Qantas Quotes

I remember being thirteen years old, sitting in my room all night, listening to the same song over and over. I thought that if I could write something beautiful, something honest, I could make someone love me.

Generations of women are ignorant, ignorant of the Quran and its teachings. If we don't inform ourselves as women, we don't know about the rights we can exercise, which are empowering to women actually, because Islam is such an egalitarian religion, Qanta! Islam gave women inheritance rights and property rights and the rights to divorce and to choose a marriage partner. Servitude never enters the equation. Beatings are Haram.” Maha

The Super Constellations took three days to reach London [from Australia] and lacked the power or range to dodge most storms. When monsoons or cyclones were encountered, the pilots had no choice but to put on the seat belt signs and bounce through them. Even in normal conditions they flew at a height guaranteed to produce more or less constant turbulence. (Qantas called it, without evident irony, the Kangaroo Route.) It was, by any modern measure, an ordeal.

Discrimination in fact is how many of the Saudis define themselves. Saudi Arabia is about separation of gender, race, tribe, fiefdoms.

The forbidden becomes much more enticing than what is always revealed.

Until as late as the early 1950s a round-trip aeroplane ticket from Australia to England cost as much as a three-bedroom suburban home in Melbourne or Sydney. With the introduction by Qantas of larger Lockheed Super Constellation airliners in 1954, prices began to fall, but even by the end of the decade travelling to Europe by air still cost as much as a new car. Nor was it a terribly speedy or comfortable service. The Super Constellations took three days to reach London and lacked the power or range to dodge most storms. When monsoons or cyclones were encountered, the pilots had no choice but to put on the seat-belt signs and bounce through them. Even in normal conditions they flew at a height guaranteed to produce more or less constant turbulence. (Qantas called it, without evident irony, the Kangaroo Route.) It was, by any modern measure, an ordeal.

I don't think this is a good idea. We all live on one planet so we cannot segregate the genders. If the Holy Mosque in Makkah, which is the holiest place on earth, does not segregate women, then why would the Ministry of Health want to segregate them?” She also went on to object to the selection of a physician based only on gender and not competence, expressing her disdain as follows: “I prefer doctors who are professional in studying my situation and solving my problem, regardless of whether they are male or female. I cannot imagine a men's hospital without female nurses and doctors, and I also cannot imagine women's hospitals without men playing a role in them.

fact that a woman cannot drive or travel without authorization, for example, gives a special sense of strength to the man. And this strength is directly connected to the violence. It creates a sense of immunity; that he can do whatever he wants, without sanction.

Ignominiously reined in by their ruler, the Ikhwan became deeply offended especially as they considered themselves the religious Army of God. The rude rebuff drove them to question their unwavering loyalty for their King. Thus the first crisis of clergy and King was conceived.

By removing the ability to drive themselves anywhere, women were at the mercy of male authority, compelled always to inform men of their destinations and returns, and in a country where women could not travel without prior authorization by men, they were effectively hostage to their male relatives. Rania

Here at Hajj, I was experiencing a taste of the same poison. While the women in my tent weren't nearly as wealthy or polished as the bewitching woman at al-Multaqa, they subscribed to the same view, deciding (based on skin color and ethnicity) that I surely must be a handmaid or at best nanny to a poor Saudi family who couldn't afford the much better Filipina maids, having instead to resort to Pakistani or worse, Bengali help. In fact I did remember one Saudi woman in the tent asking me if I was Bengali.

Yet I couldn't connect this racial purity with the warmth of the toothless, lined Bedouin women who showed me such affection in the hospital. I thought about the Bedouin patients I had attended in Riyadh and what they had taught me of acceptance. Surely these Bedouin were the purest Saudis of all, Daughters of Arabia, borne of tribal forebears who had roamed Arabia before the slick of oil wealth suffocated their culture, washing them up like half-dead seagulls into the new urban metropolis of modern Saudi Arabia. I decided it had to be wealth which made the stark difference. All I had to do was think back to the “real” Saudis I had met in Riyadh, so different than the women sharing this tent with me.

To the delight of visiting American sailors, the British still had a military base there, Changi, and shared it with those stout lads from Down Under, the Australians, who naturally came supplied with Down Under lassies. Australian women were the glory of Singapore. These tall, lithe creatures with tanned, muscular legs and striking white teeth that were forever being displayed in dazzling smiles somehow completed the picture, made it whole. You ran into them at Raffles, the old hotel downtown with ceiling fans and rattan chairs and doddery old gentlemen in white suits sipping gin. You ran into them in the lobbies and restaurants of the new western hotels and in the bazaars and emporiums. You saw them strolling the boulevards and haggling with small Chinese women in baggy trousers for sapphires and opals. You saw them everywhere, young, tan, enjoying life, the center of attention wherever they were. It helped that their colorful tropical frocks contrasted so vividly with the drab trousers and white shirts that seemed to be the Singaporean national costume. They were like songbirds surrounded by sparrows. “If Qantas didn’t bring them here, the United Nations should supply them as a gesture of good will to all human kind.” Flap Le Beau stated this conclusion positively to Jake Grafton and the Real McCoy as they stood outside Raffles Hotel surveying the human parade on the sidewalk. “I think I’m in love,” the Real McCoy told his companions. “I want one of those for my very own.

Even when critically, I learned, hiding her face was of paramount importance. I watched, entranced at the clash of technology and religion, some version of my religion.

Even when critically ill, I learned, hiding her face was of paramount importance. I watched, entranced at the clash of technology and religion, some version of my religion.

Did an unconscious sickly Muslim have the same responsibilities as a conscious, able-bodied one?

In Riyadh, I would be licensed to operate procedures on critically ill patients, yet never to drive a motor vehicle. Only men could enjoy that privilege.

I knew my hips were showing, noisily announcing my sex. I wished I had something to engulf my debilitating gender. I almost wished I was a man.

Such forced incarceration of womanhood is a form of female infanticide.

While these veils conceal women, at the same time they expose the rampant, male oppression which is their jailor. Polyester imprisonment by compulsion is ungodly and (like the fiber) distinctly man-made.

Inexplicably, the Kingdom's clerics compel non-Muslim women to veil also, a rule which is not to be found codified in the Quran.

The driving in Riyadh was deadly. Turbocharged testosterone without creative or sexual outlet translated into deadly acceleration.

I was slowly becoming aware that chauvinism and sexism was just as marked among many of the Western attendings as it was amongst many of the Saudi and other Arab physicians, as though the climate of the workplace promoted an infectious transmission of male supremacy.

Worse, they suggested this was a considerate move for the protection of women, conveniently disguising their discrimination with a thin veneer of patronizing gallantry.

I looked at the pilgrims kissing the Black Stone. I was disturbed by the paganistic and ritualistic qualities of the scene. But I knew this was an ancient rite utterly distinct from the stone worshippers of centuries earlier. Muslims are very clear that only God is worthy of worship. The stone is only honored because Muhammad (PBUH) demonstrated his reverence for it by kissing it, but never worshipped it, worshipping only his Maker,,, so I found, as I would time and again in the days ahead, that in this of holiest of Islamic rites, deeply pagan rituals had survived the passage of time, persisting even after the dawn of Islam.

In the night light, the golden Thuluth Arabic calligraphy glittered on the Kisweh, its brilliance enhanced by the velvet blackness of the surrounding silk. I was bewitched by its beauty. With the distortions of Wahabi extremism, beautification of any object was considered an offense, resulting in a Kingdom without ornate decorations, other than repetitive geometry which peppered public walls and even highway underpasses. Anything else was considered futile vanity by Wahabis, but at least the Wahabis had not eroded what seemed the final remaining evidence of Islamic craftmanship: unparalleled calligraphy. For the first time in the Kingdom, I appreciated beautiful Saudi craftmanship.

The efforts of the Ikhwan would replace this primitive culture with the clarity of their furious Islam. A convenient military strategy was therefore cloaked in a righteous enforcement.

Religious zealotry therefore became the anchoring fabric weaving fractious fiefdoms together into a Kingdom.

The origins of the Mutawaeen therefore were never to be an anti-Western mine-sweeping tool, rather a means of policing the state for the security of the precarious monarchy that had conquered it.

The men were not watering the grass; they were spraying it an emerald green. This was Ireland in an atomizer. The workers were coloring the dead, hurrying to finish before the Crown Prince's gaze would zoom by, perhaps peering through the bullet-proofed, tinted, heavily-armored glass of his German car. So much about the Kingdom concerned outward appearances. Veneer was as important as substance, perhaps more so.

Divinely sanctioned wife-beating “There is no basis in Islamic theology to support domestic abuse of any kind,” declared Qanta A. Ahmed, author of In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom, in May 2009.43 But it all depends on one’s definition of “abuse:” wife-beating exists in all cultures, but only in Islam does it enjoy divine sanction. The Koran tells men to beat their disobedient wives after first warning them and then sending them to sleep in separate beds (4:34)—a punishment that suggests the Koran regards women as sexually insatiable and needing to be kept under control. This is, of course, an extremely controversial verse, so it is worth noting how several translators render the key word here, waidriboohunna:              Pickthall: “and scourge them”              Yusuf Ali: “(and last) beat them (lightly)”              Al-Hilali/Khan: “(and last) beat them (lightly, if it is useful)”              Shakir: “and beat them”              Sher Ali: “and chastise them”              Khalifa: “then you may (as a last alternative) beat them”              Arberry: “and beat them”              Rodwell: “and scourge them”              Sale: “and chastise them”              Asad: “then beat them”              Dawood: “and beat them

persistence in and of itself. In a moment of clarity, I knew at once I wanted to visit Hesham's home and express my condolences. It was the only way I could express penance for my

Kingdom (in stark contrast to the monolithic Najd). The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was the modern reformer of Hajj, and his personal efforts dispelled the heinous pre-Islamic associations with idolatry. He restored the Ka'aba as the House of God and cleansed it of statues and symbols of pagan worship, which were sometimes stored even within its hollow core. He returned monotheistic worship to Mecca, making Hajj the pinnacle of Islamic worship, as the Quran

They are impressed with you, Qanta, because you are a doctor. Until they found out about last night, they thought you were just a Pakistani maid.” She went on, even more bluntly. “They look at your dark skin, Qanta, dark as an Indian, and they noticed your friendliness to Rashida and Haneefa, the Hijazi maids, and assumed like those black girls, you were also a servant. They probably think you serve a family in Riyadh. They looked down on you because of your Pakistani blood and the fact that as a servant they didn't think you belonged in this tent. Don't worry, Sherief, my husband, gets this all the time too. He is dark-skinned and he is constantly mistaken for a Pakistani or Indian too. When they find out he is Egyptian, it's not much better, though.

You know the Saudis hate the Egyptians the most and vice versa. It's to do with the economic inequality in our countries. Most Egyptians come to work in the Gulf countries like the Kingdom for economic reasons so Saudis regard them as poor. And on the other hand, the Saudis like to vacation in Egypt, where they unfairly get a reputation of womanizing and drinking, so the Egyptians look down on them, very unhealthy

Skin color, previously something I had never considered in my years of living in the United States or England, had somehow invited discomfort to me in Riyadh already. It was while I worked among the Wahabis that I first noticed how some Saudis discriminated, first among themselves and then among the expatriates. Discrimination in fact is how many of the Saudis define themselves. Saudi Arabia is about separation of gender, race, tribe, fiefdoms. I had developed a theory based on my crude observations, which explained the Wahabi Saudi ecosystem surrounding me in Riyadh. Perhaps it reached here too, in a tent full of Saudi orthodox Wahabi women from Riyadh.

This was hardly so very different than many Western societies, I thought, recalling frosty, pooch-carrying, anorexic cadavers scuttling up and down Madison Avenue. So Saudi Arabia had a similar culture of frosty exclusion, a claim to superiority based on economics and tribal origins. The purity that the mysterious woman mentioned was actually an expression of Saudi aristocracy.

counted scores of Saudi planes lined up, waiting to deplane.

This was Islam: Hajj! Not the Muttawa with their nightsticks and nihilism. Equality in the eyes of our Maker, whether we be men or women, rich or poor, able-bodied or deformed, black or white, was all that mattered. The frenzied, fascist supremacy of Wahabiism had simply been washed away by a torrent of truth: the multiracial, spiritually hybrid Muslims now flooding Mecca. As

(they seemed so thick) completed the ensemble,

We disembarked the plane in a tumbling mass,

the first research study on abused wives was published by the King Saud specialist Medical Center and it found ninety percent of the women in the study had seen their mothers go through the same abuse?

the mandated veiling and the prevention of women driving in the Kingdom are not the disease itself; they are merely symptoms of the very serious illness at the center of our country. They are merely clinical signs of a much more significant syndrome.

The core issue is not the violence itself. It is this immunity for men, the idea that men can do what they like. It is the society of which the violence is an expression.” Rania

Majeed was a self-confessed Holocaust denier. I had witnessed his indignant nihilism about the six million condemned to be extinguished infinitely in countless narrow minds like his. Despite his intelligence, he possessed capacities I had never previously encountered. I

this diversity, finally I belonged. Islam was many-faceted and I was simply one. Our diversity had obliterated the Wahabiism of the Najd,

but here at Hajj, just like everywhere else, women talk and try to find solutions for problems by networking!

I tried to be as helpful as possible, unused to being waited upon. After eating I always returned my plate and utensils to the bucket in which everything was collected and taken away for washing, and would just get up to retrieve my own cold drink from the refrigerator cabinet in the corner of the tent, rather than ask a maid to fetch me one.

For all his scholarship of the Quran, I realized it hadn't reached further than his throat. It hadn't touched his heart.

he would never be able to debride his own devitalized hatreds that encased his glossy world. His hates would never heal. They would only propagate.

unsoftened even by the responsibility to preserve the innocence of his child.

Both Saudi and non-Saudi Muslims felt free to express their hate to me, even as some planned to flee to their Virginia homes with blue passports in hand.

In a roiling Muslim sea, my lifelines were cast by Jewish hands. I was grateful for their solidarity toward me and felt glad that Allah had blessed me with such Jewish goodness in my life. I felt no shame for my allegiances with Jews in the way so many Muslims around the world are wrongly raised to express, especially after 9/11.

Afraid to move and give away his nervousness, Zubair was in no hurry. Once most of the other passengers were gone, he retrieved his computer bag and made his way down the narrow stairs to the main body of the plane. He half expected to see a group of men in suits waiting for him, but thankfully there were none. He’d been warned that the Americans had gotten much better at intercepting people who were trying to illegally enter their country. Two female flight attendants with whorish makeup and skirts that were far too short stood by the door. They thanked him for flying Qantas. Despite what his trainers had told him, Zubair ignored the women, refusing to look them in the eye. Fortunately for him his diminutive stature made him seem shy rather than hostile. Zubair was just five and a half feet tall, and weighed a svelte 142 pounds. With his mustache shaved he easily passed for someone five to ten years younger than his twenty-nine years. He stepped into the Jetway, joining the stampede for baggage claim and customs and sandwiched between the business-class and economy customers. The stress of the situation and the heat of the enclosed Jetway triggered the scientist’s sweat glands, sending them into overdrive. Within seconds salty perspiration dampened every inch of his skin. Zubair felt trapped, as if he was on a conveyor belt headed toward his own execution. There was no turning back. Passengers continued to pour off the plane, pushing forward, moving through the confined tunnel toward U.S. Customs agents who would ask probing questions. Zubair suddenly wished he had taken the sedative that they had given him to calm his nerves. He had thrown the pills away at the Sydney airport. Allah would never approve of him taking a mood-altering drug.

Qantas, formed in 1920, has the best safety record of all airlines, with no fatal crashes in their operating history

On either side, tumble-weed and desert bushes fell away to interminable sand, an earth-bound Sea of Tranquility on a nocturnal moonscape.

Fronting the announcement on the bonuses, Mullen said he had no wish ‘to throw Alan under the bus… but he’s captain of the ship, and unfortunately that’s what comes with the territory’. (Had he thrown in mention of Joyce derailing Qantas, Mullen would have covered every mode of transport except aviation with his mixed metaphor.)

As a young revenue manager at Irish carrier Aer Lingus in the early 1990s, Joyce had – with the help of his younger brother Anthony, an actuary – designed the mathematical model for overbooking flights on the basis that a percentage of passengers never turn up. ‘That’s how he made a name for himself at the start of his career, and he’s ended it the same way,’ I wrote in the AFR. ‘He’s optimised revenue to the point where it’s now the planes that don’t show up for the flights. It’s a logical extension.

That afternoon, Qantas advised the Senate committee and the media that its total outstanding balance of COVID credits – including Jetstar and foreign customers – was $570 million, a lazy $200 million more than the number Joyce had been using publicly, and $50 million higher than even its admissions in the Senate hearing.5 The furore ratcheted up another several notches. ‘CON AIR’ screamed the next morning’s Daily Telegraph. ‘The Lying Kangaroo’ roared Melbourne’s Herald Sun. There was now a gigantic snowball rolling downhill in Alan Joyce’s direction, and sprinting away from the impact radius were Anthony Albanese and his senior ministers. Jim Chalmers called the ACCC’s allegations ‘deeply concerning’, while the PM was at pains to remind everyone, ‘Something I called for in recent days was [for] Qantas… to not have those credits expire.’ But distance between them couldn’t suddenly be manufactured. The Qatar decision, the Voice launch, the Chairman’s Lounge affair, defunding the ACCC’s airline monitoring, its steadfast inaction on slot hoarding: the perception firmly prevailed that the government was in Joyce’s pocket.

It wasn’t until 8:30pm on the Monday that the Qantas board met (by teleconference). And while the directors must have understood that Joyce’s resignation was possible, it was only once the meeting began that it became apparent it had been called for that express purpose. Of course, this jarred with Goyder’s statement before the weekend that the board was ‘fully engaged’. The chairman joined the call from Perth; former Cathay Pacific CEO Tony Tyler joined from his home in the south of France; Maxine Brenner was also overseas. The meeting was convened so hurriedly that former American Airlines CEO Doug Parker, who’d only joined the Qantas board in May, was fast asleep in the United States. Parker was ropeable when he woke to discover that Joyce, a long-time industry peer, had fallen on his sword without the genuine consultation of the full board.

Joyce came off the board hook-up into a snap meeting of the group management committee to break the news. It was late, so most of the group dialled in, but QantasLink boss John Gissing, Loyalty CEO Olivia Wirth, and PR boss Andrew McGinnes had stayed back with Joyce. When the meeting ended, they were joined by Joyce’s executive assistant of twenty years, Jenny Borden, while Andrew David returned to the office for the impromptu wake. The Qantas wine cellar was raided – one would hope for something superior to the vinegar Qantas had been serving its customers. A quiet shock prevailed, although as one attendee recalls, ‘Alan was stoic, kind of unshakable.

Joyce did not return to Qantas headquarters that day. That evening, he headed to Sydney airport to catch Emirates’ last flight to Dubai and onwards to Dublin. He was captured by a Daily Telegraph photographer rolling his suitcases through the departures hall, an image that was emblazoned across the next day’s edition. ‘Australians all let us REJOYCE’ went the headline – the same pun I’d deployed on the front page of Qantas’ staff newspaper when Joyce started the job all those years ago. The popular joke that day in TV news bulletins and newspaper columns was: finally, Qantas had managed an early departure. But the gag was flawed. Joyce’s grand miscalculation was to leave four years too late.

None of the world’s leading airlines failed to survive COVID. Yet by 2023, Qantas routinely portrayed its survival of the pandemic as a uniquely Joycean feat, while defining 100 per cent of its operational failures as symptoms of an industry-wide phenomenon. None of that is to trivialise the extraordinary injuries COVID inflicted on Qantas, or Qantas’ decisive efforts to achieve hibernation then manage through oscillating lockdowns. But rather than swallowing Joyce’s post hoc rationalisations offered in 2022 and 2023, I have relied in this book on what he actually said and did in 2020 and 2021.

Mistakes were made’ was a phrase popularised in the Nixon era as a device to evade personal responsibility for mistakes. American political scientist William Schneider described it as ‘the past exonerative tense’, and it was also the subject of a terrific book by two eminent social psychologists called Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me). The singular, first-person pronoun was deployed by Goyder only in self-justification: ‘I have always sought to act in the best interest of Qantas.’ He might have sought, but he had failed. It takes a lot to accept that the problem is you, and Goyder just couldn’t get there. Collective, deidentified responsibility was the most he would cop to. His denialism was understandable on a human level: he didn’t want his failure to be true. Who among us would easily give up the chairmanship of Qantas, the honour of a lifetime?

Qatar’s Akbar Al Baker, who retired as CEO without warning in October 2023 after twenty-seven years at the helm of the Gulf carrier, is in no doubt as to what happened: ‘It was Alan Joyce blocking us by his relationship with the prime minister.’ Al Baker accepts the Australian government’s desire to ‘look after the national carrier’ but insists that ‘the national carrier was not delivering’. ‘In COVID, we were your national carrier,’ he argues. ‘We lost over US$150 million flying to Australia, operating this long route with only fifteen passengers on board for nearly two years. We never told anybody to wait for weeks or months to get your refund, or that we won’t give you a refund. We showed our commitment was not to swindle people, not to sell tickets on cancelled

Finch’s tour de force was not yet over. ‘Chair, it’s 6:30pm. The last flight to Sydney leaves in about 35 minutes. We have been here since three o’clock.’ Australia has a cottage industry in ex-government staffers whose role is solely to coach company executives for these parliamentary hearings. The first thing inculcated into witnesses is that they’re on the MPs’ turf and are governed by their rules. ‘You can’t just walk out like it’s a play you don’t like,’ says one regular consultant. The other universal rule: never, ever be a smartarse; it worked once for Kerry Packer and then literally never again. ‘I guess you’re delayed, Mr Finch, at the discretion of the committee,’ McKenzie said. ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘We’ve still got questions, and we will be pursuing them until we’re finished.’ As Simon Birmingham put it to me later, ‘There’s often one moment when hours of disciplined effort by those around you is undone, where you lose the room in an instant. [Finch] worrying about the time of the last flight was that moment.’ ‘I’ve never seen anyone express the arrogance that Finch expressed on that day,’ says Tony Sheldon. ‘To say, “You’re all wasting my time, I’ve got better things to do, I’m catching my flight” showed so little respect to the Australian public.’ The committee excused Goyder, Hudson and Finch at 6:40pm. Theirs was a long drive back to Sydney.

Several weeks later, Hywood learned from his subordinates that Qantas was terminating its $2 million advertising spend with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and removing complimentary copies of the papers from domestic boarding gates and onboard flights. He called Joyce for an explanation and Joyce told him there was no point running Qantas ads in newspapers that carried negative stories about it. ‘I asked him, “Alan, do you believe in the freedom of the press?” He said, “Of course I do.” So I said, “Well, the thing about the press is that it asks questions of institutions and people in power that they can’t or won’t ask of themselves and by doing so, keeps the community cohesive and civil and prevents it from breaking down. Government and the commercial world must understand that it’s to everybody’s benefit, including theirs, that this system is sustained, and it’s sustained by advertising. If every advertiser pulled their ads because there were negative stories, the system would simply fall apart. So what you’re doing is jeopardising the underlying principles of the freedom of the press.” ’ Unsurprisingly, Joyce didn’t see it that way. In response to Qantas’ advertising boycott, Fairfax shifted its $2 million corporate travel account from Qantas to Virgin Australia. In turn, Virgin

knowing

Minutes after I’d put the fact of Nathan Albanese’s Chairman’s Lounge membership to the Prime Minister’s Office for comment, Anthony Albanese called AFR editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury. As Stutchbury recalls, the PM ‘made the case that politicians’ families should be off limits, but he came away knowing we weren’t going to kill the story, so he was pretty unhappy about that. I think he’s still unhappy about that.’ Stutch had already sense-checked my story with other senior heads in the AFR newsroom, concluding, ‘No one was necessarily saying it was a terrible thing, but there was a public interest in knowing that.

I was twenty-four years old and had never worked for a large company. But I had been schooled in the deranged ways of politics, with its ludicrous bureaucracy and its dubious standards of accountability and personal conduct. The transition was seamless.

This is the two hundred dollars a bottle champagne, dear. Don’t tell me you are so jaded you can’t stand a taste.