Qantas lawyer Andrew Finch still flying high

As Qantas’ company secretary, Finch will at Friday’s AGM sit alongside Richard Goyder and Hudson, though will surely be on firm instructions not to say a word out of school. The mere optics of his presence will do enough damage as is.

Quite aside from his total inability to read a room, Finch also has carriage for both industrial relations and legal affairs at the national carrier. And hasn’t Qantas been tarnished on both counts.

Finch executed the legal instrument by which then-chief Alan Joyce delegated total authority for the decision to sack 1700 baggage handlers during the pandemic. It worked: Joyce never had to front court. But Qantas lost the case and was found to have acted illegally, its board nonetheless advised to appeal the case once, then again, to no avail.

Qantas won’t repeat the error and will surely settle its case with the ACCC imminently. For now, though, Monday’s defence is a classic of the genre.

“Mistakes were made”, Qantas freely admits, before 1500 words of  logical contortion suggesting to customers it sold them cancelled flights for their own good.

Further, and “in purely legal terms”, Qantas says the ACCC ignores “the nature of travel – when weather and operational issues mean delays and cancellations are inevitable and unavoidable”.

But the ACCC isn’t suing Qantas for cancelling or delaying flights. It’s suing the airline for continuing to sell tickets to cancelled flights, for an average of 16 days after those flights were cancelled!

Removing such flights from sale would, apparently, have been very difficult. Had flights disappeared from the available schedule, people might have called up about it and Qantas didn’t have enough staff rostered to handle their queries. Imagine the angst.

Qantas was really looking after its customers all along, making sure it had arranged them alternate flights before it gave them any inkling anything was wrong (never mind any other plans they made, assured in their erroneous belief they had their flights sorted). These things take time, but that’s hardly the fault of the ticketing department. Mistakes everywhere, and not a drop of responsibility to account for them!

And then there’s the core reputational bombshell Qantas legal filing exposes it to, which is the argument that customers never purchased tickets to particular flights, but rather, a “bundle of rights” to fly on any number of similar flights.

Try claiming your “bundle of rights” at the counter next time you turn up 30 seconds after check-in closes, or as you query the price difference between a 6am or 7am flight, or on the phone as you try to change your ticket to one slightly earlier or later than the one you booked without paying a hefty fee.

It won’t work, but when dealing with Qantas, neither will anything else.