Alan Joyce says he's sorry .. for what?

Open Alan Joyce’s new memoir to page 359 and you will find these words: “I am sorry.”

Interesting, right?

Because if you have a Qantas horror story, it probably dates back to the Joyce years. The ghost flights. The dreaded credits. The long queues. The time during Covid when he blamed customers for not being “match fit” when in fact he’d sacked thousands of staff so passengers couldn’t get their bags loaded.

Now Joyce has written a book about his time at the helm of Qantas and look, these things are tricky to get right. The best memoirs – Andre Agassi’s Open, for example, and Anthony ­Hopkins’s We Did OK, Kid – succeed because the authors were willing to critically examine not only their triumphs but also their failings.

Can Joyce do that?

He promises to give it a go, and so we agree to meet to discuss Riding the Jet Stream in the ­library of his apartment building in the Rocks beside Sydney Harbour. A concierge answers the buzzer and Joyce comes down in the elevator, dressed a bit like Dan Andrews in a fleece and soft shoes. It’s an ­architectural marvel, this place. The foyer is all swirly marble surfaces and the carpet goes right up the walls. We go past the indoor pool, where Joyce is learning to swim (working class kids from Dublin don’t get lessons) and past the baby grand piano, which he is learning to play, to take up seats in front of the communal bookshelves.

Here, it becomes apparent that while Joyce wants to be “open and honest” he also wants to bring a minder with him, to sit in on the interview, take notes and record the conversation.

When I ask why, Joyce says: “Maybe it’s just my background but for 20 years as a CEO, this is always the way I would have done an interview …. Have you ever interviewed a CEO?”

Yes – but also, he’s not a CEO now. He’s a private citizen.

He ponders this, and though the minder stays for the first day of the interview he’s not there on the second day. Joyce says he talked things over with his husband, Shane Lloyd, who also wondered why he felt he needed one, ­saying: “You don’t have to protect Qantas ­any more. You can just be yourself.”

You don’t have to protect Qantas any more. 

Doesn’t that hit things right on the head? Joyce makes plain in his book that he believes everything he did at Qantas, he did for Qantas. He manoeuvred the company through the global financial crisis, tense industrial disputes and Covid. He did so without any of the privileged pedigree normally associated with the top end of town, but as a young gay man from Dublin.

So, what is he sorry for?We will get to the specifics of his apology in a moment. For now, it’s important to know that he has dedicated the book not only to his ­husband but to his ­parents: Colette, who at 85 is still living in the same little cottage where she raised Alan and his three brothers; and Maurice, who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2018.

Joyce describes his parents as his “heroes”. They grew up terribly poor, his father in a home shared by 35 others, collecting discarded cigarette butts to roll into new ones, and his mother in the basement of a house shared by 40 others, collecting meals from a soup kitchen. The couple met on a “Mystery Train” to Tipperary and were married in 1965. Alan was born a year later and, because he was a breech baby, the doctor deliberately broke his mother’s pelvic joint to get him out. This was considered “more natural” than a caesarian in Catholic Ireland, and Alan’s account of the injury she suffered as a result – and of the nuns trying to get her to walk on the break – is harrowing.

The family remained skint during most of Alan’s childhood, with his “Mam” working as a cleaning lady and his Dad in a range of jobs in a chemical factory, a cigarette factory and a garage. Alan’s first bath was in an iron tub out the back of a council house. Eventually his parents got a mortgage, and began stressing the importance of education, doing all they could to keep their sons in school.

Joyce says he was generally a happy kid but “carried a secret that felt like it was burning through me … I knew I was gay from the age of 13, but being gay in Ireland in those days was dangerous. In class, homosexuality was described as a deviation.”

Unable to hold it in, he decided to tell his Dad first. “For a few moments, he made no ­response,” he writes. “Then, he stood up and gave me a hug. A little later, he told Mum.”

Alan’s brother Anthony, to whom he remains close, remembers “being brought into a room so we could be told. I thought it was very brave … I mean, looking back, I felt, oh my God … you heard stories of people being beaten up. But our parents loved us very much, and for them it was, ‘You’re gay, no big deal’.”

Joyce says the arrival of fee-support for poor kids enabled him to become the first in his ­family to attend university. His interests were always maths and physics. Upon graduating from Trinity College in Dublin with a masters in Management Science he spotted an ad in The Irish Times for an operations research analyst at Ireland’s ­national airline, Aer Lingus.

Thinking that sounded like a match made in heaven, he went out and purchased his first shiny grey polyester suit for the interview.

“I thought I looked like James Bond,” he writes. He didn’t, but he did get the job, and so began his career in aviation.

For the record, he was yet to fly in a plane. And here’s another fun fact: Joyce knew so little about flying when he started at Aer Lingus in 1988 that he mistook a reference to the “Mile High Club” for a special tier of the frequent flyer program. His boss had to wise him up. (He is not himself a member; I asked, and he seemed shocked by the suggestion.)

Joyce stayed at Aer Lingus until 1996, when he was approached by head-hunters about a role in Australia with Ansett. He took it mainly because he thought he’d be able to live as a gay man more openly than he could in Ireland. He had to buy a whole new wardrobe – that first summer, in Melbourne, was brutal – but he says the biggest cultural ­adjustment was getting used to “the endless slagging I received for my Irish accent”. Colleagues were constantly trying to get him to say “thirty-three and a third”, which comes out as “turty-tree and a turd” in the Dublin brogue. Why? Because they were Australian. So of course they did.

Less than a year after arriving in Australia he met Shane, then a teller at the Commonwealth Bank, at a bar in South Yarra. He writes about their meeting, adding: “A few dates later, Shane’s toothbrush appeared in my bathroom, then a drawer was claimed, and suddenly I had a live-in boyfriend.”

They have been together ever since.

Shane says Joyce was vibrant and handsome but mainly “we seemed to complement each other. Alan has drawn me out as a person. I was always shy. I would never be able to have this conversation with you [this is the first interview he’s ever given] ­because I struggle having conversations with people I don’t know, but Alan has sort of encouraged me, pushed me outside my comfort zone. But then conversely, I think I have a calming effect on Alan, so if Alan’s getting a bit worked up I’m able to just say, ‘Oh, it’s OK’, and sort of diffuse the situation a little bit.”

Joyce’s first leadership role came when he was appointed founding CEO of the low-cost carrier Jetstar in 2003. The idea was to “open the skies”. The first flights between Sydney and Melbourne were a gimmicky $29, and customers raced to grab them. Joyce chuckles as he ­remembers the time a couple, unsure about how seating worked on planes, put their baby in an overhead compartment. Flight stewards quickly opened it to find the infant up there, “no crying, no fuss. Just chilling in the locker”.

You can sense his pride at having been able to ­extend air travel to those who’d never ­experienced it. He was once one of those ­people.

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Five years after launching Jetstar, Joyce was handed the keys to Qantas. He was just 42. He quickly formed the view that the place was fat like a suckling pig, and the cost-cutting began almost immediately. Unions ­naturally resisted. In October 2011 Joyce ­demonstrated how far he was prepared to go with his program, grounding the entire Qantas fleet – interrupting the travel plans of 68,000 people – rather than ­capitulate during an ­industrial dispute.

He writes: “I rang Transport Minister Anthony Albanese and told him … He was furious and tried to persuade me to change my mind, but it was too late.”

Joyce’s brother Anthony says: “Five minutes before he did it I actually rang him for a chat, and he said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Anthony, I just have to do something’ and so I stuck the TV on and suddenly I saw Alan walking on stage, and then he grounded the airline, like, an amazing thing to do. And people have said to me, he must have balls of steel … he became a hero to management across the aviation world, because airlines can fail easily, and I think the unions were going to destroy Qantas if he didn’t do it.”

Airlines can indeed be a fragile business. Pan Am went under, as did Ansett. Maybe Joyce really believed that Qantas was at risk, although it was profitable at the time of the grounding. His decision to lead with a steel-capped boot was an unexpected move, particularly for a man who comes from a strong union family and had voted Labor all his life. Joyce says it was a bit of a “frog in a pot” situation: he had slowly moved from the kind of person who always supported unions “to ­recognising that not everything’s in the same category”.

John Gissing, who was CEO of QantasLink until his retirement in 2023, says he and Joyce “worked closely for more than 20 years, and his view – our view – was always: we were short-term custodians of an iconic airline, the longest continuously operating airline in the history of the world. We were responsible for its survival and there were a lot of tough decisions that had to be made. You can always kick the can down the road. We never did that”.

In his book, Joyce argues that Qantas employees were at the time of the grounding “among the best-paid in the global aviation industry”, with A380 captains on “annual earnings just shy of $400,000”.

Which may well be right. But pilots are ­highly skilled. They fly the planes. And when things go wrong, they save the day.

One example: the disaster that befell QF32 on November 4, 2010, when a Rolls-Royce ­engine on an A380 with 469 people aboard ­exploded shortly after take-off in Singapore.

“Passengers on the left side saw it first – a flash of white,” writes Joyce in his account of the incident. “Then the sound arrived: boom, boom – two concussive blasts that shook the airframe. Inside the cabin, coffee sloshed, conversation froze … Black smoke and debris streamed from the wing, whipping past windows in jagged flashes.”

The Qantas Operations Centre in Sydney lit up with warnings. Bits of the plane began falling to the ground, with one piece smashing through the roof of a primary school on Indonesia’s Batam Island, landing centimetres from a five-year-old boy seated at his desk.

Joyce says he was given no opportunity to speak to the captain, Richard de Crespigny, who kept the plane airborne for nearly two hours while the damage was assessed. Joyce had to wait like everyone else for him to finally execute a safe emergency landing. The crew were astonishing under pressure, and everyone survived.

These were the people Joyce now wanted to hammer in an industrial dispute?

Joyce says the grounding was necessary because union demands would have crippled Qantas. Courts ruled in his favour. Wages were capped and profits soared, which sent the ­Qantas share price – and Joyce’s own salary – into the stratosphere. In time, he’d become one of the highest paid people in the land.

Joyce does not mention in his book how much he received in salary and benefits while he was at Qantas, but the figure is well known: $125 million. In all the talk about wages, why not put his own in there?

He says he didn’t deliberately leave the ­figure out of his book. He’s quite happy to say he was “very well remunerated for what I did. I recognised that”. Besides, he says, that’s just the way the system works: “We are in a capitalist society … I’m not here to defend capitalism, but that’s the society we’re in. We are in a position where people are rewarded for creating ­shareholder value … We’ve tried communism in certain countries. It didn’t work.”

He also makes this very reasonable point: “It was all approved by shareholders.”

Customers? They just had to suck up the changes that came with radical cost-cutting. You don’t have to go far to find those with a story about how cold and mean the airline became under Joyce. Let’s say your team had made the footy finals and you wanted to go; Qantas would happily gouge you on the fare. Let’s say you dread having the middle seat because you’re 2m tall; Qantas will be pleased to charge you to choose another. Let’s say you’ve built up a fine points balance; good luck finding a flight. With the benefit of hindsight, would Joyce have put customers before the shareholders more often? “Well, that’s good that you’ve raised that, ­because I talk [in the book] about the money that we put into customers over the time I was there,” he says. “We spent billions of dollars buying new aircraft. We spent hundreds of ­millions on revamping every aircraft and the lounges …”

This may well be true, but did the average customer really want freshly made tacos in the Qantas Lounge at LAX? Or did they just want the occasional show of kindness, maybe even some flexibility, from the airline they had long considered their own? It’s not like they always have a choice, especially when it comes to ­domestic flights, and it’s not like Qantas doesn’t actively lobby politicians to make sure competition stays limited.

Which brings us to young Nathan Albanese. Shortly before Joyce’s time at Qantas came to an end, a story by journalist Joe Aston broke across the land: the Prime Minister’s son, who was then fresh out of university, had somehow gained membership of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge. You can’t buy your way into this ­exclusive club, which is meant to be for captains of industry, political leaders, celebrities and the like. It’s invitation only. In Joyce’s own words, it’s “elite”, which is why, he says, some people have been known to embarrass themselves and “beg” for membership.

Yet Nathan was a member? If such a thing happened in any other country – if a private company doing business with the government handed a literally priceless perk to a member of the Supreme Leader’s family – we’d call it ­corruption. Joyce says he didn’t address this scandal in the book because “I have a bit of a problem … I’ve never confirmed who’s in, or the membership of the Chairman’s Lounge.”

This is not quite true. He lists some members in his book: “All federal politicians, most state politicians, high court and federal judges, editors of national newspapers, a few journalists, and high-profile celebrities … on top of that, the rough rule of thumb is that if your company gave Qantas around $1 million in annual revenue, you’d likely receive a Chairman’s Lounge membership.”

He is happy to refute suggestions that he ever personally upgraded the Prime Minister to business or first class, saying: “Claims were aired that I’d personally upgraded the Prime Minister’s flights. My first thought was, ‘That’s news to me.’ To be certain, I rang Jenny [his ­former personal assistant] and asked her: ‘Did I ever instruct you to arrange an upgrade for the Prime Minister?’ ‘No,’ she said, adding that I ­always signed a form, and I’m assured there’s no record of me authorising an upgrade for the Prime Minister.”

But upgrading Nathan to the Chairman’s Lounge? “I think it’s up to the Prime Minister to speak about that,” he says.

Joyce completely rejects the idea that “granting someone access [to the Lounge] could influence decisions of national importance. If that were true, Qantas would never have lost a case in the High Court or Federal Court – yet we did.”

They most certainly did. More on that in a moment.

Joyce defends his determination to see off competitors – mainly Qatar Airways, which wanted to add more flights in 2023 – and he ­recounts some of the health and human rights campaigns he championed while at the helm of Qantas. He supported the Voice campaign, and prostate cancer testing (he endured a brush with prostate cancer early in his tenure, and does not shy away from the effect on his bladder, or his erections, so brace yourself for that). He fought particularly hard for same-sex marriage, saying it was about “the simple right to love and be loved”. He was dismayed when The Australian published a Bill Leak cartoon depicting gay rights activists as goose-stepping Nazi soldiers. He promptly made the largest single donation to the cause, and Shane went to work full-time on the campaign.

Some of Joyce’s friends expected him to ask for Shane’s hand after same-sex marriage ­became legal, but it was actually Shane who proposed. “I hesitated for dramatic effect,” Joyce writes in his book. “Then I said yes.” They tied the knot at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2019.

By this point, Joyce was getting ready to leave Qantas. He was wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of a little Dublin boy, and the company share price was in great shape, having jumped nearly 650 per cent during his tenure. He thought to himself: “I’ll host a fun party in a hangar to mark the airline’s 100th birthday in November 2020, and then I’ll ­skedaddle.”

Good to know where the journey ends, right? And then, out of a clear blue sky, came the Covid pandemic.Joyce says the Qantas board, specifically chairman Richard Goyder, asked him to manoeuvre the company through the crisis. He doesn’t regret his decision – he believes he helped save the airline – but he does say that he’d be telling “absolutely a different story” if he had gone in 2019.

“One of my biggest regrets is how we handled coming out of Covid, because we got it badly wrong,” he says. “Covid was not great. It was terrible.”

Too right it was, and here is where Joyce’s entertaining memoir begins to falter and, ultimately, to fail. There are pages devoted to the business decisions that Joyce made during the pandemic – “the ones I got right and the ones I got wrong” – but no serious attempt to analyse the underlying problem.

For years, Joyce had been making ethical and moral calculations to keep himself at the Qantas trough. His instincts – to gouge the ­customer and gore the workforce – had served him well. In Covid, he gave these same instincts full rein, and there was no pushback. The board was drunk in love with him, and why wouldn’t they be? Among other things, their perks – free first class flights anywhere in the world, not only for them but for the wife and the adult kids, and so on – were delicious.

Joyce forcefully defends his decision-making during Covid, saying he was desperate to stave off bankruptcy, prepared to sell even the A380 bar carts if that was what it took to keep Qantas solvent. At the same time, there is no question he took advantage of the pandemic to further gut the joint.

In August 2020, Qantas announced it was going to outsource ground handling operations – the workers who clean the aircraft ­between flights, load luggage and so on – which involved sacking around 1800 people.

“I firmly believe it is essential for the airline’s long-term survival,” Joyce said at the time.

Or else, you can just hack your way to glory.

In his book, Joyce seems awfully keen to stress that this particular decision – sacking those staff, which was arguably the worst of all decisions during Covid – wasn’t actually his.

“In August 2020, Andrew David, CEO of Qantas Domestic and International, made the decision to outsource ground handling operations at 10 major Australian airports,” he writes. A few lines on, he adds: “This decision was ­Andrew David’s alone.” In case you missed that, he also says: “People often ask why I didn’t personally make the ­decision to outsource ground handling …” Do they really?

In person, Joyce agrees that as CEO “the buck stops with me”, but also: “It was discussed at board level, anyone could have objected. ­Nobody did.” If you’re imagining a man standing there with his fingers pointing in any direction other than toward himself, you’ve got it.

Michael Kaine, national secretary of the Transport Workers Union (TWU), doesn’t buy it. “The 1820 people he sacked – dozens of them from the same families – all had reasonable terms and conditions, and they all loved working there, and [Joyce] was dedicated to unpicking that, to renegotiating their terms and conditions downward. During Covid he ramped that up. He thought, ‘This is our chance to get rid of that workforce, and we just need to say we have to do it, and if we don’t do it there is a risk the company will collapse’. We tried to reason with them, and they took a litigious approach. And they lost. The unlawful sacking cost the company around $210 million – $90 million in fines, and $120 million in compensation – and that is all on Joyce. I can understand why he wants to recast his time there, but the objective evidence is that he was arrogant in his approach, and ruthless when it came to ­people. Not just workers. Also customers.”

There is some truth to this: as soon as the skies opened after Covid, Qantas began jacking fare prices to eye-watering levels. Remember that line from the beautiful old Qantas ad: “One day we’ll all be together once more”? Maybe so, but they were certainly going to slug you for it. Flights from Sydney to Melbourne were advertised at $700 one way. Business class to New York would set you back $25,000. It was pretty much impossible to use your points, you couldn’t get refunds on tickets you hadn’t used during Covid, and because all the ground staff had been stood down the lines at security were snaking out the doors.

Social media quickly came up with a term for what was happening to customers: they were “getting Joyced”.

But who did Joyce blame for the chaos? You. The passenger. And, on page 349 of his book, this is what he explicitly says he’s sorry for.

“I stirred up a storm by saying, ‘Our customers are not match fit’,” he writes. “That remark was insensitive and stupid … I am sorry.”

The unwise decisions kept coming: in June 2023 Joyce sold Qantas shares worth about $17 million and put the money in his pocket. Just weeks later, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission launched an investigation into the so-called “ghost flights” (apparently Qantas had been selling tickets for flights that had already been cancelled during the pandemic). Joyce says selling those shares “is one of the decisions that, in hindsight, I would change”, adding: “I would change what we did on flight credits. I would change what we did on the ghost flights. I wouldn’t have sold shares when I sold them. But this is with hindsight, and you don’t have hindsight when you’re making those calls,” he says.

Joyce was still a few months from his official retirement date when he got a call from Richard Goyder. “Almost out of nowhere, he asked if I’d thought about leaving early,” he writes.

“The question caught me off guard. I hadn’t considered it – not seriously – since three years earlier, when Richard had asked me to stay on, to see Qantas through that pandemic crisis.

“In my heart, I didn’t want to quit.”

Joyce’s brother Anthony says: “The board asked him to stay because they needed someone experienced at the helm through Covid … and my own personal opinion is he really got stabbed in the back. He rang me and said, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘Just go. I mean, it’s not worth it. Just go’.”

Joyce brought forward his retirement as CEO by two months; Qantas docked almost $10 million from his final pay packet. He got Joyced, in other words. And the nation, it must be said, rejoiced.

Reflecting on this time, the ever-patient Shane says he agreed that it was time for his husband to leave. You can see why: here is a man who once had to have a romantic river-boat dinner alone, with Alan’s face opposite him on a phone screen, after yet another long-planned escape got scuppered by some Qantas crisis or another. But he is still very proud of all his ­husband achieved. He says people they meet often tell Joyce “how they think he did a fantastic job and appreciate the fact that Qantas is still operating in Australia after everything it’s gone through.”

Peter Harbison, who co-wrote the first book on Joyce’s tenure, Alan Joyce and Qantas: the Trials and Transformation of an Australian Icon, agrees, concluding in his book that Joyce did his best to make the airline “bullet proof, profitable … he set Qantas up for the future”.

It’s certainly true that Qantas has never been more profitable, and the share price, at time of writing, has never been higher.

Joe Aston, who wrote The Chairman’s Lounge: The Inside Story of How Qantas Sold Us Out, isn’t quite as generous in his appraisal of the Joyce years. In a report for the Australian Financial Review in 2023, he said that the “idea that Qantas was ever facing liquidation is sheer make-believe” and that Joyce “mastered the art of gaslighting the nation” by pretending that it could fail, while lining his own pocket. He added: “He punches down at Qantas customers and he punches down at Australian taxpayers.”

Joyce doesn’t mention Aston’s name in his book, although he does get a mention in the index, with Joyce relying on Aston’s reporting for a gossipy item about a blow-up with a newspaper columnist at one of Lachlan Murdoch’s annual Christmas parties.

So, The Chairman’s Lounge. Has he read it?

“I haven’t.”

Why not?

“Because I haven’t. Because I’ve given my story …”

You’re not curious?

“I’m not … I know Joe has written a lot of ­articles, and I know in my mind a lot haven’t been right, and I think the better way is to give people the choice to read two different ­versions,” he says, carefully.

Aston’s book sold 60,000 copies, an extraordinarily high number for a nonfiction book in Australia, and it won Nonfiction Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards.

Is there a market for Joyce’s memoir? Business leaders will probably find it interesting. Union leaders may pick it up, with gloves on. Passengers? It’s hard to know how they feel about Qantas these days. It was once ­Australia’s favourite company. To see the tail poking up among all the other national carriers was to experience a real sense of pride. Now it’s just an airline. A safe, profitable airline – which is no small thing, and maybe that’s all anyone wants. Who says it has to “feel like home” to you?

As for the employees, Qantas today is completely atomised, with thousands of people on short-term contracts with no real security and no sense of ownership. They used to be a family. Now they just go to work.

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First published in The Weekend Australian Magazine, 23 July 2026