Janet Albrechtsen, and Qantas not the airline it once was ...

(Above: oh yes, hit me with another chocolate chip cookie, or perhaps some more of those cheesy cheese bites).

Only Wednesday, and yet it's hard to work out what was the more astonishing sight.

There's poor Brendan O'Neill shocked and appalled to discover that the UK Girl Guides have discovered there's more than one god in the world.

Silly Girl Guides, when we all know that there's only one god, and if you don't eat your spaghetti, she's a most vengeful deity. Or perhaps at long last the Catholic and Anglican conceptions of god have come into some kind of cohesive theological shape and battered the other aspirational gods of the Islamics, the Hindus and the Calathumpians into submission. (Where would we be without the comedy stylings of Brendan O'Neill at Counterpoint?)

It must be roughly equivalent to Bob Katter discovering that he has a gay brother, and now the commentariat are making hay, as in No gays Bob? Try closer to home (warning, forced video at end of link). The thought of having Katter as family automatically gives Carl Katter the sympathy vote, as it's always hard to talk sense, humanity, marriage or common bonds to a cut snake ...

And now, heaven forfend, Bob Katter is in the wars with Janet Albrechtsen, as she muses about the fate of Qantas in Sky's the limit for demanding Qantas workers:

Then Katter played the parochial card, arguing for new legislative restrictions on Qantas and pointing the finger at the "people from overseas" such as "Mr Cleverness" at Qantas (Joyce is Irish-born) and Gail Kelly (who hails from South Africa) at Westpac.

God forbid, Senator, that we should encourage the movement of people and trade in the 21st century.

Uh huh. God forbid, except perhaps we should discourage the movement of boat people showing entrepreneurial initiative trying to get to the lucky country ... If you can't afford a ticket on Qantas, you're simply not welcome!

For the rest of Albrechtsen's piece, she resorts to the Qantas management line, and indulges in a riot of union and worker bashing. Typical line? "... don't fall for the unions' wicked use of emotional tricks."

Naturally this is an excuse for Albrechtsen to trot out all sorts of tired, wicked management tricks, and forces the pond into a personal anecdote, as recently we had the increasingly rare pleasure of sampling the services of Qantas, not the airline it once was. Ah the joy of the fumes on an aged 767 ...

Lord knows, the captain tried hard, assuring us all he was a better pilot than he was a comedian, but then he made a fatal mistake. He also assured us that, with an ounce of luck, he'd get us to the gate on time, or maybe with a smidgin more luck, a little ahead of time.

We arrived an hour late, and the captain heaped the blame not on the fog that had disrupted Melbourne airport, but on a Singapore Airlines flight ahead of us that was taking a little time to land safely (perhaps they should have diverted to Avalon, so we could show those Asiatics how to do a rushed cowboy landing).

It was a Katterish performance in relation to a foreign airline that these days provides a better service, and which along with Virgin is now the preferred supplier of the pond's travel requirements.

Oh and a bag was lost - probably the Melbourne fog, and its late delivery to various addresses entertained us until we decided to collect it at the airport - and the flight back was also late, without the excuse of fog or Singapore Airlines ...

Not the airline it once was, but somehow it's all the fault of the surly workers, as opposed to the surly management.

Here's Albrechtsen lining up to blame the workers for the demise of Ansett, and preemptively blaming the workers for the decline and fall of Qantas, as if Geoff Dixon and Alan Joyce have had nothing to do with it:

Bring it on. For too long, unions at Qantas have got their way. If this is the modern face of the union movement, then unions have not yet secured a sensible, responsible place for themselves in the 21st-century workplace.

They have learned nothing from Ansett's demise 10 years ago, after years of union-dominated cost structures. And they have learned nothing from the broader union movement's diminishing membership.

In a case of industrial deja vu, get ready too for all sorts of claims thrown at the flying kangaroo, most of them highly emotional and economically irrational and some of them downright misleading and reckless.

Speaking of downright misleading and reckless, amazingly, Albrechtsen doesn't blame the carbon tax for the proposed staff cuts. Perhaps she doesn't want to get into bed with the highly emotional and economically irrational Tony Abbott, but it's also clear she doesn't have much of a clue about commercial airline operations.

Oh sure, she knows how to write about "commercially illiterate unions that want to stop Qantas from innovating and expanding", and "cheap emotion", clearly different to dear emotion, and unions unencumbered by logic, and the emotive "our flying kangaroo", and economic lunacy, and pilots' greedy demands, and the highfalutin' label of an association, deployed not just by the evil pilots but by the engineers, and "arrant nonsense" and so forth and etc ...

But if you want an alternative view, why not try one of my favourite blogs, by Ben Sandilands, which has of late been running hot with talk of Qantas.

Here's a few stories for starters, with the headers giving a fair clue to the content: Qantas hit by claims of dishonest accounting, failed management and another takeover bid, which it denies.

Forensic study of Qantas accounts undermines the company line about international losses.

How Qantas has butchered London flights.

Sandilands is prepared to look at all kinds of angles (Media coverage of Jetstar in Japan, OMG!) and isn't afraid of a little pilot and sheltered government Air Canada bashing (Emirates video: A study in media hysterics), and truly it would be a treat to see him tear strips off the fatuous Albrechtsen, who ends her piece thusly:

The same ill-conceived brand of Katter economics once argued in favour of so-called "national champions" to justify governments running airlines and taxpayers picking up the tab. It failed dismally: governments have no idea how to run efficient businesses.

Nor, it has to be said, did the management of Ansett, Compass (ah the glory days) and Tiger.

Oh okay Tiger is just Singapore Airlines in disguise, which is just Temasek Holdings in disguise, which is just the Singapore government in disguise, which is a vast relief and explains exactly why Singapore Airlines currently runs such an efficient business. It's because governments have no idea how to run efficient businesses ...

Meanwhile, you don't have to spend long in the world of Air Crash Investigations to realise that safety and efficiency are not always compatible in the world of number crunching, so that the things that Qantas traded on - safety and quality - have slipped in recent years. I mean, to get into bed with American Airlines and BA! What next? Air France?

But back to Albrechtsen:

Even dumber in economic terms is the prospect of fencing in Qantas with new demands to stop the airline growing its business overseas. As the experts will tell you, that's a sure way to turn a national carrier into a national basket case.

And there's the rub. In the international market place, the concept of a national carrier is now verging on the meaningless. It's no longer possible for Qantas to trade off on its iconic status as an Australian airline, and it's no longer enough for the company to fudge its accounts, downgrade its longhaul service and capacity, and chase the chimera of the Asian market, up against competitors with serious cash (AirAsia stuns with 200 plane order).

At that point, you're better off reading Sandilands rather than Albrechtsen:

In the days after the phase one announcement Joyce gave interviews in which he claimed the Asia based premium carrier, using A320s for short to medium haul routes, would feature lie flat beds in first class, to the disbelief of those who heard him.

There are many things that need to be examined in Qantas without delay, as the long haul operation loses more customers, and the group in general seems to be losing its mind.

And if you don't know why the people around Joyce listened with disbelief to idle chatter of lie flat beds in short and medium haul routes, you're about ready to appoint Janet Albrechtsen as your new company director with a fresh vision, which consists of union and worker bashing.

Good luck with that, and good luck to the flying kangaroo, and Singapore noodles and Hainanese chicken rice, here we come ...

(Below: a few old Qantas cartoons, with more Nicholson here).