PRESS RELEASE: Andy Schmulow’s submission to Senate: Qantas is lying — compensation for flight delays works
ACP NSW Senate candidate Associate Professor Andy Schmulow was asked to make an urgent last-minute submission today to the Airline Passenger Protections (Pay on Delay) Bill 2024 Inquiry, currently before the Senate RRAT Committee.
In his submission Prof Schmulow slammed the lies and deceptions peddled by Qantas Jetstar on Monday of this week.
Deploying densely researched evidence from the EU he tore down Qantas’s assertion that a compensation scheme would provide no benefits to consumers.
He pointed out that in 2023 alone the EU compensation scheme resulted in time savings to consumers, equivalent to person hours totalling 9,256 years.
Moreover, he destroyed the arguments put forward by Qantas’ Mark Svensson that such a compensation scheme is unnecessary, because Qantas always puts its customers first.
He reminded the RRAT Committee that Qantas’ former, and notorious CEO, Alan Joyce, was marched into early retirement because of his propensity to commit wide-scale, egregious and flagrant misconduct against his customers.
Culminating in his attempt to defraud customers by selling half a billion dollars’ worth of tickets on ghost flights.
He then attempted to convert that fraud into theft, by seeking to retain those ill-gotten funds if they were not claimed back within six months — despite that fact that customers couldn’t actually get through to Qantas on their phone lines — a clearly deliberate attempt to frustrate customers’ attempts to obtain a refund.
Moreover, Qantas has been exposed for cancelling flights that it never intended to fly, so that it can horde booking slots and deny its competitors the ability to land their aircraft.
Prof Schmulow strongly urged the Committee not to be duped by the lies peddled by Qantas, notorious for abusing its customers and for its market misconduct.
Prof Schmulow is currently standing for election to the Federal Senate for NSW as the ACP’s #1 candidate for the state of NSW.
If elected this is precisely the kind of blow-torch, no holds-barred, backed by irrefutable research and evidence, attack-dog style that he will bring to Federal Parliament, and to opposing the reach and power of companies like Qantas that are relentlessly turbo-charging our cost of living crisis.
The Australian Citizens Party is an independent, federally-registered political party, founded in 1988. It is committed to policies that promote the economic development of Australia for the benefit of all its people, not just the vested corporate interests which have too much influence over the major political parties. It takes its inspiration from the "old Labor" party stalwarts including King O'Malley, who fought to establish Australia's national bank, the Commonwealth Bank, and John Curtin and Ben Chifley, who used the Commonwealth Bank to lead the economic mobilisation that saved Australia in WWII. The ACP fought against the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank, which has concentrated financial power in Australia in the Big Four banking oligopoly that gouges short-term profits at the expence of Australians and the nation's economic development, and is campaigning to re-establish a national bank, modelled on the old Commonwealth Bank, as a government post office bank which would guarantee face-to-face banking services, and access to cash, for all communities, and break the Big Four banking oligopoly.