Seasoned air travellers are familiar with the sight of a swarm of masked and gloved cleaners waiting to rush on board as soon as they have disembarked to rapidly get rid of all the litter and mess left behind by one horde and have the place looking shiny new for the next.

It will take more than a crack team of airline cleaners, however, to get rid of the acrid stench of a scorched reputation left behind by departing Qantas CEO Alan Joyce. What was once Australia’s pride and joy, the Flying Kangaroo, is on the nose.

So here’s a few handy cleaning tips for the new hands behind the joystick:

Start by scrapping the asinine Welcome to Country announcements that blight every take-off and landing. Not only are they meaningless – passengers landing at Brisbane, for instance, are landing on reclaimed land – but they are tiresomely offensive. The majority of Qantas passengers are Australian citizens who pay their taxes and own or rent property under Australian sovereign law. In the case of fancy airport terminals and runways, these belong to the taxpayer or to the shareholders of corporations and nobody else. Australian taxpayers do not need to be welcomed onto land they already own, and facilities they pay handsomely for, whenever they touch down or take off.

And they certainly do not need to be repeatedly bludgeoned in some quasi-spiritual fashion by lauding abstract persons who may or may not exist.

Landing at Heathrow, are passengers welcomed to the lands of the Catuvellauni and Trinovante tribes of ancient Britain? Landing at Rome-Fiumicino, do hostesses pay their respects to Praetors past, present and emerging? The idea is risible.

The politicisation of Qantas by Alan Joyce et al. must be immediately reversed if the brand is to be restored to its former glory. By definition, politics are polarising – our democratic system is designed to not only tolerate but actually thrive on robust adversarial debate. For every man or woman or whatever in-between who rejoices in Alan Joyce’s virtue-signalling politics, there is another paying customer who is appalled by having politics they disagree with rammed down their throat. Qantas is not the only company jumping on political bandwagons – this disease has taken hold throughout the boardrooms of the West – but it is one of the most visible. During the same-sex marriage debate, Qantas under Mr Joyce took a prominent stance. During Covid, the airline disgracefully and shamefully imposed vaccine mandates on its employees that saw many pilots and others who had dedicated their lives to the airline tossed aside like soggy leftover airline sandwiches.

Yet at the same time as preaching its superior morality from the pulpit – sorry, the cockpit – this unctuous airline stands accused of diddling its customers, allegedly selling seats on flights that had already been cancelled. Whether this occurred due to laziness, greed, incompetence or accident is immaterial. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is seeking to hit Qantas with $250 million in fines. A slew of other allegations of poor behaviour is also now surfacing.

There will be many, many Australians who will look back on events that occurred where perhaps they missed a funeral, or an important family occasion, or a crucial business meeting, or who were simply inconvenienced, and who will view these allegations with seething anger. And they will not forget.

Then we get to the current support for the Yes campaign for an indigenous Voice to parliament, where Qantas’s advocacy coincides with a major rival airline, Qatar, being denied access to our aviation market and – also a sheer coincidence, obviously – the Prime Minister’s young son being gifted membership of the elitist Qantas Chairman’s lounge.

As Qantas enjoys record profits and Mr Joyce bails out with a glittering multimillion-dollar parachute, Mr Albanese’s popularity plummets. Labor’s free-falling PM will surely rue the day he risked hopping on board the flying roo.

Whispering hack

The chorus of John Farnham’s newly-politicised song ‘You’re the Voice’ implores the listener to ‘try and understand it’. To which most Australians, including indigenous Aussies, might reply, ‘If only I could!’ Stealth and deception have been the hallmarks of the Yes campaign, and cynically using a sentimental hit song to sell the racist Voice is simply more of that same condescending obfuscation. Mr Farnham will deservedly lose many more fans than he gains.