On Monday 28 October, arguably the most highly anticipated book of the year for the travel industry, and perhaps the Australian business sector in general, hit shelves.
In it, potentially the final, defining round of the business battle of the last 10 years. In the blue corner, former Australian Financial Review Rear Window columnist, Joe Aston. In the red corner, former Qantas CEO, Alan Joyce.
Not that many people would have been able to nab front row seats. Copies of Aston’s The Chairman’s Lounge expose of the Joyce/Qantas era seemed to sell out even before dropping onto shelves.
No matter where in Sydney you looked, a physical copy of the book was as rare a sighting as seeing Joyce himself these days.
While publishers may purposely seed only a limited number of copies into stores on launch day to create the illusion of a big seller, it was not surprising that the book was hugely popular.
By the end of the day, there was one man lying barely conscious on the floor. Curiously though, it was neither Joyce nor Aston, who by all accounts had relatively quiet days on the media front.
We’ll come to who and how a little later on.
Too long in the hot seat?
The Joyce/Aston rivalry has been cooking for a long time. As Joyce rose in stature as CEO of Qantas, Aston rose in stature as an influential columnist in one of the most prestigious mastheads in Australia, The Australian Financial Review.
Neither could be ignored in business circles and for years leading up to the book launch, Aston had an eagle eye on the movements and actions of Joyce, calling into question much of what he did.
It had been a significant build up to the book’s launch. Let’s not forget that in signing off from Rear Window, the column that established Aston as one of the most fearless business commentators, he continued to have Joyce in the cross-hairs.
Joyce was the first executive to get a mention in Aston’s farewell column: “And frankly, who wouldn’t want to laugh at Alan Joyce, the man with the enchanted spectacles?”.
For this accolade, Joyce beat out competition like Andrew Forrest, Gerry Harvey, Mike Canon-Brookes and more. It was an indication of just how important the Qantas commentary was to the success of the Rear Window column.
The Rear Window farewell tour also involved a spot on 2GB with Ben Fordham in Sydney, where Aston was described as “one of Australia’s most feared business columnists” by the radio host, before being asked why Qantas and Joyce got it so wrong.
“I don’t know why the whole company got it wrong,” he told Fordham. “I think it was because they were in the thrall of Alan Joyce, and the reason Alan Joyce, I think, got it wrong, was because he had been there too long and it had been absolutely years since anyone had said to him ‘mate you’re getting this wrong’ – after that long in charge you are surrounded by sycophants and there is a positive feedback loop”.
Interestingly, it would be easy enough to suggest something similar of Aston and his time at the AFR. His ability to disseminate the thickest of information quickly, write it in prose that was not only informative but entertaining, and his fearlessness in going after some of the biggest names in Australian business earned him an almost sacred reputation, one that seemed potentially untouchable.
Would it have been in the best interests for an editor to try to control that, if you know you have the eyes and ears of the majority of Australia’s business community reading the column?
One of Aston’s former editors, Sean Aylmer, writing for my old haunt Mumbrella, said, “Joe has arguably been the best business gossip columnist in Australia. Ever. Period. But that doesn’t come without angst.
“Joe sailed close to the wind, particularly around defamation. The lawyers at what was Fairfax, now Nine, would regularly fear that he’d gone too far. Legal costs and payouts show that sometimes he overstepped.
“Aston wasn’t always a team player. His column ran on the back page of the AFR, and anyone else writing on that page – the Chanticleer column, other Rear Window writers – had to be ready to add a few hundred words if Joe’s column didn’t turn up. ‘Friends’ were fair game. He could take apart someone in his column and then lunch with them the next day – he was that powerful (among some) in the business community.”
It doesn’t sound dissimilar to the situation Aston suggests Joyce was in. Aston was, and still is, a big deal in business and a bigger deal in journalism. Not bad for someone who started out in public relations – it’s a rarity that media professionals travel from PR to journalism and even rarer that they do it with such success.
Battling back with big punches
Joyce had given as good as he got, though, in the long-fought battle with his former staff member (Aston had, once upon a time, been a communications exec for the national carrier, even revealing that he used to deliver the morning media clippings directly to Joyce at the beginning of his tenure as CEO).
In 2014, in a public strike against the AFR and reporting by Adele Ferguson, Qantas pulled advertising from the masthead. And thanks to the efforts of Aston, it was a move that Joyce and the team at Qantas wasn’t afraid to make again when in 2023, it “pulled The Australian Financial Review from its lounges and from digital distribution following critical coverage of chief executive Alan Joyce from the masthead’s Rear Window column.”
Ironically, that may have been a step too far in the battle as even staunch competitor to Nine (publisher of the AFR), News Corp, came to its defence in the form of local boss Michael Miller.
“This is pretty pointed: ‘We don’t like what you’re saying so therefore we won’t have a commercial relationship,’” Miller said in a statement. “I don’t have a view on what Joe [Aston] says, but I’ll defend his right to say it.
“As someone who people attempt to intimidate when they don’t like coverage, I take exception to the pressure put on journalists and the media to stifle free speech,” he added.
So with that in the background, among many other bruising rounds, it was almost a given that this potential final round would be an absolute cracker.
Albo to the rescue
It seemed that Alan Joyce thought this would be the case as well. Prior to the launch of Aston’s book, it was reported that he had brought in not one but two big guns of the PR world to be ready for action in the event of any fallout.
There was also his appearance on AIG’s Our Future Skies podcast last week which was seen by some as a defensive measure to remind people of just how many good things he had done for Qantas.
If that was the aim, it was a rather muted attempt, as the major plotline from the podcast wasn’t so much that Qantas and Australia should be thankful for the impact that Joyce had on the national carrier, but that it had almost shuttered its international division, and also looked at opportunities to merge with British Airways and Malaysia Airlines.
The Flying Wau Bulan just doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
Apparently QF was literally burning $50m per annum on the Sydney to Frankfurt flights alone, but that’s quite literally another story.
Despite the buildup, and Joyce getting some defensive players into position for the launch of the book, it became increasingly obvious that he wouldn’t be the lamb out for slaughter.
The Chairman’s Lounge is not a pro-Joyce book, in fact, it is very much the opposite, as expected, but of all the revelations that surfaced, including some via excerpts published by the AFR, it was Prime Minister Anthony Albanese who took the brunt of the fallout.
In the book, Aston revealed that the Qantas flight upgrades he received, although declared, were organised directly between the politician and the former Qantas boss.
“According to Qantas insiders, Albanese would liaise with Joyce directly about his personal travel,” Aston wrote.
The Coalition, of course, demanded answers. Albanese came to his own defence. Every commentator under the sun who had anything to do with aviation or reputation got in front of the media to share their two or more cents.
Geoffrey Watson, a director of the Centre for Public Integrity, told News.com.au, “Part of the problem is it’s not sufficient to make a disclosure on the register. Why do you think Qantas use these upgrades? What are they trying to do?
“I’m surprised and disappointed that politicians and powerful people allow them to be manipulated by such an obvious tactic. How naive are they, and who reaps the benefit of it?”
Liberal frontbencher Bridget McKenzie stuck the boot in proper: “The problem is that I don’t know of another transport minister who had a hotline to the CEO of Qantas to request freebies for family holidays,” she said, referring to when Albanese was Minister for Infrastructure and Transport.
On Tuesday afternoon The Australian ran this story: PM potentially was in breach of ministerial code over Qantas upgrades. As one of my colleagues quipped to me, “Imagine if this book brought down a PM!”. It’s unlikely, but it certainly seems to have done more damage to Albanese at the moment than Joyce.
The aforementioned Aylmer, in his Fear & Greed weekly newsletter summed it up well: “I don’t care that he and other politicians are allowed to be part of the exclusive Chairman’s Lounge at Qantas. I do care if he made a phone call to Joyce and asked for an upgrade.”
Two days after launch, Albanese is still in the headlines for his QF upgrades. But there is little mention of Joyce or Aston. As for Qantas itself, its share price hit another record high – it’s at $8.13 as this is written.
End of the war?
Since leaving Qantas, Joyce has laid relatively low. And outside of The Chairman’s Lounge, Aston has also laid relatively low.
The book fires some pretty big missiles for those interested. Aston takes aim at the Covid refunds and credits, murky underlying profit figures, using Covid to increase structural profit, claims of being close to bankruptcy, and much, much, more.
It’s 13 hours of fairly consistent fire if you listen to the audio version.
Is the book worth reading? Absolutely it is.
Will it change how Alan Joyce is looked upon? Unlikely. If you disliked him before, you would probably continue to dislike him. If you heralded him as a business hero, nothing Aston says here is likely to change your mind, particularly as it is penned by someone who has a history of taking Joyce to task.
Is the war over? In the book, Aston writes that had Joyce retired in 2019 instead of extending his contract, he would have left a hero and now been a chair or at least a board member of other high-profile companies. Despite Aston’s assertion, stranger things than Joyce resurfacing in Australian business have happened.
For Aston’s part, he’s likely to surface somewhere. As much as journalists wish this was the case, even previously being the most well-read business columnist in Australia and having penned what will likely be a bestseller it isn’t a ticket to seriously early retirement and riches.
In an interview with ausbiz yesterday, Aston told Nadine Blayney, “I love journalism, it’s like heroin, and I am discovering that having just put out a big piece of journalism, but I don’t know what that [the future] looks like, I’m not trying to be coy or anything, I’m literally at the point of starting to figure that out.”
There is every chance this is just a ceasefire rather than the end of a fascinating war. If there is a true victim, it’s more likely to be the Prime Minister than either Alan Joyce or Joe Aston.
