Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration, Integration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

There are moments in this parliament when we deal with legislation of great moment and have debates that grip the nation. This is not one of those moments. The Migration Amendment (Statutory Agency) Bill 2007 contains but one clause on a simple administrative matter. It is an important clause but it has taken the government some years to bother to draft it. The bill simply formalises the existing administrative arrangements between the two main merit review tribunals for immigration cases—that is, the Migration Review Tribunal and the Refugee Review Tribunal. The one clause in the bill amends the Migration Act to provide that the principal member of the Refugee Review Tribunal together with the registrars, deputy registrars and other officers of the MRT and the RRT who are employed under the Public Service Act will become a statutory agency for the purpose of the Public Service Act 1999. The bill makes the principal member of the Refugee Review Tribunal the head of this statutory agency.

For quite some time the two tribunals have been gradually amalgamating their administrative arrangements in order to save money and improve efficiency. The tribunals used to operate as two quite separate and independent tribunals, but increasingly they have been integrating into a single unit. The tribunals’ offices have already co-located in both Sydney and Melbourne. They share common registries and common administrative facilities, and members and staff have for some time been cross-appointed to both tribunals. The two tribunals are also prescribed as a single financial entity for the purposes of the Financial Management and Accountability Act 1997. There is a single payroll and set of financial statements. The tribunals have also combined their case management systems. This bill formalises the existing arrangements and makes clear the legal basis on which those tribunals have been operating as a single statutory agency.

One of the main legal effects of the bill is that the principal member of the RRT will have the legal authority as the agency head to employ staff and exercise Australian Public Service powers. At the moment the principal member acts on the delegated authority of Mr Andrew Metcalfe, the Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, in order to make those decisions. This bill will not change the actual work in practice but will shift the legal basis for those operations.

The impetus for this change—when I say ‘impetus’, it sounds like something that provides a big push and a rapid movement, although it was not—comes from some time ago, following the Review of corporate governance of statutory authorities and officeholders known as the Uhrig review. The Minister for Immigration and Citizenship acknowledged this in his second reading speech when he said:

The … bill …will implement the last of a range of minor changes to the legislative framework of the Migration Review Tribunal and the Refugee Review Tribunal recommended in the Uhrig report …

This report was actually handed down in 2003 and, as we have plenty of time, because there is not a lot to talk about in the bill, we will take a moment to look at the chronology of how we actually got here.

This bill comes from a promise back in October 2001, at the height of the election campaign, that the government would review statutory authorities because we were in a climate, as we remember, shaped by the collapse of both HIH and OneTel. The public rightly perceived that there was a lack of accountability mechanisms. In particular, there was concern at the time over the monitoring provided by the ACCC. In 2001, the promise was made of a review. In 2002, the Prime Minister finally bothered to commission former Rio Tinto and Westpac chairman John Uhrig AO to review the corporate governance of statutory authorities. His report was presented to the Prime Minister and the Minister for Finance and Administration in the following year, 2003. It then took until 2004, having been received in 2003, conducted in 2002 and promised in 2001, before the government decided to publicly release the report. The government truly was taking one step at a time—one year per step.

At the time of the release of the review, the Minister for Finance and Administration, Senator Minchin, stated that all government agencies would be assessed against the templates of the review and those assessments would all be complete by March 2006. So that was another 18 months to figure things out. In an article by Lenore Taylor in the Financial Review on 12 August 2004, the minister acknowledged:

“In our last term, there were some events to cause the business community considerable anxiety, mostly centred around the ACCC, and a general sense that the ACCC and a few others had become laws unto themselves, and the ATO was being seen as not properly accountable to the government and the parliament …

The quotation continues:

“While the heat has gone out of some of those issues now … we think Uhrig has proposed a good and necessary strategy to ensure accountability in structures that have really built up in an ad hoc manner over the years …”

Waiting for the heat to go out of the issue from 2001, we are then told that the heat has gone out in 2004. We then wait until it gets really cold in 2006 for the last progress report and we are now here in 2007 finally dealing with a one-clause amendment to legislation that came out of a review promised in the election campaign of 2001. Why have we actually even got here now? There was speculation in the Financial Review in an article by Verona Burgess on 18 May 2007. It was a very brief article but obviously there was not a tremendous amount to report on. It says:

We understand the government intends to issue an overview of the whole thing in the near future, and not before time.

Once the government decided to do an overview of the progress, they realised that progress has been conducted pretty much at a snail’s pace on something that was always going to have bipartisan support. It was never difficult; it simply took time for the government to get around to it. We have the response now and we have legislation which puts in place what is simply prudent policy recommended a very long time ago.

To bring the two agencies under one head as a single statutory agency is sensible. It allows a more logical principle than to have everything operating under delegated authority, which is the way it has been happening so far. The opposition are pleased to have an opportunity to speak to legislation that we certainly hoped we would have been speaking to many years ago. But, notwithstanding that, we are here now. It is hardly controversial, it is sensible public policy, the opposition are very pleased to be finally speaking on the legislation and we certainly hope we vote on it this year—that it is this year when the Senate votes on it and this year when it is proclaimed as legislation.

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