Paul Sheehan, Chris Berg, and as well as Qantas, let's mangle history, xenophobia and the White Australia policy ...

(Above: the NSW state government has installed a handy community response mechanism in King street, Newtown. Let all other governments follow their example. First call should be to complain about Paul Sheehan but luckily there's no limit to the calls you can make).

Talking of the cheapest of cheap shots, Paul Sheehan leads with one today in his rant in defence of Alan Joyce in Inquisitors' cheap shots over Qantas backfire:

Not one of this pack of inquisitors has ever run a substantial business but all have highly developed ideas of entitlements.

It begs the question of course of which substantial business Paul Sheehan ever ran in his life, and how much a developed sense of entitlement might belong to a columnist member of the commentariat handsomely paid to spew his opinions into the ether.

A scribbler for Fairfax?

What sort of substantial meaningful business is that? What useful goods or services arises from that business model? Oh it gives rise to a lot of bluster and verbal bullying - pack of inquisitors for example is a most useful term for a newspaper inquisitor - but that's about the end of it.

This sort of idle nonsense - that you have to have run a substantial business to have an opinion about a substantial business - would see the commentariat run out of town within the week, because most journalists have worked as journalists because words is all they's got ...

The simple answer once delivered to me - when I chattered on about critics being unfair to artists, especially when said critic couldn't even be a composer's bootlace - was that you didn't have to be a master carpenter to know that a chair's legs were crooked or unbalanced.

Now Sheehan can rabbit on for as long as he likes in defence of Alan Joyce, and interpret the Senate committee hearing as some kind of witch hunt (of the McCarthy kind) which blew up in the face of the government and its allies for taking cheap shots, exaggerating, sneering, distorting, and indulging in conspiracy theories ...

Hey, wait a minute, who'd have guessed they were talking about a Paul Sheehan column with its standard sneers and distortions and cheap shots and conspiracy theories ...

But in the end consumers will determine whether a business is worth favouring with consumption, and it's always most bizarre to see a columnist suggest that Qantas management needed the help of the federal government to get itself out of its self-induced pickle.

You see, according to Sheehan, the whole thing has been the fault of the federal government:

The great failure in this long-running, slow-burning, highly disruptive industrial dispute was the government's willingness to ignore the multiple pleas from the tourism industry to put an end to the months of industrial guerilla tactics being used by unions representing Qantas engineers, long-haul pilots, baggage handlers and caterers.

Nothing to do with Alan Joyce or Qantas management at all. And if it isn't the government then it's the failure of Fair Work Australia:

Similarly inert was the bureaucratic wing of the Labor Party, Fair Work Australia, which could see no justification for intervening in the dispute.

Talk about snidery and cheap shots.

Now you might wonder why, if things are so bad in the airline and the tourism industry, why the federal government and Fair Work Australia hasn't had to rush off to save Virgin Australia, and sort out things for the Virgin Australia management team?

It turns out that this week Sheehan - who in recent months has railed at lazy Celts ruining Britain, wretched Kiwis for bunging on throat-slitting hakas and lazy cheating Greeks for ruining Europe - is shocked and appalled by any reference to Asia:

Based on this proposed bill, and his performance on Friday, Senator Xenophon would be better named Senator Xenophobe ... In full xenophobic mode, the senator then raised the spectre of Asian sweatshop workers stealing the jobs of Australian workers.

Uh huh. Pot meet kettle and call it Sheehan.

And in the meantime the delusion that Alan Joyce fosters - that somehow he's going to be able to save the premium brand of Qantas by destroying it, by turning it into an off-shore brand capable of competing with low cost Asian air carriers, goes through to the keeper.

Joyce wants to do with the brand what's already partly been done by Jetstar, which is why Virgin has started to make out like bandits with business travellers domestically, and why a premium brand like Singapore Airlines now competes so effectively offshore with Qantas.

Joyce is continuing what started under Geoff Dixon, which is the destruction of a brand and a business model. Sheehan can blame the unions all he likes, at least when he's not blaming the government and Fair Work Australia and the Fair Work Act, but the coming year will see the full effects of the Joycean strategy unfold ...

Bizarrely the same notion of xenophobia unfolded in Chris Berg's column on the weekend Memo to unions: White Australia was a bad idea.

It turns out, in the Bergian view of history, that the White Australia policy was led by a union movement trying to eliminate competition in the labour market. This is an awkward truth.

Yep, the gold diggers in the great Australian rush of the 1850s were a fully unionised mob who demanded that Chinese immigration and residency be restricted by way of taxes ... (Gold rush era).

Ain't it wonderful the way a policy widely supported and implemented by all social strata in Australia can be sheeted home to just the union movement.

Yes, they were in the thick of it in the 1870s and 1880s, but that was also at a time when blackbirding was a popular pastime for sugar plantation owners ...

More to the point, the reality is that the vast majority of Australians, fed on the notion that they were loyal subjects of the British empire, British to the bootstraps and in love with any passing monarch, did they but see them passing by, were in favour of the White Australia policy. It wasn't just the union movement, and it involved deeply felt racism on a wide scale. This is an awkward truth ...

The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman.

Thank you Edmund Barton. Explain a little further Mr. Alfred Deakin:

It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors.

Put it another way. How did we ever survive before the two dollar store landed in our midst? How did Australia Post ever succeed at anything before they put a tasty array of 'made in China' objects in the path of the long queues that routinely form in post offices?

We keed, we keed, but the funniest Bergian notion is that the only serious opposition to White Australia came from pro-market thinkers ...

... particularly the great free-trade MP Bruce Smith, who described the policy as ''racial prejudice''.

The White Australia policy was based on racial prejudice? You don't say, and here we were thinking it was just a trade union movement policy protecting protectionism ...

Well we look forward to a flood of columns from Paul Sheehan and Chris Berg in favour of boat people, who truth to tell are only using entrepreneurial initiative to escape ugly persecuted lives, and carve out new, prosperous lives in a relatively free society, using the free market and whatever cash they have to hand ... unless of course these scribes happen to support John Howard dog whistling to the electorate:

... I do believe that if it is – in the eyes of some in the community – that it's too great, it would be in our immediate-term interest and supporting of social cohesion if it (Asian immigration) were slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb it was greater.

Come back Mr Howard, the union movement and Pauline Hanson need leaders like you.

Perhaps this is how Berg came to his closing par:

All this leaves us with is a union boss attempting to stoke xenophobia in service of his own economic interests. That's something with which Australian history is sadly familiar.

Of course he could just as easily have written:

All this leaves us with is a Liberal party leader attempting to stoke xenophobia in service of his own party political interests. That's something with which Australian history is sadly familiar.

But where would that get him, as he casts back to Bruce Smith making a stand against the White Australia in 1901?

Well at least it helps him avoid closing on his even funnier penultimate par:

Nor is there any reason to believe basing some Qantas services in Asia will be bad for consumers. Few companies would deliberately make their service less desirable.

Except of course that's exactly what Qantas management has succeeded in doing these past few weeks, but let's not ignore their longer standing achievements over the past few years.

As previously noted, the pond long ago left the services of Qantas, as their maintenance record slipped, their customer service declined, and their reliability floundered. This started in the days of Dixon, and has got worse in the days of Joyce, and if the same poor management-staff relationships persist, in a few years Qantas's international service will be a fading dream ...

Sad in a way if you're a management victim of the nationalist fervour so rightly deplored by Sheehan and Berg, who naturally want to see the Asian work ethic transported to Australian soil ... along with wages and working and living conditions ...

Some Australians will find this upsetting, but the idea that the pond will be spared a choir of children and Peter Allen and scientologist John Travolta and flying kangaroos has a certain piquant appeal ...

If that's the spirit of Australia, and if The Australian is the heart of the nation, then the spirit and the heart is truly stuffed ...

Perhaps it's not fair, because Qantas is competing with cashed up government owned airlines willing to splurge oil money or Asian capital to provide a better fleet than the one chosen by Qantas management, a mish-mash of bizarre routes (to Dallas of all places) and ageing aircraft that should have been replaced long ago ...

But there you go, talk of anything - the Federal government, Fair Work, xenophobia, the White Australia policy, unionists as racist, as if somehow the larger polity is exempt from racism - but whatever you do, don't talk of how Qantas management has played its part in the airline's destruction by:

- managing to continue to sell tickets online three and a half hours after grounding the fleet;

- failing to make plans to accommodate passengers caught up in the snap shutdown;

- failing to give much of a stuff at all about the passengers caught up in the lockout, when you come to think about it.

- imagining that performing such a shut down would solve the problem of the way forward bookings for Qantas services were collapsing, as if somehow after the event consumers would rush off to make forward bookings.

Of course if you want to read about brands and actual airline management, the last thing you need to do is read Paul Sheehan, who's never run a substantial business in his life, or Chris Berg, who's never had a substantial fact-checked thought outside his ideological posturing in his life ...

Come on Chris, write a genuine balanced insightful history of the white Australian policy, instead one liners attempting point scoring and ending up gibberish. At least wikipedia tries ...

As always, the pond recommends Ben Sandilands as an alternative, balanced part of reading life, with either Alan Joyce faces fire in Senate grilling, or his blog Plane Talking as good starting points...

You won't find much by way of Irish jokes (since Joyce is an Australian citizen), or idle chatter about xenophobia and the White Australia policy, but you might garner a few more insights into management responsibilities, as in If you believe Alan Joyce then Qantas would have to be an incredibly inept company:

Despite the obvious and unfair political imbalance in today’s Senate committee examination of CEO Alan Joyce’s role in the Qantas groundings there is a critical issue which means that Joyce is either totally unfit to occupy that role and the company has totally lost sight of its legal obligations, or, its responsibilities were deliberately ignored.

And that was its continuing to sell tickets to customers after Joyce exercised his authority to shut down the airline at 5 pm on Saturday night after seeking and getting the endorsement of his board at 10.30 am.

Indeed. Not even a card-carrying White Australia endorsing xenophobic trade unionist could manage that level of ineptness ... as if somehow online ticket selling still remains an afterthought in the world of Qantas, and passengers mere cattle to be carried, without regard even to the standards deployed in the live cattle trade ...

Yep, you don't have to be a master carpenter to work out that a chair's legs are unbalanced. Just try sitting in the seat and enduring the flight ... if you mistakenly attempted to book one at the start of the lockout ...

Meanwhile, for a bizarre bit of nostalgia, the pond recommends Immigration and the "White Australia Policy", as penned for the Australian Communist Party by yet another Dixon, back in 1945 ...

Perhaps Chris Berg might read it too ...

(Below: and remember while eating white Australian pineapple to enjoy your leisure moments playing the white Australia game, with more details here).