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

As outlined, the Administrative Review Tribunal and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025 goes directly to the process and integrity of the government. All of the other speakers from the government made this point. They used this as the basis to extol the virtues of the government. All I am doing is highlighting and shining a bright light on this.

I realise it's very difficult for the members sitting opposite to have it highlighted to them, because it shows an uncomfortable truth: that if you're going to make your integrity central to the passage of a piece of legislation and have it embodied in the legislation because, as the ministers have said, the foundation of this legislation is transparency of review processes and decision-making, then maybe an association with the head of a criminal enterprise is not a great place to start, just as the conduct of the current member for Isaacs—I know he'll be former one day, but at the moment he's current—and his consistent failure around processes of legislation which led to the need to introduce this bill is also an important part of the conversation.

So, of course, we have a problem with the law as it currently operates. Labor's bill has failed the Australian community. It has delayed decision-making. Australians have been let down, and part of it is because we have a minister who's sitting at the table and ministers who are sitting on government benches over there who are simply not interested in driving legislation which is going to improve the Australian community. They simply have legislation that advances the interests of the people that they seek to represent, which is primarily the patronage and power associated with the Labor Party. And, of course, even when they appoint people to the Administrative Review Tribunal to do exactly that, they're being failed by them. But it's the Australian community that is suffering the consequences of the patronage network of the Labor Party.

So, this legislation is designed as a backflip, acknowledging the simple reality that their legislation has failed. It isn't going to work for the Australian community, so they are having to fix up their administrative mess. Of course, as much as we don't want a backflip, because we'd rather that the law works, we welcome a decision of a backflip from the Labor Party, because it means we might actually see some improvement in decision-making and in the pathway for decision-making—simply to be able to allow the tribunal to make decisions on the papers for significant migration matters, starting with student visa refusals, and give it a broader discretion to decide other matters on written material. Applicants will still be invited to provide written submissions and respond to any adverse information before a decision is made. These reforms are designed to improve efficiency and reduce the record backlog and deliver faster, fairer outcomes.

So yes, we are fixing the problems of the legislation put forward by the Labor Party that has led to a huge backlog for those many Australians—or those who are not even Australians—who rely on the Administrative Review Tribunal as the basis for fair decision-making. I just wish the Labor Party would acknowledge that there is a need for transparent, informed integrity-based decision-making in so many other areas. We don't have it in the context of the Australian construction industry right now, where we know that, because of the failure of the Labor government, there is flagrant abuse of the law, ongoing allegations and whistleblower evidence increasingly coming out and highlighting that the minister has failed and Labor's solution to corruption on Australian worksites has failed. And we have an administration that has become an enabler of corruption.

If they've got that in one area and they've got a failure, as they have with the Administrative Review Tribunal—to their credit, the government eventually acknowledged that yes, the member for Isaacs didn't get it right, and we have to fix up his mess once again—then maybe they could turn around and say, 'The current Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations is failing the Australian community and is an enabler of corruption, and maybe she needs to fix that legislation.'

See this speech in context