Originally Posted by
3544quebec
And given that this thread is titled Australian Visa Gets Cancelled - What Happens?, it is highly unlikely that OZ/NZ consumer & financial protections are of any relevance whatsoever to the thread.
The statement I was responding to was about the ability of the airlines to recover costs. As such, consumer laws are well within the gamut of response/relevance.
The statement in your previous post The airlines (ex-Australia) have no legal basis to recover costs from the pax if they are denied entry at the destination when they boarded with the correct documents in hand, is a better example of what constitutes utter rubbish I would imagine than Often1's post which you characterise as such.
I stand by what I said. It's based on experience and qualification and practice. Granted, I did bother to at least wave my finger vaguely at the reasons why I have that position, but it you want to just gainsay it, feel free.
It seems that Contract Law would give some legal basis to the airlines' attempts at cost recovery based on their Conditions of Carriage - as I said previously I shall leave the merits of the legal argument to the lawyers and admit differences of opinion rather than present my opinion/experiences as the only valid viewpoint and differing ones as utter rubbish
I'll say it again: you cannot contract out of legal protections (in the area we're talking about)
The scenario we're talking about is where an airline is being fined or compelled to bear costs by authority X or Y
under colour of law: you can't pass fines on to other people. The fine/cost adheres to the entity fined.
The airline would have to show that the pax misrepresented the facts or themselves before they could even get to the starting blocks for trying to extract the cost from them. Given that we've already said the condition is that the pax presented with the correct documentation in good faith, the entire case would be a non-starter. I have doubts you'd even get a Registrar to lodge the case. Certainly wouldn't in NZ IMO. Oz is a bit more complicated, but not by much.
I honestly don't care what the CoC from the Oz/NZ airlines says. It's substantially unenforceable at the extreme ends of it. Take the
OneStar CoC. It says at ~s.17 you can't sue them for injury, or, at least, that they're not liable. But guess what: if you're travelling in or from NZ, where NZ law controls, you can't sue them in NZ anyway. There's no right in NZ law to sue for personal injury except by leave of the AG. The Government reserves the right to sue in those situations. So why is it in the CoC? Because it's a giant Corporate FO to pax to try and intimidate them. If OneStar points to the CoC as an automatic response to most anything then they can avoid a lot of problems (for them) because people are silly enough to accept it.
The CoC may (& do) say all sorts of things, but that has little to nothing to do with the actual/potential legal position/s of the respective parties. Obviously, all IMO.