Justice Michael Lee at the Federal Court in Sydney resumes discussions on the penalty for Qantas, related to the nation’s largest incident of unlawful dismissals.

In the previous October, Justice Lee mandated that Qantas compensate the ground crew $120 million, addressing their financial losses, distress, and hardships following the outsourcing of their roles amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The court should order that the penalty be paid to the TWU, which had taken on enormous risks and burdens to fight the sackings, Hutley said.

“If the penalty is paid to my client, my client is an organisation charged with advancing the interests of its members … and the money would be applied to the proper purposes of the organisation.”

Yesterday, Qantas chief people officer Catherine Walsh told Justice Lee that “hopefully you’ll see from the size of the compensation payment that, in fact, we are very sorry”.

“We do wish for the workforce that was impacted to be properly remediated and the compensation that has been agreed could go some way to deal with that,” she said.

Outside court, former Qantas worker Damien Pollard said union members were looking forward to the conclusion of the case “to allow us to get on with our lives”.

“It’s been a long fight, it’s been very stressful for a lot of employees, so we are looking forward to the end,” he said.