An apology by Qantas for sacking 1820 ground crew rings “wholly hollow” and it has failed to make changes that ensure such actions never happen again, a judge has been told.

In the Federal Court in Sydney today, Justice Michael Lee continued hearing submissions on the penalty to be imposed on Qantas for the biggest case of illegal sackings in Australian history.

Last October, Justice Lee ordered Qantas to pay $120 million to the ground staff as compensation for their economic loss, pain and suffering since their jobs were outsourced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Transport Workers Union is seeking that he impose the maximum penalty of $121 million and order that the money be paid to the union.

Noel Hutley SC, for the union, told Justice Lee that he should reject Qantas’ submission that after four-and-a-half years of litigation, it was now contrite.

“Your Honour will not brush aside, as Qantas urges in its submissions, its vehement and regular denials of wrongdoing (and) its rejection of Your Honour’s findings, which persisted all the way to the High Court,” he said.

“These reveal an attitude of adamantine self-righteousness.”

Since the High Court ruled against Qantas’ appeal no senior executive of the airline had publicly accepted it broke the law or Justice Lee’s conclusions until yesterday, Mr Hutley said.

“The contrition rings wholly hollow.”

There had been “a profound failure” within Qantas “to come to terms with what needs to occur to avoid these things happening again”, he said.

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.