Alan Joyce, unreconstructed

For two years since thunderous opprobrium forced him into an early retirement, former Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce has laid low. Last week, he chose a safe space – the Australian Aviation Summit – to soft launch himself back into public life. 

Some of us had sympathetically imagined that two years of enforced self-reflection might serve Joyce well. His keynote speech on Thursday sure put paid to that. "From Survival to Strategy," he called it, when the more faithful title would've been "I was right". 

Joyce began by repeating an assertion that has been completely discredited: "Qantas, at one point, was just 11 weeks away from running out of cash." As my book The Chairman's Lounge records, Qantas was only 11 weeks from exhausting its cash if the company chose not to reduce any of its costs. That's like someone with a melanoma announcing they're 11 months from death if they don't get it cut out. Hey, at least Joyce isn't still claiming Qantas was "11 weeks from bankruptcy," which is a whole additional level of bulls--t.