Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

As the member for Goldstein, it is a great privilege to speak on this legislation. I speak as somebody who supports this legislation because there is no legislation in this parliament that has ever been put forward by the member for Isaacs that has not needed improvement.

The member for Isaacs established the Administrative Review Tribunal in the last parliament. He has a litany of train-wreck legislation that needs constant improvement, like his tenure as a minister in government. I say this with sadness. When he isn't turning up to teal fundraisers and events in Goldstein or sending volunteers to Goldstein to help teal candidates get elected—even though they claim to be independent—he puts train-wreck legislation before the parliament. Of course, this legislation is designed to fix the legacy of the member for Isaacs, who, every time he has tried to put things forward, has gone onto fail and create more problems and more confusion than the problems he sought to solve in the first place. I remember this, well and truly, back in my time as Australia's human rights commissioner, when we were dealing with the legacy of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments and the children who were asylum seekers, locked in detention because of those governments.

During that time, the member for Isaacs, at the latter stage, was Attorney-General. During that period as Attorney-General, he was confronted with a number of choices. Some of those choices could have been to get children out of detention, just like this sort of legislation; review the Administrative Review Tribunal; or review legislation to assess whether people should have pathways to be able to get out—visa or migration pathways. But that wasn't the pathway that the member for Isaacs took. As Attorney-General, his solution was to seek to abolish the office of the Australia's human rights commissioner, the office that was, in part, responsible for oversight of the treatment of those children in detention.

So what do we have? We had children denied education. The solution to that was to abolish the position of the person who had oversight. Children were suffering from mental health conditions. The member for Isaacs's solution was to abolish the position of the person whose responsibility was to have oversight over the mental health deterioration of children in the custodianship of the government. At every single point, what we had was a government—the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government—who was involved in demonisation and humiliation of children and a rapid advancement in the deterioration in their mental health. His only answer to those situations was through a different piece of legislation put forward to abolish the office of Australia's human rights commissioner, which included a pathway to remove any oversight or actually address the problems of how the government was bullying, dehumanising and delegitimising children.

I am not surprised that this legislation had to be put forward by this government to fix the long litany of, once again, the member for Isaacs's problems. He was very vocal about this legislation today in question time, when anyone dared question the correlation and relationship between the Australian Labor Party and the CFMEU, and was outraged that anybody might highlight that the Labor Party received $7 million worth of funding and that the head of the Victorian branch, who's directly connected to figures like Mick Gatto and John Setka, sits on the National Executive of the Australian Labor Party. I think it's the member for Bruce, who's sitting opposite at the table right now, who also sits with the head of the Victorian division of the CFMEU on the National Executive. But, apparently, there's no issue here! Nobody can see any issues or problems, even though they're directly associating with criminals and organised gangs. But, again, no-one from the Labor party seems to care.

Yes, the previous speaker, who spoke before, is right. There are issues around making sure there's transparency, and oversight, and a process that's being followed. But I can well and truly be confident that you're not going to get it from this Labor government. That's why their legislation, which the member for Isaacs introduced in the previous parliament, needs to be fixed—because, despite his promise of a grand future of the Administrative Review Tribunal ushering in a new era of review rights to make sure that there was integrity, trust and transparency sitting behind tribunal hearing processes, it has instead turned into a catastrophe of epic proportions.

The AAT, which was doing its job making sure there were proper review processes of administrative decisions, was replaced by a body stacked with his mates that is now slower, more expensive and facing the largest backlog in its history. The caseload has now increased to 67,000 matters, substantially more than was the case when we were last in office. Median case times have now blown out from 30 weeks to 68 weeks under the member for Isaacs and, of course, the current attorney-general. Student visa appeals have risen from around 2,000 cases to more than 40,000, an extraordinary growth by any measure with which one could count.

Labor's abolition of the AAT was a vindictive, malicious and unnecessary attack solely because they didn't get to appoint every single person who sat on it and they wanted to make sure it was like the Fair Work Commission or another organisation where only their people sat on it—because they want to control every single part of the artifice and control the state. Well, sorry, Deputy Speaker Freelander, but we live in a democracy.

See this speech in context