Philip - it's not quite that easy, pairings are build based on roster efficency/schedule and then aircraft are cycled by maintenance scheduling requirements - to match changing crew numbers depending on destinations would be very messy.
It would also mean having different procedures for in Tiger's case 4 & 5 crew operation which would have to be added to relevent manuals & approved by the relevent regulators.
What operators do is a risk assessment based on the potential for things like this to occur and then balance against whether it's cheaper to have extra crew (say on reserve in that base) or to fly crew in or to cancel & reaccomidate.
Normally you'd fly in a crew member from one of your hubs on your or a different carrier and then operate the flight delayed. You could also potentially have crew outside of a rest period in a hotel ready to operate a later flight (although not really a option for Tiger).
Worst case scenario (which can sometimes be best case to limit delays) you cancel the flight & transfer pax to later flights & other carriers.
Some airlines have very small bases outside of hub ports to cover for situations such as this however it's naturally not viable at every port.
HBA would be a relatively low risk for any airline as it's so close to MEL where airlines all have hub bases & has high frequency of flights from 3 airlines - Lukas's comment of a 1% chance of finding crew is very strange - airlines normally operate a certain (significent) percentage of crew on reserve coverage so either Tiger is operating very, very lean or their reserve coverage finishes before this situation occured.
The further comment of a 1.5 hour delay is "nothing these days" is certainly not accurate -that would be a very significent delay that would cost tens of thoasands of dollars (and potentially a lot more) and would certainly be avoided unless absolutely necessary. A 1.5 hour delay could potentially cause disruption for 2 days on that aircraft cycle if it couldn't be isolated & terminated into a non curfew port.
Other airlines have very structured procedures to deal with situations like this with plans in place & are willing to transfer pax to competitors to get them away - given Tiger's very low cost base they may not have the same capacity and planning in the background to deal with what for them given their small size would still be unusual occurances. For the other 3 airlines mid duty/upline sicknesses occur network wide multiple times daily.
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