Qantas Chairman: Airline Could Still be Aussie Brand With Bigger Foreign Ownership

MELBOURNE, Nov 20 AAP - Qantas could have a greater level of allowable foreign ownership and still retain its status as a great Australian brand, the national airline's chairman Margaret Jackson says. The present maximum allowable level of foreign ownership in Qantas is 49 per cent. "Qantas was owned 25 per cent by British Airways - that didn't make Qantas less Australian," Ms Jackson told the Nine Network's Business Sunday program. "You can have, and we've suggested to government that one of the trade-offs (for lifting the foreign ownership level) may be that you have a `Kangaroo share' to guarantee that control will always remain within Australia. "You can guarantee that the chairman is always an Australian, that the board is always Australian, that the place of running the business is always in Australia, so you can actually guarantee that the business of Qantas is Australian but still have access to the global capital markets." Ms Jackson said said people were sympathetic to the idea and others were not so. "But (from) the studies that we have done, it's very compelling that the 49 per cent foreign ownership limit has actually cost us billions of dollars in extra cost of capital," she said. Ms Jackson also said the availability of new, large aircraft such as the Airbus A380 would make it possible for Qantas to fly directly from Australia to London or New York. "But it might be even more significant that we could have an aircraft that could get direct to Dallas (in the United States) and you would then be in the hub with American Airlines," she said. "That might be a very attractive destination, or other destinations in Europe which you could fly to direct." AAP