Was it Qatar airways who took women off a flight and gave them cavity searches?
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Seriously amazing that the three other airlines youâve mentioned are also state owned and the states owning them have some ridiculously bad human rights issues. But do continue
So the options are pay more or support a government with a history of horrific human rights abuses?
Iâd just prefer my politicians to not be getting backhanders to be honest - regardless of the source of the money.
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Yep, because they were the airlines off the top of my head which flew to Europe. Vietnam do also, but they are already cheap AF so didnât include.
Iâm sure there are others - but Iâm not arguing for human rights, Iâm arguing for competition to drive costs down and service up.
I bet you donât inspect every label for every item you purchase, or what clients you work with and their ultimate parent companies and what their human rights records are - how far do you want to take this to stay on some moral high ground (which was not what was being argued at any point).
Play the ball, and donât move the goalposts mid game. Whataboutism at its finest.
While youâre not wrong, the problem is that Qantas will always 100% lose out on service, price and general competitiveness, especially when you compare it to companies like Emirates, Qatar and Singapore Airlines. The Arab companies subsidize the fuel costs and their hiring/firing policies are an absolute joke. They can very much fire a person because theyâre too oldâŠ
Throw in the fact that the state owns all the maintenance hangars etc. Youâll literally never compete. If the government was to give free range to the bigger flyers into the country, youâll very much see Qantas disappear, which leaves us with no national airline. While Iâm all for market competitiveness, the Qantas brand is pretty big internationally for it to fall easily.
Also taking into account theyâre blocked from massive overseas investment by the government.
How much profit did Qantas make in the last year?
They can afford to be more competitive, pay their staff properly and increase service levels. They choose not to.
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Yeah, Qantas would never do something like that.
Qantas ordered to pay $170,000 to three workers illegally sacked at start of pandemic | Qantas | The Guardian.
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Thatâs a fair argument. I guess, as has been pointed out before, you canât make that much money without screwing some people over.
Bridget McKenzie launches flight upgrade inquiry â into herself
Sources familiar with Senator McKenzieâs travel, but not authorised to speak to the media, claimed she received upgrades as recently as this year from Qantas that were not disclosed on her parliamentary register of interests.
Albanese at least declared his graft!
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Interesting seating positioning for Dutton thereâŠ
Ginaâs probably packing more than him anyway. 
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International Arms:
Qantas $550 million
Qatar: $2.5 billion
Emirates: $7.76 billion
Singapore: $3.14 billion
Now the three international airlines have the vast majority of their routes internationally and donât have huge domestic arms. Qantas doesnât take into account the domestic arm
Exactly, they did it, they got charged and are punished. You think Qatar or Emirates care about workers rights? Have you not noticed how most of the people working in those flights are generally very young and good looking?
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âfutilityâ was a ârelevant factor to be taken into accountâ.
Geez, hope no one ever refers to me in that manner.
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Late to the party and I absolutely do not want to relitigate this argument. But there was an episode of More Or Less recently which touched on the difficulties the UK has had with this kind of question, and I thought it might be of interest. To summariseâŠ
The UK was the first country (afaik) to ask this kind of question in the census. In England & Wales, they asked:
- What is your sex? [Female / Male] (with a note to say that a question on gender identity will follow for those over 16y)
- Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth? [Yes / No] (with the option to write in their gender identity in a text box)
They found that 0.54% (262,000 people) answered âNoâ to the second question, and hence would be classified as transgender.
However, region-specific summaries showed some weird trends, in that the regions you might expect to have higher proportions (e.g. Brighton) did not, and in particular, regions with large immigrant populations (especially Muslim) had surprisingly high rates. One striking result was that overall, 0.4% of people with English as their main language answered âNoâ to that second question, compared to 2.2% of people who did not speak English well.
These region-specific investigations were pursued by a âgender-criticalâ bloke who obviously has his own agenda. And the UK Office for National Statistics stood by their results against his criticism⊠until the Scottish census results came out. The Scots asked:
- Do you consider yourself to be trans, or have a trans history?
0.44% answered âYesâ, slightly lower than England + Wales. But notably, it was only 0.47% in people who did not speak English well, similar to that in the English-speaking population and much lower than the England result. After this, the ONS (which has its own regulator, the OSR, who reported that the ONS was âdefensiveâ in regard to this stat) downgraded their transgender statistic from âofficialâ to âexperimentalâ.
The ABS questions appear to avoid the first trap where people who donât fully understand the question might incorrectly have answered âNoâ, but maybe there is a potential issue in the opposite direction with that first question (assuming people who give constrasting sex vs gender responses will be counted as transgender) in not being as âdirectâ as the Scottish question, in particular if some languages donât easily communicate a clear distinction between sex and gender. Maybe we will see the opposite trend to the English results!
Anyway, I know the people who contributed to the consultation (disclaimer: I work with some of them) put a lot of thought into it, and no doubt they have taken the UK experience into consideration. But I guess this just highlights how tricky it can be.
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Thanks mate, very interesting, I will check out the podcast too.
Tbh I think Iâve not so much summarised it as included pretty much everything they said in the episode haha. But I would recommend the podcast in general as an incredibly straight-laced review of number-based claims in the (mostly UK-based) news, if youâre into that kind of thing.
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I am! I have had some professional experience on projects with data sorted by gender, and work with numbers often despite not being a natural stats boffin, so this is great.
So just a question on this though, with google translate now being applied openly to most webpages, wouldnât you assume that the 3 questions would be more easily answered?
I can see what youâre saying though, if the UK and Australia have both said itâs a difficult question to word, yet both countries also indicating that itâs information that needs to be added, isnât the logical step to actually ask the question and use each subsequent census to try and educate individuals in how to answer or finetune their help prompts? Itâs not like the English language is going to go through a magical change that will suddenly make it easier to ask quite complex questions. Ignoring the question because âitâs too difficultâ definitely isnât the correct way to go about it. If itâs that much of a problem, it should be up to the statisticians to understand thereâs issues with the stats rather than anything else.