Alan Joyce thinks it could’ve been worse

In mid-2023, while travelling in Europe, your correspondent was subjected to a real-life horror movie known as Air Serbia.

After that ordeal – which involved days stuck in the post-Soviet liminal space that is Belgrade Airport, bags lost multiple times, flights missed multiple times, airline staff nearly coming to blows with frustrated customers multiple times – it was rather quaint returning to Australia and the news that Alan Joyce was departing early as Qantas chief executive, fleeing the firestorm of public outrage that had engulfed his final years in charge.

Sure, under Joyce, Qantas had illegally sacked 1820 workers, sold tickets to flights that didn’t exist, given the prime minister’s son access to an exclusive invite-only club, and degraded the customer experience so severely that the storied national carrier had by then become a national joke.

But on the whole, were things really that bad? Some of you have never endured the likes of Air Serbia, and it shows!

This is effectively the argument made by Joyce when he emerged this week after nearly three years of public exile with a new tell-all memoir. A key theme in the blizzard of publicity which has accompanied the launch of In the Jet Stream has been Joyce saying “well, things could’ve been so much worse”.

“I’m actually very, very proud of the fact that I’m not sitting here and apologising for Qantas going bankrupt, [something] that many airlines around the world did,” he said. He really could not have set a lower bar.

In interviews with our stablemates at The Australian Financial Review, Joyce insisted that despite the public fury, Qantas’ investors never really complained. Indeed, on paper, and from a shareholder’s standpoint, Joyce’s performance over his 15 years in the cockpit was stellar.

As chief executive, he’d seen six prime ministers, the global financial crisis, and a once-in-a-century pandemic. Weeks before his departure, the airline delivered a record $2.47 billion profit, reflecting a strong rebound from the pandemic.

In that sense, Joyce’s downfall parallels that of many COVID-era political leaders, who draped themselves in the mantle of “strong leadership” through an unpredictable global pandemic only for voters to fall out of love with them once the crisis was mostly past.

Within months of Joyce departing Qantas, the last two COVID premiers standing, Daniel Andrews and Annastacia Palaszczuk were gone. Both now keep a low profile.

But for some reason within Joyce’s psyche, that was not possible for him.

Qantas’ post-pandemic return might have delivered record profits, but for many customers, flying was a constant series of humiliation ritual characterised by lost bags, interminable delays and exhausting crowds, so often met with a sense of beige corporate indifference from airline staff. Joyce, the most visible face of our most visible airline, became a lightning rod for public frustration at the degradation of air travel.

Perhaps more telling than anything Joyce has said during his book tour was a now-withdrawn claim in 2022 that passengers struggling with another airport meltdown were simply not “match fit”. Try telling them that Qantas was actually in the process of delivering record value for shareholders!

The sense that passengers failed to appreciate just how hard Qantas had worked to navigate the pandemic built the hubristic attitude that hastened Joyce’s downfall. And while glimmers of it emerged during recent interviews, the former Qantas boss only now appears somewhat reflective.

“One of my biggest regrets is how we handled coming out of COVID because we got it badly wrong,” he told The Australian this weekend.

Had Joyce left in 2019 as initially planned, his reputation would be very different. And while nobody should feel too much sympathy for a chief executive who received approximately $125 million failing to get much love from the wider public, the inauspicious end to Joyce’s tenure at Qantas has shattered the more remarkable parts of his legacy.

In an interview with this masthead, Joyce said it was a “shame” that more corporate leaders were not willing to take a stance on social issues, much like Qantas had done on same-sex marriage.

A gay working-class kid from Dublin who went on to lead one of Australia’s most storied companies, Joyce didn’t have to put his identity in the maelstrom of the marriage equality debate. He did so anyway.

If not for his failure to read the room after the pandemic, that is probably what he would be remembered for.

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