David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Unlike the Labor Party, the Liberal Party and One Nation, the Greens will be opposing the Administrative Review Tribunal and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025. I was on the review by the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, and I listened to multiple witnesses from a variety of different organisations who gave clear evidence about why this bill should not be supported, how it will take away important procedural rights, how it is unfairly targeted at migrants and how, potentially, it is going to give significantly expanded powers to the government of the day to remove even more rights from reviews in migration matters.

I also heard, because I listened, the evidence about the real failures causing the backlog not being in the Administrative Review Tribunal—although I accept that they're underresourced and they don't have the appointments they should have to deal with the work. The real reason the backlog is happening in the ART is the poor behaviour of Home Affairs and its automatic refusal of tens of thousands of visa applications because people haven't got all their documentation together at a particular point in time. The surge of refusals from Home Affairs explains a large part of the backlogs in the ART.

What I find remarkable, having listened carefully to Senator Cash and then to Senator Stewart, is that not one of them referred to the multiple compelling submissions from stakeholders and people engaged in the space who said that this bill should not be supported. Not one of them made any reference to those, so no wonder those stakeholders are asking themselves, 'What is the process for—this sham process where the government presents a piece of legislation which is largely reheating the coalition's previous attacks on procedural fairness rights in the ART?' To that extent, Senator Cash was right that this is legislation from the Labor Party trying to put into the microwave some failed efforts from the coalition previously. That part of Senator Cash's analysis was right. What Senator Cash failed to address, of course, is that the intent of the coalition at the time and the intent of Labor now, no doubt with the support of One Nation, is to remove rights from people when they say that their visa application has been unfairly or wrongly refused by Home Affairs. If the government were serious about reform to address the backlog that the ART is facing, it should do two things: it should properly and adequately resource the ART, putting in the members who are needed to do the job, and it should look to Home Affairs and its poor behaviour—its 'refuse first, ask questions later' behaviour—that is driving tens of thousands of applications into the ART. But, of course, that would require putting the hard word on Home Affairs, not punching down on migrants.