Qantastic

GH on Joe Aston's The Chairman's Lounge

In 1906, the great American muckraker Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel of life in the brutal Chicago meat yards based on his observations of wage slavery, child labor and unendurable poverty during a period there working incognito.  The reading public was scandalised, though not at the ordeal of the workers - rather did a fixation develop with the unsanitary slaughtering and food handling processes that Sinclair more glancingly described.  The journalist complained: ‘I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.’

Our most readable contemporary Australian muckraker Joe Aston would be pardoned similar sensations.  In writing his new book The Chairman’s Lounge, he trained his crosshairs on Qantas’s vaunted CEO Alan Joyce, and has instead put a cap in Albo’s ass.  The controversy since the book’s publication has involved not what Joe rightly calls ‘the greatest collapse of brand equity in the modern history of Australian business’ but the propensity of politicians from the prime minister downwards for cadging free upgrades.  Alan Joyce’s name has scarcely been raised, though Albanese in the book is by comparison a bit player.