Unions have lodged formal submissions to the competition regulator over the Qantas-Emirates alliance, warning it will see the flag carrier become a shell of an airline.
The Transport Workers Union said the plight of Qantas is due to poor decision making and management strategies rather than down to any external or competitive pressures.
Far from assuring the future of the carrier, a partnership would hasten Qantas’s demise, the union said.
“The suggestion that the future of Qantas as a functioning international airline can be assured by outsourcing and offshoring its core operations – flying passengers on Qantas aircraft – is farcical,” TWU national secretary Tony Sheldon said in the submission to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
The Australian Licenced Aircraft Engineers Association (ALAEA) said a “key question” for the ACCC is whether the alliance is the “thin end of the wedge which will see Qantas hollowed-out and diminished to the detriment of competition and the national interest”.
There was support for the alliance from the Victorian Government which told the ACCC it would open up Europe for Australians and “reduce the perception of distance as an impediment for travelling to Australia”.
