COMMENT

The thousands of airline workers facing an uncertain future over the coming months must be shaking their heads at an unseemly public squabble between their leaders. At a time industry unity is paramount, Qantas boss Alan Joyce and Virgin Australia chief Paul Scurrah are generating controversy with a spat in the national broadsheet over an issue manufactured from what may or may not have been a throwaway line by Prime Minister Scott Morrison. It wasn’t even a direct quote. “Virgin could be one example of a company, if it were to go to the wall, that the government might consider a “strategic” priority,” the paper said. READ: Air New Zealand cancels dividend as it secures $NZ900m government loan. The controversy took off when Joyce, who had done a commendable job explaining his airline’s painful stand-downs and capacity cuts, took the bait the next day on a Sky News interview. Airlines worldwide are shoring up balance sheets, arranging standby loans to improve liquidity (Delta Air Lines just arranged a $US2.6 billion credit facility) and clamoring for government assistance. Joyce made the sensible point that government assistance should be industry-wide but then he squandered the opportunity by putting the boot into Virgin. Suggesting that the government should not look after “badly managed companies that have been badly managed for 10 years” was a bridge too far. Joyce was responding to a question in the heat of an interview but it was enough to give the journos at News Corp. an opening to inject some spicy controversy into the torrent of aviation COVID-19 news. Scurrah hit back on Saturday, reportedly warning Joyce not to treat the coronavirus crisis as a game of Survivor and, more to the point, denying there had been any discussions about nationalizing Virgin. He made the point that now was not a time for rivalry but a time for the industry to be united to work together to preserve as many jobs as possible. Virgin has since argued that it needed to respond to repeated sniping from Qantas over a week and which escalated on Friday with the Joyce claim. But this sort of public spat is still not good enough. This is an unnecessary distraction from the important message that the aviation industry is in serious financial trouble and requires a coherent national strategy that helps everyone in the industry get through it. Aviation is a vital part of Australia’s national infrastructure, an enabler of its tourism industry and an employer of hundreds of thousands of people. It’s not a question of who’s first in the hand-out line, it’s a question of making sure that vital aviation infrastructure — airlines, airports, engineering facilities and the rest — is still with us when the wheel finally turns. Even unions are coming to the party, despite the fact some were in the dispute with airlines prior to the crisis. Pilots unions have said they are working with the airlines on implementing the distressing measures the coronavirus has made necessary. Even perennial Qantas nemesis The Transport Workers’ Union joined forces with the Australian Services Union and “underwing” companies such as dnata and Menzies Aviation to call on Prime Minister for an industry assistance package. The package included payroll tax relief, loans and state guarantees for aviation companies as well as allowing workers on unpaid leave to receive unemployment benefits and top up to average weekly wages. There’s a lesson here: old habits die hard but die they must in what are unprecedented times.