Let’s call it a day: January 26 is not for celebrating

Simon Storey writes: Re “Dutton’s parting gift: Conservative Australia Day outrage, a Christmas tradition”: I was once firmly in the “change the date” camp until I began thinking more about our penchant to forget in this wide brown land.

Australia Day needs to stay because we can all rally on the streets and highlight the extreme disadvantage and racism that First Nations peoples have to put up with, thereby keeping up the pressure for real change. We can banish it with glee when there is true equality for First Nations peoples — when they are not overrepresented in jails; when they have equal access to education and health; and when all our children are taught the factual history of this country, i.e. it is founded on rape, murder and dispossession.

Hmm. Australia Day could be with us for a long time yet…

Jean John writes: Nobody minds having an Australia Day. Most countries feel the need to have one, and everyone enjoys a day off work and an excuse for a barbie. But why January 26? In the 65,000-year history of our continent, why settle on the day only 239 years ago when the Brits invaded and grabbed the land for the British Crown?

Surely we have better days to celebrate. Days that don’t remind Indigenous peoples of their dispossession or remind the rest of us of our guilt over the actions of our predecessors. How about Federation Day or, better still, the day all Australians, including women and Indigenous peoples, finally became full citizens entitled to vote?

John Peel writes: Why waste breath boycotting Australia Day? For most people it’s a happy opportunity to celebrate being Australian. For a few bigots it’s a chance to raise the middle finger at First Nations peoples and at anyone who would prefer not to join in celebrating. So perhaps it should also be called Survival Day — survival of the diseases, massacres and dispossession that made today’s Australia possible.

John Courcier writes: An anachronism and an insult. White-bred (!) Australians gaze with misty eyes at the 1950s of the women tied to the kitchen and the blokes down the pub after a hard day’s work.

Flying blind

Frank Aquino writes: Re “Qantas offers litany of lies in a flight from reality on regulation”: I no longer choose Qantas to fly domestically except where the monopoly forces me to. Rather like root canal treatment — unpleasant but unavoidable. All other flights are Virgin except where possible Air North, a genuinely nice airline.

And what kind of cockamamie government puts airports in the hands of private enterprise? And seaports? And telecommunications? And electric power? And water? And roads? I mean seriously, roads? These facilities are progress enablers and should not be profit centres. Why doesn’t anyone get that?

Dr Ian Douglas writes: It is worrying but not surprising that Qantas opposes formalising specific consumer protection for airline customers. On-time performance (OTP) data for November shows the top 10 carriers in Asia-Pacific at 81% on time, with only Air New Zealand cancelling more than 1% of its flights. North America OTP was 82% with less than 1% cancelled. Europe OTP was 84% with less than half of 1% of flights cancelled.

The Australian domestic Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics (BITRE) reporting for October shows OTP for Qantas in the mid-60s, cancellations around 4%, and the Australian carriers cancelling one in 10 flights between Melbourne and Sydney — a route largely served by the Qantas Group and Virgin Australia.

If Qantas was matching the OTP and cancellation rate of its peers in Asia, Europe and North America, it would have little exposure to compensation claims from passengers.

Glen Davis writes: Qantas continues to get it very wrong. The lame duck chairman slammed the door on shareholder questions at the annual meeting after presiding over the outrageous golden handshake to the departed CEO. And he had presided over the selection of a new CEO who it was evident to all was wholly unsuited to the brand emergency that Qantas continues to deepen.

Corporate boards across the country observe the Qantas blunders with horror and something approaching disbelief. “What should we do to avoid five years of self-immolation?” The Commonwealth Bank recently recoiled when I described it as “the Qantas of the banking industry”. It was true, but it was shocked to read the words in print.

Qantas is a corporate plane crash in slow motion, tail first. Passengers, customers and shareholders were the first hurt and we are moments away from total loss.

Malcolm Spry writes: There is a simple fix here. To greatly improve competition in the airline industry Qantas should be made to sell Jetstar immediately. We would then have three viable domestic airlines, which would ensure lower fares and higher service levels.