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Qantas

The ABR Podcast 

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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Peter Dutton

Episode #185

‘Some grotesque Minotaur’: Peter Dutton’s aggressive formation

By Patrick Mullins

This week on the ABR Podcast we review a profile of opposition leader Peter Dutton. Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s strongman politics by Lech Blaine is the ninety-third issue of the BlackInc Quarterly Essay. In his review of Bad Cop, political biographer Patrick Mullins begins by comparing Dutton to another cop-turned-politician in Bill Hayden. Listen to Patrick Mullins with ‘”Some grotesque Minotaur”: Peter Dutton’s aggressive formation’, published in the May issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast we look at Qantas with business writer and historian Stuart Kells. In his review of Alan Joyce and Qantas: The trials and transformation of an Australian icon by Peter Harbison, Kells notes that the company’s declining reputation extends beyond the area of substandard customer service. Stuart Kells is Adjunct Professor at La Trobe Business School and has twice won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize. Listen to ‘Fasten your seatbelts: Turbulent times at Alan Joyce’s Qantas’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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Nearly everyone in Australia has a story about bad airline service, and many of those stories involve Qantas, whose ‘mishandled bag rate’ recently doubled and flight cancellations tripled. The formerly smooth and efficient Sydney-Melbourne run is now a dispiriting ordeal.

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I have never flown first class on Qantas; I’d love to, but somehow I don’t think I ever will. But next time you fly first class on a Qantas 747, take a look at the inflight library and you might be surprised to find copies of George Johnston and Charmian Clift’s Strong Man from Piraeus; Elizabeth Jolley’s Palomino; Evan Green’s Alice to Nowhere; Gerald Murnane’s A Lifetime on Clouds; or Kate Grenville’s Lillian’s Story.

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