#AUStriches national airline #Qantas sold seats on 8000 flights they had already cancelled and then made it super difficult for customers to get refunds or book alternate flights. They had planned to “expire” the travel vouchers and keep the money for this before some Senators realised they stood to gain hundreds of millions in what was essentially fraud.

Now Qantas are defending themselves in court against the ACCC (Australian consumer rights watchdog) and they’ve come up with the most fiat defence imaginable:

Customers don’t buy a seat on a particular flight, rather they buy a ‘bundle of rights’ for flying with Qantas..

What used to be an iconic brand that Australians were proud of remains iconic, but for all the wrong reasons. It is an exemplar of all the ills that have befallen Australia in the past 20 years - fiat thinking, outright fascism, gifts for the politically connected, woke virtue signaling, huge taxpayer handouts during Covid, a service which barely functions and one which is way overpriced due to aforementioned fascist protectionism.

Qantas is a microcosm of everything wrong with this country; now watch every body in power remain absolutely clueless and ball-less in trying to fix it.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

australia is headed for some big trouble. everything is turning into melbourne.

Definitely mate. Weak men have created hard times that are only gonna get harder yet

100% this, unfortunately.

Feels like 1938 must have in hindsight

Its not something new, although it has accelerated in the last two decades. Like the guards in any penal colony, our well-connected have a culture where they expect to lounge around and make money middle-manning and monopolizing. With detours into outright fraud.

Governor Bligh briefly put a stop to the nonsense, and we know what happened to him - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_Rebellion

Same problems, same elite culture today. Just different excuses and lies...

You make a good point, it’s not new but we’re definitely approaching the peak of a new cycle of this nonsense.

And #Qantas is not alone in this type of behaviour. Over $40 Billion of the $88 Billion spent on jobkeeper went to companies which didn’t need it - no clawback mechanism in there, just $44 odd Billion in wasted tax dollars..

There is nobody in the system who would fix it though. You expect the red and blue uniparty to rort for their base but the Greens are no different, they’re rorting through indigenous funding and NDIS and the Teals are rorting through renewables horseshit, Palmer is the king of rorting and I doubt Hanson has a clean nose either.

Too many pigs at the trough now. Things are gonna have to properly break and people will have to feel real pain to break the cycle this time.

^ This. And in case they're feeling left out, The Nationals were deeply enmeshed in the lavish taxpayer buyback of (nonexistent) flood water use rights from donors and cronies.

Australia 🇦🇺 - a Ponzi of Ponzi schemes

The same happened in Colombia with Viva Air. Is not enough that they are basically a monopoly, they also decide to scam people.