Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [48]
Qantas’s Hong Kong-based Orient director, Alan Loke, and tour operations director, Ron Rosalky, both resigned and went to Ansett. Former Australian chief John Schaap also resigned. He had a history with Dixon from their time together at Australian when Schaap had come in as CEO and told Dixon he couldn’t work with him. ‘I’m not one for hanging around. John and I did a deal in about half an hour and I was in the pub by 5.30,’ Dixon said of the move that sent him to Ansett for a spell.17 Certainly Schaap did not last long when Dixon came in to Qantas. Deputy managing director Ted Radford was also moved out of his role into another job.
From the original Qantas team in place when Strong arrived, only three remained a year later, all in executive general manager positions: Rodger Robertson as head of corporate planning, Ian Riddell in information technology and Trevor Crabtree in engineering and maintenance. Another executive general manager, Ken Gilbert, executive general manager of customer and staff services, brought embarrassment to the airline when it emerged that he had awarded lucrative training contracts to consultants linked to his own private company. Two days after it became known that Gilbert had awarded the contracts he was clearing his desk and Strong had called in the auditors to overhaul the rules governing contracts for outside consultants. Bowtie-wearing Strong, who had been angered at a newspaper description of him as a Ken Doll, was quickly showing he was more of an Action Man with a tough new broom.
Previously, Strong had moved on fairly swiftly, so there was always jostling to be his successor. CEO Dixon and deputy CEO Gary Toomey emerged as the front runners, creating tension among the divided executive team. The tension was illustrated in an off-the-record recollection given to the Australian Financial Review by one of the senior management team who was staying with the executives at the InterContinental hotel at Hyde Park in London. ‘Toomey went into Geoff’s room and said, “You’ve got a bigger room than mine.” Dixon said, “Do I? It looks OK to me,” and Toomey said, “Of course it does. It’s bigger.” I had to go to the hotel management who said the rooms were exactly the same in square metres, just different shapes. But Toomey had his nose out of joint for the whole trip. And when there wasn’t a bellhop to meet him when he checked in, he bunged an act on. Geoff would never do that; he’d just go and check in, no worries.’18
While the executives bickered, the airline was locked in a battle for domestic market share with Ansett. It was frustrating Strong, who hit out at the domestic rival in 1996 for agreeing to an eight per cent pay increase for staff over two years that would become a benchmark for the Australian airline industry. ‘Here you’ve got a company that is probably losing money, agreeing to a set of wage increases that are not related to its profitability and how the company is going nor are they apparently related to how they think they’re going to fund it,’ he said at the time, before outlining the thinking that would dominate staff and union negotiations with Qantas for the next two decades. ‘I find that interesting. Unfortunately there is still too much of a sense in Australia of a comparative wage justice without looking at the welfare of the corporation that is going to be