remembered for by your partner, by this nation? Because I lead a team that's responsible for, I think, the most iconic brand in the country, I hope... Not in the ABC, but in the public. It doesn't have the same emotion. But I think because I lead the most iconic brand in the country, I hope people would see me as a good custodian that's taking the airline from where it was and left it in a great spot for the future. Because I am really passionate about the brand and the company and its people. It's got an amazing people. It's got an amazing impact on this country. And it's a national asset that I hope, like your contribution to the ABC, that people will see later. He did the writing by that brand. He did the writing by its people. He did the writing by its customers. And he left it in a better position than he found it. That's why I've signed up for another three years, because I can't leave now. We need to make sure that this company turns around in the next three years and as strong as it was last year. Alan Joyce, thank you very much. As the first guest of the Griffith Hotter Talks, which are going on into the indefinite future like Qantas. Thank you. Thanks, Kerry. Thank you. Thank you.