What is it we don't know?, page-23

To what social media do you refer, and what was the gist of its nature? I am surprised that this matter has not withered on the line for the want of class members. Insiders to this class-action matter would know what we mushrooms do not.

I Googled for updated information yesterday, hoping in vain for something meaningful and recent (dated 2018). The number of mischievously misleading headlines concerning the $20m pertaining to the ASIC matter is astounding.

It seems that TGA has until 30/03/2018 to poke around, and the next case management meeting is on 5/04/2018. I thought that there was going to be a case-management meeting on 20/02/2018. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=4e0dfe04-eecc-43f3-9bc1-79028395c0e6 states, “The first case management hearing of the Proceedings will be held in the Federal Court in Sydney on 20 February 2018 at 9:30am.”, so maybe I had in my mind something I had earlier read there, or elsewhere.

However, https://www.comcourts.gov.au/file/FEDERAL/P/NSD448/2017/order_list provides the following date-related information:

DATE OF ORDER: 21 August 2017
By Friday, 30 March 2018 the respondent give discovery of documents within the categories listed at Annexure 2 to these orders

DATE OF ORDER: 29 September 2017
The matter be listed for case management on Thursday 5 April 2018 at 9.30 am.

Although I do not know the line of argument that Maurice Blackburn will purse, I thought that it might use contract construction to construe that TGA's marketing material (“representation”) creates contract provisions, and that the construed provisions should override express provisions to the contrary in the signed standard-form contracts. Normally with contracts, what is written last and signed overrides earlier oral and written contradictions that arose in the communication between the contracting parties. However, Consumer Law may not be as tight as law should be, and bleeding-heart sentiment is biased against companies in favour of the "vulnerable".

I poked around legislation that I could find on the Internet, and I concluded the Consumer Lease legislation is flawed by contradictions. The law clearly states that a consumer lease cannot have an ownership option. Elsewhere it states that lessors must respond to lessees' requests for information to terminate leases, and although the wording does not mention lease buy-outs, the wording suffices to cover them. Consequently, until leases are terminated, or expire, lessor-supplied information may in effect give lessees an ownership option. Additionally, the law states that end-of-lease statements must be issued no later than 90 days prior to expiry of leases, which in effect means they could be issued much earlier. Offers to sell the goods in end-of-lease statements are in effect ownership options. There is no evidence that these two avenues of introducing purchase options into consumer leases causes them to cease being consumer leases, which I think sets precedents that weaken the case for using contract construction that overrides ownership provisions clearly articulated in TGA's standard-form contracts to claim that TGA's contracts are rent-to-buy contracts, not consumer leases.

ASIC would have been onto TGA years ago if TGA's contracts were rent-to-buy contracts. For example, ASIC cancelled the credit licence of a firm trading as Rent To Buy Appliances in 2016 – see http://asic.gov.au/about-asic/media...els-credit-licence-of-rent-to-own-appliances/. I assume that the firm's standard-form rent-to-buy contracts contained purchase obligations, or options.

I am not a lawyer, and my brain inclines to embrace thoughts that give it comfort, so do not take the foregoing waffle too seriously.