Navigating Towards an Airworthy Protection Regime for New Zealand's Airline Passengers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Delays and cancellations are a frequent occurrence in air travel, but passenger protections in New Zealand lag behind those in other jurisdictions such as the European Union and Canada. Concerns around airlines' treatment of passengers were brought to the fore during the COVID-19 pandemic, but protections were not strengthened in the replacement of the Civil Aviation Act 1990 with the Civil Aviation Act 2023. The new Act provides insufficient protection to passengers, and New Zealand's other consumer law is also inadequate and difficult to apply to an airline context. Neither set of law has a dispute resolution scheme that is fit for purpose. Public enforcement of relevant laws by regulators is limited to breaches of the Fair Trading Act 1986, largely for misleading or deceptive trading practices, and not for breaches of specific obligations to passengers.This article examines the deficiencies in New Zealand's airline passenger protection law and compares that law with the corresponding law in Australia, the European Union and Canada. It advocates for the making of regulations that provide for fixed amounts of compensation when a flight is delayed for controllable reasons, rather than laws which require a passenger to prove damages. That is consistent with the European and Canadian approaches. It also advocates for refunds to be made available to passengers where flights are cancelled or significantly delayed. To ensure that new regulations would be effective, this article also advocates for an adjudicative dispute resolution scheme, funded by airlines according to their market share and the number of complaints received, with capacity for public enforcement (monetary fines) by the Commerce Commission.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".