Do we like Qantas?
Australia's flag-carrier airline (Qantas, Jetstar, Qantas Freight), based in Sydney, Australia.
Our score: 4 out of 10. Not yet. Record court fines for sacking workers and misleading customers are recent. The new management is trying to fix things, but trust is still being rebuilt.
Qantas is the national airline, and it spent years as the country's favourite. Then it hit a bad run. Its board's own governance review noted a lack of board focus on non-financial issues, employees and customers. Long-time boss Alan Joyce left early, and insider Vanessa Hudson took over in 2023.
The ugliest scandal was in 2020. Qantas outsourced its ground handling and sacked 1,820 people. The Federal Court and then the High Court found this was illegal. In August 2025 Justice Michael Lee fined Qantas $90m, the biggest industrial-relations penalty in Australian history. He also said he was left with a sense of disquiet about what happened at the top.
Customers got burned too. The ACCC said Qantas kept selling seats on flights it had already cancelled, and Qantas admitted it misled customers. It paid a $100m penalty plus about $20m to affected passengers. The ACCC called the conduct egregious and unacceptable. Qantas says it has since overhauled the booking system.
Then came a 2025 cyber-attack. A caller posing as IT support tricked an offshore call-centre worker, and about 5.7 million customer records were taken. Passport and card details weren't stored on that system. In July 2026 the privacy regulator said it didn't think privacy law had been breached. On 2 November 2026 Qantas said a separate breach at travel-tech supplier Amadeus may have involved its customers' data, but not its own systems.
So would we put money in? We give it a 4. The new team has changed a lot and has been handling the fallout better. But the biggest penalties are very recent, and the court said the worker sackings were deliberate. The TWU also notified a work stoppage for 28 October 2026. We'd want a longer clean record first.