Qantas says technology, artificial intelligence and potential outsourcing are about delivering better outcomes for customers and employees. But after years of customer-service controversies, workplace disputes and two major privacy incidents, Australians have every reason to ask whether another round of cost-cutting will really make the airline better, or simply cheaper to operate.
Qantas has spent the past few years trying to convince Australians that it has changed. Chief executive Vanessa Hudson has repeatedly spoken about rebuilding trust, improving the customer experience and recognising the contribution of Qantas employees.
Now those promises are facing another significant test. Qantas is considering a major restructuring of its back-office operations under Project iQ, with consultancy giant Accenture involved in discussions that could reportedly see hundreds — potentially around 1,000 — roles affected across functions including finance, marketing, human resources and other corporate services, with some work potentially moving to India.
Qantas stresses that a decision has not yet been made. Its latest statement says the airline is looking at ways to accelerate its use of technology and artificial intelligence to modernise its operations and deliver better outcomes for both customers and employees. Qantas says discussions with Accenture remain at an early stage and that there is currently no formal agreement.
But the obvious question:
If the objective really is better outcomes for Qantas employees, why is the possibility of eliminating or offshoring hundreds of their jobs on the table?
Modernisation should not become another word for cutting Australian jobs
There is nothing inherently wrong with Qantas using artificial intelligence. There is nothing inherently wrong with international companies providing specialist services to an Australian business either. AI could make Qantas better. It could help predict disruptions, improve aircraft scheduling, speed up customer support, detect fraud, personalise travel and reduce repetitive administrative work.
The concern is what happens when technological transformation becomes intertwined with a search for lower labour costs. Modernisation should mean giving workers better tools and customers better service, not simply discovering how many Australian employees can be removed from the payroll.
Qantas has pushed back against suggestions it is abandoning Australian employment. It points to thousands of operational jobs created in Australia in recent years and its new Adelaide Product Innovation Centre, which is expected to create more than 400 technology roles. That investment does deserve recognition. But creating hundreds of jobs in one area does not automatically answer concerns about potentially eliminating hundreds in another.
Both things can be true: Qantas can be investing in Australian technology capabilities while simultaneously considering moving other Australian work offshore. The public deserves transparency about the second part of that equation.
Has Qantas already learned how vulnerable customer data can be
The concern with further outsourcing is not that overseas workers are inherently less trustworthy or capable. The issue is control, accountability and complexity. Every additional contractor, system and jurisdiction with access to customer information expands the environment Qantas must secure. That matters because in 2025 a social-engineering attack against an employee of an overseas third-party contact-centre provider ultimately exposed around 5.67 million Qantas customer records. The Privacy Commissioner later found no evidence that Qantas had failed to take reasonable protective steps, but the breach still showed how one compromised account within an outsourced environment can have consequences for millions of passengers.
This is why data sovereignty matters. Keeping sensitive information onshore does not automatically make it secure, but it can simplify regulatory oversight, reduce cross-border legal complexity and give organisations tighter control over who can access critical systems. Australia already applies this principle to particularly sensitive information: My Health Record data is generally required to be stored and handled in Australia. Even in the United States, where HIPAA does not outright ban overseas storage of health data, regulators warn that offshore storage can create additional security, jurisdictional and enforcement risks.
Qantas should apply the same caution to its own customer information. If Project iQ means more systems, contractors or overseas staff will have access to passenger data, Qantas should clearly explain what information will be accessible, where it will be processed and what additional protections will be put in place. After a breach involving millions of customers, keeping sensitive data and privileged access as close to home as reasonably possible should be seen as a security strength, not simply an inefficiency to be cut.
It was not Qantas’s only recent privacy failure
The 2025 cyberattack also followed another significant customer-data incident.
In May 2024, a technology problem with the Qantas app caused some customers to be shown information belonging to other passengers, including names, booking and flight information, Frequent Flyer balances and status. Qantas determined that the incident resulted from a technology problem rather than a cyberattack and apologised to affected customers.
These were different incidents with different causes. It would therefore be unfair to claim that Qantas simply has chronically inadequate cyber security. But it is entirely reasonable to say that Qantas has experienced two significant incidents involving the privacy of customer information in just over a year.
That history should make the airline exceptionally cautious about any transformation that changes who handles its systems and information.
Before Project iQ proceeds, Qantas should explain whether affected functions have access to passenger or employee information, where that information will be processed, which organisations will have access to it and what additional protections will be implemented. The answer cannot simply be: trust us. Trust needs to be earned, it is often said it is 10x harder to regain trust in a relationship after you have broken it than starting a new relationship.
There is another kind of data Qantas should remember: passenger trust
Qantas’s recent difficulties have not been limited to cyber security. In 2024, the Federal Court ordered Qantas to pay $100 million in penalties after it admitted misleading customers by continuing to offer tickets on flights it had already decided to cancel and failing to promptly notify existing passengers of cancellations. The airline also agreed to around $20 million in payments to affected consumers.
The ACCC said up to approximately 880,000 consumers were affected by aspects of the conduct. That scandal mattered because it illustrated what happens when corporate systems stop serving the people who rely on them. Passengers are not merely entries in a database. When somebody buys an airline ticket, they may be organising a wedding, attending a funeral, starting a holiday, travelling for work or trying to get home to their family.
A cheaper corporate structure is not an improvement if the passenger receives a worse service when something goes wrong. Back-office employees might not be the people greeting passengers at the gate, but they form part of the machinery that makes an airline work. Finance teams deal with payments and refunds. Technology teams maintain systems. Human-resources teams support frontline employees. Corporate and administrative staff hold years of organisational knowledge. When experienced workers disappear, that knowledge can disappear with them.
Qantas’s latest pilot agreement is good news, but we should remember how it got there
Qantas has also made an important breakthrough with its long-haul pilots. After pilots voted to authorise protected industrial action, potentially including work stoppages, Qantas announced on 6 August 2026 that it had reached an in-principle agreement with the Australian and International Pilots Association and Australian Federation of Air Pilots.
The proposed agreement covers approximately 1,700 pilots flying Qantas’s Boeing 787, Airbus A330 and Airbus A380 fleets. Qantas says the agreement will deliver significant pay increases, improved rostering and additional career-progression opportunities while balancing the needs of the business. The airline also says there is now no immediate risk of industrial action or work stoppages.
That is welcome news for Qantas employees and passengers. But it should not erase what happened beforehand. Long-haul pilots rejected an earlier proposed enterprise agreement in April, with 66 per cent voting against it and 95 per cent of eligible pilots participating. Negotiations continued for months.
By July, the Australian Federation of Air Pilots was saying that movement from Qantas had resulted from the collective message pilots had sent by rejecting the previous agreement. Then pilots authorised industrial action. Only now has an agreement apparently been reached. That sequence matters. It demonstrates why employees need bargaining power and why management needs to genuinely listen to the professionals who operate the airline.
And another industrial dispute may already be emerging
Even as the pilot dispute appears to be moving towards resolution, another group of Qantas workers is considering industrial action. Around 650 Qantas ground workers are preparing to vote on protected industrial action amid a dispute over pay and working conditions.
The Transport Workers’ Union has also raised allegations about staffing levels and workplace safety, claims that should be properly investigated and considered rather than automatically treated as established facts.
Qantas, for its part, says it wants to reach an agreement providing better pay and conditions while keeping the business sustainable.
Again, there are competing interests in industrial negotiations.
But when pilots, ground workers and office employees are all raising concerns at roughly the same time, management should consider whether these are isolated disputes or symptoms of a wider problem with trust.
Qantas has been down the outsourcing road before
This is particularly sensitive because outsourcing is not new territory for Qantas. In 2020, Qantas decided to outsource ground-handling operations at ten Australian airports. The dispute eventually reached the High Court.
In 2023, the High Court unanimously dismissed Qantas’s appeal against findings that the outsourcing decision contravened the Fair Work Act because Qantas had not established that preventing employees from exercising workplace rights was not a substantial and operative reason for its decision.
Whatever the commercial rationale behind Project iQ, that history means Qantas should understand why employees react strongly when they once again hear the word outsourcing.
The burden should be on management to demonstrate that it has learned from the past.
Qantas says it is balancing customers, employees and shareholders
Perhaps the most revealing comparison comes from Qantas itself.
When announcing its half-year results in February, Vanessa Hudson said:
“Our focus continues to be on delivering for our customers, employees and shareholders.”
That is exactly the right ambition. Qantas reported an underlying pre-tax profit of $1.46 billion and statutory after-tax profit of $925 million for the six months to December 2025. At the same time, it announced $450 million in shareholder returns, comprising a $300 million base dividend and up to $150 million in share buybacks.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a profitable business paying dividends. Qantas needs to be financially sustainable. It needs money for new aircraft, technology, training and growth. Shareholders are entitled to returns. But those numbers demonstrate why employees are entitled to question whether removing Australian positions is really unavoidable.
A company producing billion-dollar profits and returning hundreds of millions of dollars to shareholders should face a particularly high threshold before arguing that its existing workforce has become too expensive. Efficiency should not simply mean reducing wages by shifting work to a cheaper labour market.
Passenger safety is bigger than whether an aircraft can take off
It is also important not to exaggerate the aviation-safety implications of Project iQ. There is currently no evidence that outsourcing finance, marketing, HR or other back-office roles under Project iQ would make a Qantas aircraft physically unsafe.
Claiming otherwise would be irresponsible. But passenger safety in the modern aviation system includes more than engines and airframes. Passengers entrust airlines with their identities, travel movements, contact details and personal information.
They rely on airlines to maintain secure computer systems. They depend on experienced employees when a disruption occurs. And the physical safety of an airline ultimately relies upon an organisational culture where pilots, engineers, ground workers, cabin crew and other staff are properly trained, adequately resourced and comfortable raising concerns. This is where an obsession with short-term cost reduction can become dangerous.
Not because every outsourcing decision creates a safety problem, but because aviation depends upon retaining skills, maintaining clear accountability and making sure commercial pressure never becomes more important than doing the job properly. Qantas should be able to demonstrate that every major transformation strengthens those principles rather than weakening them.
“Better outcomes” should be measurable
Qantas says Project iQ is about delivering better outcomes for customers and its people. Then those outcomes should be demonstrated. If work moves overseas, will customers receive faster service?
Will calls be resolved more quickly?
Will refunds be processed sooner?
Will fewer complaints need to be escalated?
Will Qantas guarantee that privacy and cyber-security controls are at least as strong as those applying to Australian operations?
Will Australian employees affected by AI be retrained and redeployed wherever possible?
And most importantly: how much of the financial saving will actually flow back to passengers and employees?
If Project iQ saves Qantas hundreds of millions of dollars but fares do not fall, customer service does not improve and Australian employees simply lose their jobs, then Australians will be entitled to ask whose “better outcome” the transformation was designed to deliver.
Qantas should be rebuilding trust, not outsourcing it
Qantas is not the company it was under Alan Joyce. Vanessa Hudson deserves credit for attempting to repair relationships damaged during that era, for investing in new aircraft, for expanding technology employment in Adelaide and now for reaching an in-principle agreement with long-haul pilots before strikes disrupted passengers.
But rebuilding a company’s reputation requires more than changing its leadership. It requires changing how decisions are made. Qantas has a chance to demonstrate that transformation does not have to mean another round of Australian redundancies. It can use AI to support employees instead of merely replacing them. It can require contractors to meet exceptional privacy and cyber-security standards. It can invest its strong profits in customer service, employee development and resilience. It can listen to ground workers before another dispute reaches breaking point. And it can prove that the phrase “Spirit of Australia” still means something beyond branding.
Qantas says its priority is delivering for customers, employees and shareholders. Australians should hold it to that promise. Because passengers and workers should not have to repeatedly sacrifice so that the third group always comes out ahead.
References
- Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (2026) — Report into preliminary inquiries of Qantas 2025 data incident. Covers the overseas third-party contact-centre breach and Qantas’s security controls.
- The Australian (2026) — Qantas in talks to outsource hundreds of jobs to India. Covers Project iQ, Accenture and the potential offshoring of Qantas back-office positions.
- Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (2024) — Federal Court orders Qantas to pay $100m in penalties for misleading consumers. Covers the cancelled-flight and customer-notification case.
- High Court of Australia (2023) — Qantas Airways Limited v Transport Workers Union of Australia [2023] HCA 27. Covers Qantas’s previous outsourcing dispute involving ground-handling workers.
- Office of the Australian Information Commissioner — Australian Privacy Principle 8: Cross-border disclosure of personal information. Explains Australian organisations’ responsibilities when personal information is disclosed overseas.
- Federal Register of Legislation — My Health Records Act 2012, s 77. Requires My Health Record information covered by the provision to remain and be processed in Australia, subject to the Act’s exceptions.
