Qantas boss Alan Joyce wins 71 per cent, $2m pay hike

[Ash W]

At the end of the day I am not a shareholder (have the sense to invest in something that is not a basket case) so it isn't for me to say.

However I guess the shareholders must be happy because he is still there and did what was asked of him, hence his remuneration.

In relation to your other points the cartel issue if I am not mistaken was well before his time and with the changes recently announced do you expect them and full details to be announced and to happen overnight?

[D Chan]

A lot has been said about the cartel investigation, but what you need to consider is that there are numerous players in that cartel so to single out QF's involvement in the cartel is not really a valid point about the QF CEO doing a bad job because 1) the cartel existed for around 10 years, 2) according to the media there were around 40 players in the cartel.

The fact is that some part of management (most likely to be middle management) in all of these carriers were directly involved in the cartel activities, and unless it could be proven the CEOs and the boards of these companies knowingly allowed cartels to be created, the fact remains that they simply did not know because things never filtered through the management structure as they were not directly involved in the day to day running of the all the various business areas within the company.


I am of the firm view that the whole CEO salary argument (and this includes other companies as well like the major banks) is based more on emotion than fact and a little bit of the tall poppy syndrome. For some reason people believe CEOs aren't entitled to multi-million dollar salaries for their roles, responsibilities and decisions and still got that vision that they play golf everyday or have fun on the yacht or elite luxury cars. Just looking at Qantas alone the company had $14.9 billion dollars worth of revenue and 30000 staff. I am not saying they should be paid more or less but executive salaries need to looked at in the overall scheme of things. Some have stated there are better CEOs elsewhere but without a salary like that - how does QF expect to find and attract the best (or better) candidate for the job? And then there's the issue of whether a CEO is worth his money. Most would commend Borghetti's efforts in reshaping Virgin Blue to Virgin Australia after Godfreys and Fyfe at Air New Zealand, so I think you'd agree it's a pretty critical role in any company.

And then there are also discussions about 777-300ER and ever-decreasing international marketshare. If AJ was doing such a bad job, have we considered what his predecessor did? yes, that's right, Dixon at his time at the helm did practically nothing about it except getting the A380 (and now QF has more bums to fill on seats). What I think is encouraging to see are CEOs e.g. Borghetti and Joyce taking a longer term look and shaping the strategic directions of the business, and instead of focusing on the profits at the end of each year (which is the easier path but ultimately the path to oblivion) - looking at addressing underly issues.

[Ash W]

Well said.