Reg Ansett - Challenges in The 1970s

Challenges in The 1970s

In 1972, Peter Abeles' Thomas Nationwide Transport launched a takeover bid for Ansett Transport Industries. This bid was thwarted with the assistance of Victorian Premier Sir Henry Bolte. This was due to both a longstanding friendship between Bolte and Reg Ansett and that Bolte was keen to save a Victorian company from being taken over by a NSW firm. After Bolte's retirement, he would become a director of Ansett Transport Industries.

Reg Ansett's views on women in aviation were widely viewed as sexist. He once described stewardesses over 30 as old boilers and claimed that women were unsuitable to be pilots because of their menstrual cycles. In the 1970s, Deborah Jane Wardley took the company to the Victorian Equal Opportunity Board for discrimination. Wardley was a charter pilot who claimed that she was better qualified to be hired than other male pilots that had been hired. Ansett claimed that they hadn't discriminated against her because she was a woman but because she had the potential to fall pregnant. On 29 June 1979, the Equal Opportunity Board ruled in favour of Wardley and directed that Ansett should recruit her at the next intake. In November 1979 Wardley started work.

In late 1979, Abeles and Rupert Murdoch launched a successful takeover of Ansett Transport Industries. Under the new management structure, Abeles and Murdoch would be joint managing directors with Reg Ansett as chairman. Murdoch would take over ATV-0 and merge with TEN-10 in Sydney to effectively give him control of what is now the Ten Network. Abeles would merge the freight operations with TNT and run the airline.

In 1980, Ansett sold TVQ-0 to a joint venture between petrol company Ampol and Sydney radio station 2SM.

Reg Ansett died on 23 December 1981. Ansett went bankrupt in 2001 following a series of poor management decisions by the Abeles-Murdoch duopoly and later owners Air New Zealand. Respected aviation writer Tom Ballantyne said in 2002: While Sir Reg Ansett laid the groundwork for a national icon, Sir Peter Abeles took it by the scruff of the neck and laid the groundwork for disaster.