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Qantas has spent decades and millions of dollars telling us it’s the Spirit of Australia. But on Tuesday it told 850 of its own staff that their jobs are being outsourced to Accenture and offshored to India. In the very same year it made a $1.29 billion profit.
I can tell you why decisions like this get made in two short words – executive bonuses. When bonuses are tied to profits, company leaders make short-term decisions that benefit themselves. And the cost of long-term brand damage is really difficult to quantify, so they don’t bother.
But a brand isn’t a logo or a slogan. A brand is a promise, and a good brand is a promise kept. It’s not what you say about yourself, it’s what your customers feel about you.
Nobody ever flew Qantas because it was cheap, and it’s been a long time since it was the best airline in the sky. It was once the safest, but all the others caught up with that. So we flew it because of how it made us feel. And if you were able to watch those kids singing I Still Call Australia Home without a lump in your throat, well, you’re a monster.
We pay more for that feeling, and Qantas knows we do. And before anyone writes brand feelings off as airy-fairy feel-good stuff, the reality is that about two-thirds of the average company’s value can be traced to its brand. It’s an asset worth real money, but Qantas is trading that away to increase short-term profits. Qantas’ reward for cutting jobs showed up within hours – the share price rose 6 per cent – but the brand damage will be long-term.
Qantas didn’t have to look far for a cautionary tale. David Jones, once one of Australia’s strongest and most successful brands, went into administration last week . Going to David Jones once made you feel special. But the company was sold to people who didn’t understand the brand. And, in the interest of short-term profitability, they cut all the things that made the in-store experience special, then wondered why people stopped shopping there.
The frustrating part is that Qantas has already been through this. Under Alan Joyce, Qantas outsourced part of its workforce in Australia to labour hire companies. That meant on the same flight they often had people working side by side doing the same job, but one was employed by Qantas and the other contracted out on worse pay and conditions. Then Qantas management seemed surprised when morale fell through the floor. If you don’t treat your staff well, that will impact a customer’s experience. It’s called brand transference.
In five years, Qantas fell from Australia’s best brand to 41st , and in 2023 alone, $384 million was wiped off its brand value. It also copped a record $90 million penalty for the illegal outsourcing . By the time Alan Joyce left early , in 2023, the national carrier had become a national punching bag. It was incredibly telling that when Paul Scurrah left Virgin in 2020 the crews were in tears. When Alan Joyce left Qantas three years later, crews were seen high-fiving.
Which brings me to Vanessa Hudson. When a brand is in that much trouble, you normally bring in someone from outside the culture that caused it. Instead, they chose Joyce’s chief financial officer , a Qantas lifer who worked closely with Alan Joyce. It was a chance for a proper reset and they squibbed it.
In fairness, the brand did recover in the short term. This year it was named the strongest airline brand, with its brand value up 32 per cent to $5 billion. But that recovery took three years and hundreds of millions of dollars, because fixing a brand always costs more than looking after it in the first place. What you don’t do is spend three years rebuilding it and then burn through it to cut costs in a year you made $1.29 billion.
Qantas said earlier this year there was no plan to send jobs offshore, and now 850 of them are going. Outsourcing staff is exactly what wrecked the brand last time. Vanessa Hudson is still playing from the Alan Joyce playbook.
When Qantas told 850 staff their jobs can be done cheaper somewhere else, the other 28,000 Qantas staff heard it as well, and they’re the ones who serve us. Blaming AI doesn’t cut it either. Every company has to modernise, but using technology to make Australian jobs better is a very different thing from using it as cover for sending those jobs overseas.
Qantas has gotten away with a lot of corporate bastardry over the years, mostly because we had little choice but to fly them, especially domestically. When you’ve barely got a competitor, you can treat staff and customers badly and still put bums on seats.
But all that might be about to change. Western Sydney Airport opened last month with no curfew and cheaper fees for airlines. Soon we’ll find out how many of us were flying Qantas because we loved it and how many because we had little choice.
Brands are about how you make people feel. And Qantas has made a lot of Australians feel really pissed off. Maybe it’s time to take Spirit of Australia off the fuselage of that fleet.
Dee Madigan runs Campaign Edge. She has worked on some of Australia’s largest brands, is a regular panelist on ABC’s Gruen, author of The Hard Sell and was lead creative for federal Labor’s 2022 and 2025 election wins.
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