Qantas back in Federal Court

The Transport Workers' Union of Australia v Qantas Airways Limited returns to the Federal Court on Monday – and, specifically, to the courtroom of Justice Michael Lee. 

This is the final battle in the 4½-year legal war between the union representing 1,700 baggage handlers and the national carrier that used its "vanishing window of opportunity" – COVID lockdowns – to unlawfully discard them.

The original trial ran in April and May of 2021, and Justice Lee handed down his judgment in July of that year, finding that Qantas' (illicit) motivation for outsourcing those jobs was "to prevent (the) employees disrupting services in 2021 by taking protected industrial action" once normal travel had resumed. 

In response to that judgment, Qantas thundered that its outsourcing "was a right decision (and) it was a lawful decision…" and claimed that "our executives exhibited the utmost honesty and integrity in the evidence they gave," when in fact Justice Lee had in his judgment singled out Qantas' executives for giving misleading and even outright false evidence.[[Forgive the shameless cross-selling here, but there is a whole chapter on the original trial in my book, The Chairman's Lounge, still available at all good book stores!]]

Next, Qantas' appeal was heard by the Full Court of the Federal Court, which in May 2022 delivered a unanimous judgment upholding Justice Lee's finding of illegal conduct. Not one of Qantas' five appeal points remotely stirred the bench. Yet Qantas announced its intention to appeal to the High Court fewer than 40 minutes after receiving the Full Court's 18,000-word judgment. Qantas' lawyers could not have read it, let alone provided advice on it. 

In various public utterances between 2021 and 2023, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce and his chairman Richard Goyder grossly mischaracterised Justice Lee's original judgment. Asked if he had any regrets about the illegal outsourcing, Joyce said, "Not at all". He claimed that "the decision from that judge was that Qantas made a decision for the appropriate commercial reasons in his mind but couldn't rule out whether subconsciously there was an illegal reason for this to happen". Subconsciously! No, actually, Justice Lee found that Qantas was positively motivated by an illegal purpose and explicitly rejected Qantas' argument that the outsourcing decision-maker, Joyce's underling Andrew David, had been solely motivated by commercial reasons.