She’s right. But Tully and Joyce seemed to think that they were the ones drawing the line in this exercise.

Ultimately, Joyce decided to make a concession. He told the airlines to start answering some of the phone calls from customers who wanted back the half-billion dollars in flight credits Qantas had stashed. A special Joyce touch? He presented this as some sort of special treatment – Qantas called it a “concierge” service. Others call it answering the phone.

And the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is now pursuing Qantas in the Federal Court for deceptive conduct for allegedly selling tickets to 8000 flights it had already decided to cancel.

And yes, Qantas abused its workers, of course. No less an authority than the Federal Court has ruled illegal its 2020 decision to outsource the jobs of 1700 ground crew so the company could cut their wages and conditions. The Transport Workers’ Union describes it as the biggest illegal mass sacking in Australian history. The High Court is expected to rule on Qantas’ appeal against this decision next week.

Either way, this was just one small part of Joyce’s larger problem of degrading his staff. Qantas has dispersed its workforce among 38 companies including 17 subsidiaries and 21 external suppliers so that, altogether, 48 per cent of its employees have agreements with companies other than Qantas. Workers on less pay and worse conditions while Joyce took some $100 million in pay over the 15 years of his tenure.

But he also abused the airline’s quasi-monopoly position and plundered the national Treasury. When the pandemic struck, the Morrison government let Virgin go to the wall but paid Qantas $2.7 billion in subsidies to keep a “flag carrier” in operation. This taxpayer support included $900 million in JobKeeper payments which the airline took. Then cut its staff anyway – illegally, as the Federal Court found. And once it was back in profit it refused to repay any of the federal subsidies.

Even now, Qantas is granted special privileges because of its flag-carrier status yet it acknowledges no special responsibilities. This week the opposition instigated a Senate inquiry into whether the Albanese government’s Transport Minister, Catherine King, was protecting Qantas’ profits when she knocked back a Qatar Airways request to fly 28 more flights into Australia per week.

Joyce took the flying kangaroo and turned it into a rapacious boar. Ultimately, it was public opinion, with senators holding the stick, that drew the line in the sand for Joyce. Yet he resigned only a couple of months earlier than planned, and leaves with a reported $24 million in bonuses pending.

“This is a classic Joyce move: pretend to take responsibility while pocketing obscene amounts of money,” thundered TWU national secretary Michael Kaine. He wants the bonuses withheld.

Loading

Some big investors are unhappy too. Australian Council of Superannuation Investors chief executive Louise Davidson has called on the Qantas board to carefully consider the matter: “The question investors will ask is, how does the board justify any bonus outcomes given the legacy issues Mr Joyce is leaving behind.”

Yet why should we have expected anything different? Qantas was a publicly owned entity that the Keating government privatised. Joyce might have been worthy of criticism in the way he ran the business, but in essence he did what the CEO of a private business is expected to do under the theory of shareholder value.

Milton Friedman’s theory was published in 1970 under a New York Times headline: “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits”.

In other words, a corporation has no responsibility other than to its shareholders. Qantas shareholders were happy with the returns Joyce made for them. Shareholder value theory has dominated.

The Spirit of Australia, by government decree, was profit maximisation. Joyce was acting within that spirit.

Privatisation is now going through a reckoning. Qantas is one case study. A business that should have public responsibilities was allowed to renounce them. Anthony Albanese said last month that he probably wouldn’t have sold off the Commonwealth Bank, a process that began in 1991 under Keating.

Albanese said he supported a market economy because it’s “a pretty useful way to allocate resources”, he told Neil Mitchell’s podcast, but government intervention was necessary at times of market failure: “I also think that there is a role for state-owned enterprises in competing, in keeping the private sector a bit honest.”

Privatisation became a dirty word in Australia around decade ago. It was a reason for the 2015 rejection of the Campbell Newman government in Queensland. The pendulum has started swinging back. Last year, Victoria’s Daniel Andrews returned electricity supply to public ownership.

Loading

Yet the problem is not necessarily privatisation. Or socialisation. The problem is establishing a sensible balance of responsibilities. It’s about governance, not ideology. One example is Australia Post, which was corporatised by the Hawke government. So it’s still in government ownership but run along corporate lines and generates a modest profit. Critically, it has public responsibilities in its charter – running a mail delivery service foremost among them. Its boss wants to close the mail service because it loses money. But that’s the price of serving the community.

Could privatisation still have a useful place? Yes it could, but not according to the Joyce doctrine. For example, the model that the Rudd government proposed for the National Broadband Network. The original plan was that the federal government would build a nationwide, high-speed fibre network with a mixture of public and private investment. The service would repay the government investment over the course of a decade and a half. Then it’d be sold to the private sector.

The nation would establish the infrastructure, be repaid its investment, and the private sector ultimately would own and operate it. Of course, the Abbott government, opposed ideologically and politically, eviscerated it, left the copper wires in place and Australia’s half-arsed internet system is the result.

It’s amazing that we somehow managed to get universal water supply, sewerage and electricity throughout our cities.

Loading

It’s possible to have well-functioning, responsible businesses that are in private hands. Or public hands. There’s been too much emphasis on ideology and not enough on governance.

This is where the Albanese governance is headed now with Qantas. It’s not proposing to re-nationalise the airline. In launching a discussion paper this week on how to make the aviation sector more competitive, Catherine King floated the idea of imposing a charter of consumer rights on Qantas. Alan Joyce need not be an argument against privatisation, just a case study in poor governance structure.

Many of the economic ideas that attained dominance in the 1980s, not only privatisation, are subject to a new reckoning. Including the role of market forces in labour markets and supply chains. And the theory of shareholder value is now fighting to survive in the era of corporate social responsibility.

Jim Chalmers has dubbed this phase in Australian politics to be the End of Complacency. Let it also be the end of dogmatism in the service of any ideology.

Peter Hartcher is political editor.