Administrative Review Tribunal and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025

Mr TIM WILSON (Goldstein) (19:13): As the member for Goldstein, it is a great privilege to speak on this legislation, the Administrative Review Tribunal and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025. 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, but we live in a democracy. There are, of course, a diversity of views that are allowed to be had. There are a diversity of views that are allowed to be spoken.

As sure as night follows day, some people are entitled to be part of the artifice of the state that are not members of the Australian Labor Party. Mr Kennedy: Shock, horror! Mr TIM WILSON: Shocking, I know, Member for Cook, that some people are allowed to serve the Australian community even if they are not signed-up members of the Labor Party.

This is not yet Pyongyang yet. When the Prime Minister comes back from one of his international sojourns, as he does, and tries to treat this parliament like the National People's Congress, some of us are still going to be here quite happily asking him questions that are not the questions he wants to have asked of him—not the ones telling him how wonderful he is or how glorious his new regime is or about all of his incredible success stories that he wants to claim and boast about.

Some of us are going to ask him difficult questions about the relationships that he has, including why he relies on the votes of the head of the Victorian division of the CFMEU on the national executive of the Labor Party. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Dr Freelander ): Order! I remind the member to be relevant to the legislation.

Mr TIM WILSON: Absolutely, Deputy Speaker. I'm being 100 per cent relevant to the legislation. We are talking about review rights and review processes, and it's very important to make sure that we're drawing attention very clearly to the issue of transparency, consistency of review rights and, of course, integrity, which goes right to the heart of this government.

In fact, that was a key theme of the previous member's speech and that of just about every single member who got up and spoke on this legislation: integrity is at the heart of this legislation and how it speaks to this government, and I agree with them. We've got the member for Bruce, who's sitting at the table—he was standing only moments ago—and he's directly connected to the head of the Victorian division of the CFMEU.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Assistant Minister? Mr Hill: On relevance and respect for the chair, word association is not relevance.

That was an unhinged rant that has nothing to do with a clause in the bill, and he didn't move a second reading amendment. The DEPUTY SPEAKER: As I've already mentioned, the member should be relevant to the legislation. Mr TIM WILSON: 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: 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.' The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

I ask that you withdraw that, please. Mr TIM WILSON: I withdraw. The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you.

Mr TIM WILSON: The minister has failed the Australian community, and whistleblowers are saying that corruption is running rife under the solution that is currently legislated—that she is oversighting and that she is backing to the hilt—and are saying the strongest possible course of action is needed. When it comes down to it, when you acknowledge a failure like the failure of the Administrative Review Tribunal and you're prepared to amend the legislation to acknowledge that, maybe it's time to look at other institutions and artifices that you have introduced and try to fix those as well.

This is a teaching moment, not just about the failure of the member for Isaacs but about the legacy of Senator Murray Watt and of course the current operations of the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. But we know full well that there will be no action by this government, for a simple reason: too many people on the other side of this chamber right now are tainted and directly connected to the misconduct that is leading to a situation that they want to perpetuate.

There is a real need now for this parliament to stand up and call out the conduct that is leading to corruption on Australian worksites, and we are going to continue to prosecute this argument every step of the way. I hope the Prime Minister and others will call out this conduct and improve the standing for the Australian community.