It must have been a painful 56 minutes for Qantas.
One of the best known justices in the country had the undivided attention of 600-plus viewers on YouTube.
Then, millions of readers of the nation’s news outlets tuned in.
Credit: Marija Ercegovac
Justice Michael Lee had already become a household name after presiding over the Bruce Lehrmann defamation trial last year. After criminal charges were dropped against him, Lehrmann sued Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson who had broadcast the initial rape allegation. Lee found – on the balance of probabilities – that Lehrmann raped Brittany Higgins in Parliament House in 2019.
“Having escaped the lions’ den, Mr Lehrmann made the mistake of going back for his hat,” Lee observed in his ruling. Lee’s language was so compelling, his powers of summary so effective, his judgment was published as a book.
Lee’s word choice on Qantas’ sprawling defence of its illegal sacking of 1800 ground workers in 2020 has proven just as rich, and the media – perpetually on the hunt for better ways to describe injustice – can’t get enough.
In the near hour it took Lee to read out in excruciating detail his rationale for applying a $90 million penalty, it was the language he employed that perhaps stung more than the financial cost.
Lee characterised Qantas’ response to its legal and reputational woes arising from the 2020 mass firing as “performative remorse”.
Before handing down the largest legal fine in Australian corporate history, Lee described Qantas’ “adamantine [unwavering to the point of arrogance] self-righteousness”.
In dispatching his judicial duties, Lee came armed with a sword of rich metaphor and analogy, replete with historical references.
He invoked parts of the entire Western classical canon – the Bible, Ancient Greece, the French Renaissance – to illustrate the gap between Qantas’ industrial relations and its public relations line.
“In considering what actually went on in making the outsourcing decision, we are ‘looking through a glass darkly’,” referencing a Biblical verse.
Later, he doubled back to the reference: “I meant what I said in the [2021 court judgment]: I used the metaphor drawn from the First Letter of St Paul to the Corinthians advisedly; it reflected the reality that we have an imperfect vision of precisely what occurred ‘within the upper echelons of Qantas leading up to the outsourcing decision’.”
In a simile that sent reporters scrambling for Google, Lee declared: “It goes too far to conclude Qantas is now simply like Tartuffe; pleading virtue only when cornered and feigning contrition while harbouring no genuine regret.”
Tartuffe being the eponymous character in the 17th-century play by French dramatist Molière, in which “under the religious cloak of piety, Tartuffe … befriends … a rich man who is so swept away by Tartuffe’s charisma and his message of the uncomplicated holy life that he gives him everything, including his daughter’s hand in marriage and the deed to his house”.
Lee intimated that Qantas pleads piety, but it builds wealth.
Even Qantas’ internal review of corporate culture, the one designed to reset the company from the inside, made recommendations, according to Lee, in a “Delphic way” – Delphi being the home of a major oracle of Ancient Greece.
For Lee, it was “unsurprising” that the Transport Workers’ Union argued that the court was being “presented with mere pieties”.
“If so, such performative remorse would be no true reckoning; but theatre staged for the audience of both the court and public opinion, hoping the curtain will fall on this saga with the financial damage minimised.”
Indeed, in his spare time, Lee has embarked on screenplay writing, the AFR has reported.
At moments, Lee’s words appeared to be written with a feathered quill. Stage or screen-ready.
In an era when serious figures resort to dancing on TikTok videos in the hope of going viral, it’s a testament to the enduring power of language – and the ideas they represent – that Lee, from the bland confines of his court chambers in Sydney, framed in a humble YouTube feed, could deliver remarks so cutting.
After his lengthy explanation of his rationale, yes, Qantas had taken steps to improve the corporate culture; Qantas apologised for firing the employees, yes, yes; but still lingering doubts remained. Lee described the airline’s corporate contrition as sorry, but the “wrong kind of sorry”.
Almost instantly, the headline writers in most of the national media knew they found their hook.
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