Qantas! Is it being done like a dinner? There is something like the smell of a barbeque lingering in the air over the need by the ACCC to take around six months to work through the approval or disapproval processes for the Emirates-Qantas partnership. Qantas can't sell the services it will offer under that arrangement for travel from the start of the northern hemisphere summer timetable on 1 April next year until it is granted conditional approval, which is broadly the second last step pending any last minute problems either from other airline objections or any further regulatory problems that might arise, or fail to go away. But this isn't as dire from a consumer perspective as it sounds, or is being portrayed around the traps. Qantas can still sell tickets to London, and to parts of its network unaffected by the partnership proposal, such as to the US, or South Africa, or South America, or New Zealand, where Emirates is a big player but Qantas plays a strong game with smaller more frequent jets, including to Queenstown, where only a few mountains stand in the way of what would be a very awesome appearance by Emirates  777s or A380s! And Emirates will no doubt keep on doing what it has done to such effect to Qantas, and sell dozens upon dozens of superior scheduling arrangements to the rest of Europe, the UK beyond London, Russia, other parts of central Asia and the Middle East, and northern, western, eastern and