Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce, who was hit in the face by a pie in a protest against gay marriage in Australia, yesterday said that he would not be silenced on important social issues.
Joyce, a staunch supporter of equal rights, said he plans to bring charges against his attacker.
The airline chief was targeted on Tuesday while addressing a business breakfast in Perth, when a man wearing a suit walked on stage and smothered a lemon meringue pie over the stunned Irishman.
Photo: AP
The man was named by the Australian Broadcasting Corp as 67-year-old former farmer Tony Overheu, a Christian opposed to same-sex marriage.
“Alan Joyce is a very active individual in this process [toward marriage equality] and in that context he was appropriate [to target],” Overheu told the broadcaster.
“I’ve never done that sort of thing. I’m a law-abiding person, but I think this is part of inevitable pushback,” he said.
“When the community is grumpy, figures who are overstepping the line have got to anticipate there will be pushback in some shape or form. The broad community have had a gutful,” he added.
In March, Joyce, who is gay, was one of 20 chief executives of some of the nation’s largest companies to sign a joint letter to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in support of marriage equality.
It urged the government to “deliver civil marriage equality for every Australian so that our nation can move forward as a more inclusive place to live, work and play.”
Joyce said in a statement that the pie incident would not stop him being vocal on the subject.
“I’ve long held the view that there is a role for companies and CEOs to speak up on economic and social issues. My opinion on this has not changed,” he said. “We’ll continue to speak about important social issues, including indigenous reconciliation, gender diversity and marriage equality, because it’s the right thing to do.”
Joyce told reporters that he would never cave in to “bullying.”
“No attempt at bullying us into suppressing our voice will work,” he said.
“Certainly what happened yesterday has reinvigorated me, in actual fact. It’s really encouraged me to be out there and to continue to be out there and express my views even more strongly than I have done in the past,” he said.
Police have so far only charged Overheu with providing false details, but the Qantas chief said he wanted to take it further.
“The police are continuing their investigation and my intention is to send a message that this type of behavior isn’t acceptable and that I have every intention of pressing charges,” Joyce said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS