Tony Burke, the minister for employment and workplace relations, has discussed community frustration about Qantas’ profit prediction of approximately $2.5 billion.
Following the national carrier’s announcement, the Transport Workers Union (TWU) called for the airline to pay back the $2.7 billion it received from the Government during the pandemic.
Speaking to Sky News Australia, Burke said he was aware of these concerns, but it was unlikely the government would do this.
“It’s community frustration that I hear everywhere, particularly when the government money was about keeping people in jobs, so I hear that,” he said on Wednesday.
“We’re not in the process of chasing down…,” he said, before the host cut him off, questioning why not.
“We can’t undo every decision that was made by the Morrison government, it’s just not practical,” he replied.
“The thing that it does show though, is that some companies that are saying they can’t possibly pay their workers the correct rate are under the policies we just discussed.”
Qantas received $2.7 billion in government handouts during the pandemic to gut its workforce and decimate standards.
Today it's forecasting record $2.4 billion in profits. This is obscene. Qantas should pay back every dollar of the no-strings handouts.https://t.co/O3gCArJhBA
— TWU Australia (@TWUAus) May 23, 2023
The Qantas Group announced yesterday morning that it expects the FY23 underlying profit before tax to hit between $2.425 and $2.475b.
TWU’s national secretary Micheal Kaine called the profit prediction “obscene” and deamnded the handouts be returned.
“The right thing to do would be to pay back every dollar of the no-strings government handouts Qantas received from Scott Morrison before it trashed every essential section of the airline to prop up executives and shareholders,” he said.
“The $100 million increase to the share buyback scheme is a kick in the guts to illegally sacked workers who were told their jobs were sacrificed to save this amount of money.
“A $2.5 billion profit for the first full financial year since airfares skyrocketed, complaints against Qantas rose 70 per cent… and a recently announced wet-leasing arrangement, essentially outsourcing and offshoring more essential jobs.”
In response to Kaine’s claims, a Qantas spokesperson told Travel Weekly: “Their claims – that our profit is due to the JobKeeper payments (the bulk of which were passed on to our people who were stood down and the remainder used for fee-for-service freight and repat flying) and that we’ve eroded employee conditions – are just wrong.”
