Not 4WD but how about QANTAS

I refuse to fly Qantas purely on the grounds that their ads insinuate I'm being unpatriotic for flying with any other airline.

are you really shocked? give it 10 yrs and we will be like they were 20 yrs ago - no work left

The reason they want to send the maintenance to China is cost. Well, I bet the Chinese could run the Australian Government departments from offices in China cheaper then the local polies so why don't they do that also? Yeah right.....

Air New Zealand is about to lay off 600 engineers for the same reason as Quantas

A little bit of realism has to be considered here.
When you pay $30- odd bucks to fly Melb to Sydney something has to give.

It all comes down to money, we don't want to pay anymore than what we have to for a ticket to somewhere, well low prices come at a cost, in this instance like a lot of manufactures in Australian have already done it means jobs going offshore.

I would say unfortunately "Get used to it" as you ain't seen nothing yet, It still surprises me that our car industry has stayed in Aus as long as it has.

"Competition, ain't it wonderful"?

I fly Qantas because I trust them. I'd trust a plane that has been maintained by an Aussie in Australia with all the proper checks and balances one hell of a lot more than.......well anywhere else on the planet. If that's a racist point of view, so be it. When I'm belting along across the Bight above the clouds, PC doesn't carry much weight to me (doesn't anywhere else for that matter but that's another story;-)).

I own some GMC gear which I think is great, but there's no way I'd want to fly in a GMC plane.........would you? Absolutely NO room for error with aircraft maintainence and I can't take my life back to Bunnings for a refund if the big bird spears in.

Ever seen asian scaffolding......I rest my case.

Just wait until Qantas has its first disaster and it will happen. The chit will really hit the fan then. (Hope I'm not on the plane though, I've got a bit more of the bush to explore yet)

Hi guy's My brother is one of those engineers and he has crash coarses every year to keep him up to speed.He started with Anset look what they did to them,tor it apart and scrapped one of our best companyies its a discrace what there doing.
LETS OUT SOuRCE THE PRIMINISTERS JOB MITE GET BETTER then BABY"S OVERBOARD BULL bleep >Did you vote to go to war Pig's bum.Terrorism is invented by British colonialism.This Qantis thing is tipical of there system.
I can see clearly know.

like we should really care as we gave up caring a long time ago about Australian jobs and manufacturing
everybody has sat on their big fat rear ends demanding more and wanting to pay less. now everything has gone overseas so why should Qantas be any different.
you did not see one squeal about Ryco, Feltex, Yakka, Victa, Sunbeam, Kelvinator, Holeproof, all the wool and cotton weaving. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. closing down.
no doubt the majority of you buy imported orange juice and other imported food so do not pretend you now for some reason give a damn about Qantas sending all their maintenance jobs overseas
find somebody to tell who cares because you mob have not cared about anything else going overseas.
you all even sit on your fat rear ends and say nothing about them wanting to bring in guest workers and all the fraudulent immigration going on that nobody cares about that is putting Australians out of work
if you do manage to find anybody that cares suggest you give them a halo as they will be 1 out of 10 people in Australia that care

Hey champ, i'm with you, Qantas just want to get rid of their staff 'overheads' off the books, you know wages, annual leave loadings, super etc etc. And at the moment they are scaremongering to get their maintenance done by 3rd party companies who will use some of their ex staff to do the work. They did this with their engine overhaul shop, and want to do it with their heavy and line maintenance as well. Most of us aircraft guys ( LAME & AME) cant get a decent job in australia, its all contract (at crap rates) or casual or permanent part time etc. What a way to make a living :-)) We can get work overseas (surprise surprise) but not everyone wants to leave this great place. Qantas along with a few other big companies have been lined up by the govt to be test cases with these new IR laws being introduced, to break the unions and conditions in place, so its going to get dirty.

At Ansett we were equal first in the world for the safest airline, but it didnt do us much good, as the owning interests used it as a huge cash cow for years and stripped it bare. Hmmmm Funny how most companies run by accountants end up the same......

And funny how every company that seems to complain about skills shortages is also trying to get concessions to 'import' staff at reduced or minimum wage.