Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Most Australians don't commit criminal offences and don't get involved in car accidents, so they don't end up in courts, criminal or civil. But 111,000 Australians, or people who aspire to be Australians, appeared before the Administrative Review Tribunal in the last 12 months. When you look at the jurisdiction of this particular tribunal, which is the subject of the amending bill we are talking about today, you will see the breadth of the jurisdiction of the ART. Child support—you would think that that would be a very large proportion of the work the ART does, but it is a very small proportion. There are well over 600,000 Australians who interact or are a part of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, but a very small proportion of those people ever get to the ART. Indeed, you would think, with the number of Australians who interact with the social security system, that there'd be many people, through Centrelink or paid parental leave, who would be engaging with the ART as a litigant, but hardly anyone of them does compared to what I'm about to talk about. It's the same with veterans or workers compensation cases, or indeed taxation matters.

The majority of the work that's done by the ART is in the area of migration, or indeed those people seeking protection. In any given year, migration makes up 50 to 60 per cent of the work of the ART, or its predecessor, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. That's what's the case. Of those migration cases, about two-thirds of the work that's done relates to student visa issues. If you take migration together with the protection visas people are seeking, they form an overwhelming amount of the work that the ART does. So the bill we're debating today is important. It addresses efficiency and effectiveness in our system, and it maintains integrity and allows people to still pursue their rights in a fair way—the idea of dealing with matters on the papers is a very common thing when it comes to our judicial system.

I'm pleased to speak on this bill, the Administrative Review Tribunal and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025. We are committed as a government to upholding the rule of law. We are committed as a government to enabling access to justice and maintaining and promoting the public's trust in our legal system, as a matter of principle. But there won't be trust in the system if people don't get dealt with in a timely way. The 111,000 Australians who dealt with the ART last year, according to the figures from the ART itself, need to make sure they get access to justice.

Administrative law and merits review are important. They're a longstanding pillar of Australia's system of government and our legal system. People who are impacted by decisions of government have a recourse, a right to review, or an avenue of appeal in a relatively informal way. It's critical. We see that often with matters that are dealt with in, say, a lower part of the system, where it's not necessarily a magistrate or a judge but a registrar who deals with matters on an informal basis, in the civil courts. That's why I say that this is a good decision of the government. It is efficient but still fair. It maintains the right of individuals impacted by a government decision to pursue a review of that decision. This ART is an absolute necessity that we undertook to legislate to establish. Remember what the former government did to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. They absolutely stacked it with their mates. Any form of failed Liberal or National Party candidate they could find who might have had a law degree from some obscure university they stuck on the AAT. It was astonishing. They didn't even need a law degree, frankly. They just stuck them on there.

And the great irony of the whole thing with the AAT is that you would see in the media the Liberal and National Party politicians constantly berating the AAT for its failure when they were the ones that stuck their mates on there. And they say: 'It is inefficient. They're making decisions we do not like.' Well, I'm sorry. There have been a lot of prime ministers and premiers in the history of this country who had decisions they didn't like. I channel Ben Chifley with the bank nationalisation decision. Prime ministers and premiers do not like a whole bunch of decisions made by courts and tribunals. We had to put in the ART. We just had to, to bring integrity back into the system. They made such a mess of the AAT. We had to resolve the huge backlog of student visas created as a legacy of the Morrison government flinging open the borders after the pandemic. And they constantly criticise us about migration, but the massive increase in migration after COVID happened on their watch. They initiated it, often with the support, can I just say, of the business community and the university sector as well.

This legislation will improve the tribunal's efficiency. There are clear existing caseloads, and we need to address them. We need to reduce the likelihood of backlogs in the future, especially for migration matters. So the bill introduces a new, on-the-papers review process without an oral hearing, and that is just so common in lots of civil matters that are dealt with in our legal system. Student visa matters, like I said, take up two-thirds of the migration matters that the ART deals with. If you look at student visa matters as a percentage of the total number of people who engage with the ART, it is an enormous percentage. We're dealing with a really big problem that has been created courtesy of the Morrison government, and there is a need for us to address this. We're going to create a new discretion for the tribunal to decide not to hold a hearing if additional circumstances and specified criteria are met. These reforms are balanced and targeted. They will enable the tribunal to efficiently manage the caseload. Quick, efficient and informal merits review is a fundamental feature of our legal system. To say it's not is simply nonsense. It just doesn't bear fact. The fact is it is a feature of our legal system. This will improve government decision-making and help maintain public confidence in our institutions.

We're committed to merits review. That is precisely why we abolished the dysfunctional AAT. It was beset, can I just say, with mismanagement and political stacking by those opposite. The new ART that replaced the AAT came into operation in October last year. It's a sustainable model, but we need to improve it. As part of this, we're committed to making sure the ART has the tools it needs to deliver timely and high-quality review of government decisions. One of the core objectives of the ART is to ensure that applications are resolved quickly and with little expense. The cost of justice—as a former litigation lawyer, I know—often results in inequities and injustices in our legal system due to the power imbalance between litigants. Anyone who has ever been charged with a criminal offence knows the power of the state in criminal matters. Anyone that has to litigate a corporate or civil matter involving commercial matters knows the power of money. Anyone that has to make an application for property settlement in a family law case, when you are the party that's at home and often without the qualifications, skills, talents, ability and money against a very wealthy person, knows the power, imbalances and injustices in our systems. So we need to make sure that we can equalise it, but we also need to make sure that we have efficient methods, and that's why this whole process under the ART is critical for those 111,000 Australians and people who engage with the system.

Onshore applicants seeking review of a decision to refuse a grant of certain visas are entitled to stay in Australia on a bridging visa for the duration of the merits review process. We, as politicians in the House of Representatives and, indeed, in the other place, would know that our offices deal with people every day in relation to those issues. In this context, efficient review procedures are important to reduce delays in decision-making. Backlogs and extended waiting times at the tribunal create incentives for non-genuine applicants to apply for review in order to extend their stays in Australia. For genuine applicants, this creates an access to justice issue, as the volume of applications that must be dealt with, including from non-genuine applicants, means they have to wait months and, indeed, sometimes years for a decision.

This point was made in the Rapid review into the exploitation of Australia's visa system, delivered by Ms Christine Nixon AO, APM in March 2023. The challenge we face now, since the tribunal was established by the Albanese government, is that the tribunal has seen an unprecedented level of demand for independent review services and, in particular, for applications for review of the student visas I referred to and refusals by delegates in relation to those matters.

What happened was that, at the height of the pandemic in early 2022, the former Morrison government invited international students back to Australia to work in critical sectors to address workforce shortages. It might seem fine in principle, but the implementation of this decision was badly botched. It effectively opened the floodgates, without any proper management or oversight, and in particular they corrupted the student visa pipeline with their terrible decision to uncap student visa work rights.

Students were allowed unlimited access to the job market when they were supposedly in full-time study. The result of this was that a lot of non-genuine students came in, not to study but to earn money, which they sent back home and, thus, contributed significantly to the current backlog the ART is dealing with. Another contributing factor was the post-COVID-19 temporary activity visa, which allowed people on student visas to, at no cost, switch from their student visa or suspend it and work unlimited hours. Even before the current surge, the old, dysfunctional AAT had a shocking case backlog which was allowed to build under the coalition.

The reality is that our government inherited a shocking mess in this area, and we're attempting to deal with it. We tried to rectify this by putting international student numbers on a more sustainable path and reducing the number of student visas issued. To be clear, international education is an incredibly important export industry for Australia, including in my electorate of Blair in South-East Queensland. I've got two campuses from the University of Southern Queensland, and I know how important it is for my local community. Indeed, greater priority has now been given to regional and outer metropolitan universities like UniSQ and to TAFE, but we need to manage the growth of the sector in a sustainable fashion, along with our migration program more broadly, and that's exactly what this government is doing. Notwithstanding our efforts in this space, since last year the ART has continued to experience a surge in applications for reviews of decisions to review student visas related to that post-pandemic boom in international students. Given this tribunal is a demand driven organisation, this has highlighted the importance of ensuring that it's equipped with the tools it needs for quick and efficient merits review.

It's clear, from the recent operational experience of the tribunal, that some of its current procedures are not flexible enough. That's why we're doing what we're doing here. Inefficient allocation of resources and significant delays and backlogs, particularly in the temporary migration space, means that applicants are left in limbo for far too long—a one-size-fits-all approach that's resource intensive and not appropriately targeted. So this bill gives the tribunal the additional flexibility. It enhances the powers and procedures of the tribunal to ensure that it achieves the objective we want: resolving matters as expeditiously yet as justly as possible.

Informed by the recommendation of the Nixon review and, I might add, the operational experience of the ART since October 2024, the bill ensures that the merits review is proportionate in so many ways. It amends the legislation to ensure an on-the-papers process, and that's important. What we do in relation to this is critical. We'll seek submissions and consider those submissions before a decision, and that's important. The process will reduce backlogs. Oral hearings will not be required for this visa class, and the growing backlog will be addressed.

This is an important reform. We're cleaning up the Liberals and Nationals mess yet again.

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