The headline grabbed me immediately: “Hacker Finally Makes Contact With Qantas After Being on Hold for 72 Hours.” It’s satirical, of course, but bloody hell if it doesn’t capture something fundamentally broken about how our major corporations treat both security and customer service.

The joke writes itself, doesn’t it? Here’s someone who’s supposedly breached one of Australia’s most recognisable companies, and even they can’t get through to customer service. It’s dark comedy at its finest, but it also highlights a serious problem that’s been festering for years.

As I sat in my local café in Melbourne, sipping on a flat white and scrolling through my news feed, I came across a story that left me feeling rather unimpressed. Qantas, our national carrier, had just been fined a whopping $120 million for selling tickets on flights that they had cancelled. Now, I’m all for corporations being held accountable for their actions, but a penalty of $120 million for a company that made a post-tax profit of $1.25 billion last year seems like a slap on the wrist.