How did you feel in that moment?

Well, it was an unbelievable period.

I'll give a little bit of build up to what was happening and how distressed getting their peer.

I was in the city giving a speech to investors and we were driving back into the airport where Qantas head office is.

And our head of investor relations said, the share price is collapsing.

And he said, I didn't think, he jokingly said, I didn't think your speech to the investors was that bad.

And then I said, well, can you find out what was going on? And he rang around a few of the trading desks and says, oh, there's rumors and there's pictures of a Qantas tail in Indonesia on the ground.

He

How did you feel in that moment?

Well, it was an unbelievable period.

I'll give a little bit of build up to what was happening and how distressed getting their peer.

I was in the city giving a speech to investors and we were driving back into the airport where Qantas head office is.

And our head of investor relations said, the share price is collapsing.

And he said, I didn't think, he jokingly said, I didn't think your speech to the investors was that bad.

And then I said, well, can you find out what was going on? And he rang around a few of the trading desks and says, oh, there's rumors and there's pictures of a Qantas tail in Indonesia on the ground.

He

It's a true living thing because where you've got to in the end and looking back must really give you, uh, now that you can distill it all, give you a huge feeling of achievement.

It does, Russell.

I think I look back on it and I, you know, you look at...

And writing the book was really good in doing this.

I think a lot of Irish people are glass half full generally.

And when you look back at all the stuff you've done, the stuff that hasn't worked, the stuff that did work, you always take satisfaction out of the major achievements that you achieved.

I look back on and I think, you know, Jetstar, when we set up an airline from scratch, probably the same, it's the same achievement Tony Ryan and Michael O'Leary had with Ryanair.

And was the QF92 from Singapore your biggest, uh, professional challenge in dealing with the airline business?

Yeah

... um, that, that...

He said Alan Joyce should stick to his knitting, and it was because 30 CEOs, not just me, uh, wrote a note to the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull at the time, saying he should legislate for, for, uh, same-sex marriage and not put it through this vote.

Um, that...

Uh, I think all the banks, the mining companies, we all did it, but we, we were elevated to the front of it because Peter Dutton started saying, "Alan Joyce should stick to his knitting," not any of the other 30 CEOs.

Then Margaret Court wrote a note to the Western Australian, an open note to me and to the board, saying she was boycotting Qantas because of, of our support for marriage equality.

And then I was over in Perth at, doing a breakfast on Perth to London, and a man unhappy with my support for marriage equality puts a pie in my face.

But can you talk us through some of the decisions that were made during COVID?

Now, I acknowledge you had significant losses in those COVID years, but when you put all of those things together, What is your, I guess, pushback against someone that might say that that just looks like pure price gouging and greed?

Well, first of all, Qantas wasn't the only airline that's operating.

There is a competitive market.

You're operating in one of the most competitive markets in the world in Australia.

You're operating against, I think, 50 or 60 airlines operating internationally.

We had at the time wrecks operating in the domestic market with competitor in the market.

So to say that Qantas just controlled the market is just nonsense.

Hate it.

I mean, i- i- did that opinion stay with you?

No.

So I think you...

That was absolutely not the case.

I think what we had looked at when we were setting up Jetstar was why had this never worked with any other full service airline around the world.

And in the book, I list all the failures of people like United Airlines, Delta Airlines, British Airways, all trying to set up their own low-cost carrier and it never working.

And that was because there were, there were two ways it failed.

Little Britain?

[laughs]

... to my family back in Ireland, um, which was an amazing experience, and I was petrified like a lot of people are about that coming out experience.

Again, describe that both growing up and working in conservative Catholic Ireland at the time, I didn't feel it was a safe place to come out at work.

So I came to Australia to have that experience.

I worked for Ansett in Melbourne and was able to be out at work.

And then the third time was coming out to the public as the CEO of a major corporation when the PR team said, "You're going to have to do this because I think the media know you're o- obviously openly gay, but you're not open to the general public." But then we planned it to do over an interview.

And I was a bit worried at the time, I have to admit.

Um, I was just thinking, what are some of the decisions that you've been most proud of, and what are the de- some of the decisions perhaps you wish you could have taken again and, and gone in a different direction?

He came into our studios earlier this week

weekWell, there were a number of different reasons.

One, as you know, I've dedicated the book to my parents, my mother and my father, who are my heroes and inspiration.

And, you know, the first chapter of the book talks about my family life, the very poor upbringing b- both my parents had.

My mother fed her siblings through a soup kitchen because she couldn't afford to pay, do the meals, and they were my inspiration.

They got all of our four brothers, my three brothers and myself, through school, through university.

They left school when they were 12 or 13, so we were given the education they never had, and my brothers went on to very successful careers.

I thought he might have actually taken the board and then you there, but it wasn't that case though.

How is paying out more than $200 million saving an airline?

Well, you have to go back to when the decision was made, Fran, and it was made in the middle of 2020, when we did not know how things were going to develop.

When we were looking at it, the virus had just started coming back through the communities, the borders were closing down.

And we were really worried that the airline was going to be in a long protracted recovery.

And we made a decision at the time to make around 10,000 people redundant.

It was heartbreaking.

I describe in the book having people in head office in my office.

I assumed union leaders always had the best interests of workers and companies at heart.'' At what point did you abandon that foundational belief?

How did you wield that access to your advantage?

Well, it's the job of any CEO of any company to, to lobby, to canvas for the role of their company, and then it's up to government to take all those inputs in, in, and then decide what's right for the country, but understand those things.

And so for me, that was always a Good and important part of it.

And you always had to have good relationships with both sides of politics.

When I left Qantas, I was getting text messages from prime ministers that I worked with, I think seven prime ministers over that period of time, and I felt I had great relationships with all of those prime ministers.

You know, a- and it's a two-way street because I talk in the book about the prime ministers ringing me, uh, to say, "Could Qantas put a rescue flight into Cairo to get Australians out, into Thailand, into India?" And it happened so many times.

Um, so you had, you had the prime ministers knowing the value of that relationship and knowing the value of having a national carrier and knowing the value of having that capability, and I think that capability will get even better with Project Sunrise.

So did you wield that access to the prime minister in order to get ahead for Qantas in that decision?

Shouldn't that have been made clear to customers from the very beginning?

Yeah, and we got that wrong 'cause we were in...

I, I'll explain why we did credits first, and then I can say why we got that one wrong at the start.

At the, the re- we had 22 million bookings in the system, I think, at the time.

And when the borders started closing down, most airlines, including ourselves, not all airlines, but most, reverted to credits as a way of managing it.

Because every single customer issue could, was different.

Some customers may have had expired credit cards.

Why shouldn't the collapse in public trust be treated as an equally important measure of your legacy?