Brand new to flying for business.

Brand new to flying for business. Landed a national role, and I can choose Virgin or Qantas lounge membership. Which one? Why?

Congratulations.

Where will you be going? Any rural places that may have a gap in lounge or frequency? Does it involve international travel? If so, where?

How often do you go on holidays, how frequently will you be travelling?

To many variables to give you a straight up and down answer between virgin or qantas

Thanks Riley & Hayden!
5-10 flights per month, primarily east coast Australia, unsure about rural. NZ flights 2-3 times per year. Singapore 1-2 times per year. 
Personal holidays to Europe once a year.  

Flying that much, you're likely to wind up with platinum status soon enough. In that case I'd say Qantas would definitely be the default choice because you get the snazzier version of the lounge, especially on international flights.

VA has a few advantages at the gold level -- particularly being easier to requalify for (which shouldn't be an issue for you) and the fact that VA gold gets priority boarding/security while those are reserved for platinum on QF. I fly VA and am quite happy with it but the lounges aren't quite as good, particularly in the food selection.

Unless you've got some particular reason for preferring VA (such as really liking purple lighting and white tiles) then I'd say Qantas is the way to go. 

Just a heads-up that Qantas Gold members have priority boarding privileges on both domestic and international flights, and also priority security screening on domestic flights only (on international, the Express path is for Qantas Platinum and above).

Hugo, a minor correction (and a recent one) - QF Golds now get priority security and boarding at domestic ports.

I'd definitely agree that with the OP's situation, QFF is the way to go; depending on how quickly the OP's projected travel stacks up, it might be worthwhile considering spending some time in the food court rather than coughing up for Qantas Club until they hit Gold.

The company will be paying for lounge membership, so I guess that tips the scales further into the Qantas favour?

it could almost be worth choosing qantas for access to the sydney first lounge atleast 6 times a year

I agree with Hugo above.

As someone who holds gold with both, and delicately manages travel plans to retain both, I would lean towards Virgin for the following reasons.

Given you have Singapore of the rotation, it would swing me the way of Virgin as the Singapore Airlines partnership affords you higher frequency. It's also not a bad way to get to Europe.

It's splitting hairs for domestic travel these days between the two. Perhaps the fact every second Qantas passenger is gold or higher makes the VA lounge slightly less crowded. (Although it's choccers during peak periods.)

If your plan is to amass a truckload of FF points and use it for your european holiday, I would most definitely go Virgin as you have the choice of tranferring points to Krisflyer (albeit at a 30% skim) or using Etihad. Qantas upgrades are difficult to secure, despite the pro Qantas sentiment of Ausbt.

Now this is an excellent point! I think I'd much rather amass the FF points to them dump them on a EU holiday. Having the option to move them to KrisFlyer or Etihad is handy...

May be worth checking your company's Travel Policy as well.  For example, if the policy states that you must always choose the cheapest fare for travel then your ability to accure status credits to reach higher levels of Frequent Flyer tiers (Gold, Platinum, etc) may become more difficult (as most of your flying may be on disounted fare classes that return fewer status credits).   Something else that hasn't been mentioned is that Virgin allows it's Gold-level frequent flyers to 'bump-forward' onto earlier flights even if they are travelling on a discounted fare.  As a regular business traveller it is something I find useful. It can get you home earlier !

To clarify the above, you can convert Velocity points into KrisFlyer miles at a 1.35 VA = 1 SQ ratio, although you can't convert Velocity points into Etihad Guest miles.

Velocity's tie-up with Etihad allows you to use Velocity points to book an Etihad flight via Velocity, though, so while you can't transfer points to Etihad's loyalty program, you can still use them to book travel with Etihad, if that makes sense.

One that basis alone I suggest you go Qantas Club.

Have you been allocated an airline for when you fly international?