Administrative and Judicial Review Legislation Amendment Bill 2026

Mr FRENCH (Moore) (17:57): I rise to support the Administrative and Judicial Review Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. At its heart, this bill is about something fairly simple: when government makes a decision that affects somebody's life, that person should have a fair chance—a fair way—to challenge it, and the decision should be reviewed by people who are qualified to do the job.

The process should be independent, and it should work quickly enough that the final answer still means something when it arrives. That last point is important. As a former lawyer, I can confirm that there are few things the legal profession can do quite as effectively as turning a simple problem into a very long process.

Sometimes that complexity is necessary. Sometimes it really is not. This bill is about knowing the difference.

The Administrative Review Tribunal reviews decisions made under more than 400 Commonwealth acts and legislative instruments. That includes decisions involving migration, veterans' entitlements, the NDIS, child support, workers compensation, taxation and security assessments. Those are serious decisions.

For the person on the receiving end, they can affect where they live, the support they receive, the tax they pay or their ability to remain in Australia. That is why administrative review is not some obscure legal process that only lawyers should care about. It is part of making government accountable.

If government gets something wrong, there needs to be somewhere a person can go to say, 'Look at this again,' and, if the government keeps getting the same thing wrong, a functioning review system should help expose that too. That is good for the individual. That is also good for government.

But, to have confidence in that system, people also need confidence in the institution doing the reviewing. That brings us to why the Albanese Labor government established the Administrative Review Tribunal in the first place. The ART commenced in October 2024, replacing the old Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

The new tribunal was built around transparent, merit based appointments, with additional members to deal with backlogs and better procedures. We did that because the old system had lost public confidence. Under the former Liberal and National governments, the AAT had become something resembling a coalition retirement village.

More than 80 former Liberal and National candidates, political associates and mates were appointed to the tribunal during their time in office. Losing an election should not be a selection criterion for a quasi-judicial appointment, yet for a while there it appeared to be remarkably helpful. Merits review became a coalition consolation prize.

It was bad for the institution, it was bad for public confidence and, frankly, it was unfair to the many capable and independent people who were serving on the tribunal and doing their jobs properly. So Labor abolished the AAT and replaced it with a tribunal based on merit. Qualified people should be appointed because they are qualified.

It should not be a revolutionary proposition, yet, after nine years of coalition government, apparently it required legislation. The reforms are working. The ART is finalising more applications than its predecessors did in earlier years.

But that does not mean the job is finished. A government should never introduce a reform, congratulate itself and assume the institution can then be left untouched forever. Good administration requires maintenance.

The ART is dealing with enormous pressure. By 31 May this year, the tribunal had received more than 77,000 applications during the reporting year. It's on-hand caseload had grown to more than 131,000 applications.

The median time to finalise an application had increased from 45 weeks five years ago, and only 43 per cent of applications were being finalised within 12 months. Migration is a major part of that pressure. The Federal Circuit and Family Court is facing similar challenges.

Migration accounted for two-thirds of filings in its general federal law jurisdiction in 2024-25, and more than 18,000 migration applications remained pending at the end of the reporting period. So there is a practical problem here: there are more applications, and there is a growing backlog. If parliament can remove unnecessary administration without reducing fairness, then we should do it.

And that is what this bill seeks to achieve. One change concerns written reasons. At present, the tribunal can explain its decisions orally, but in many reviews it must produce written reasons as well.

This bill allows the tribunal in appropriate cases to give its decision and the reasons orally and provide written reasons if a party requests them. That sounds like a small amendment, but in practice, across tens of thousands of applications, it can free up a considerable amount of time. If the applicant understands the decision, accepts it and does not require written reasons, there is little value in requiring a tribunal member to spend hours producing a document nobody asked for.

That time instead can be spent deciding another case. But this is not a blanket rule. The bill specifically protects areas where written reasons can be especially important.

Reviews involving social security, veterans entitlements, aged care and the NDIS will continue to require written reasons, and that is the right balance. These cases can involve vulnerable Australians, complicated evidence and significant consequences. And, in cases where oral reasons are permitted, a person can still ask for written reasons.

So this is not about removing accountability; it is about not producing paperwork purely for the pleasure of producing paperwork. As someone who spent years working as an electrician before becoming a lawyer, I've learnt the two professions take a slightly different view of paperwork. An electrician generally wants to know what the problem is and how they fix it.

A lawyer may occasionally want to know where we can establish a working group to determine the problem first. I remain sympathetic to electricians. This bill takes that same practical approach elsewhere.

Migration and protection review applications will be required to use an approved form. That means the tribunal gets the information it needs at the start, rather than staff spending time chasing basic details later. Again, this is fairly basic.

If information is required to process an application, it makes sense for it to be asked for when the application is lodged. The bill will also allow the president of the tribunal to authorise registrars to exercise some additional powers. That includes reinstating applications in appropriate circumstances and dismissing an application where there is no reasonable prospect of success.

This power should not be misunderstood. It is not an invitation to dispose of difficult cases because they are inconvenient; the test is for whether there is no reasonable prospect of success. The explanatory material gives the example of an applicant who cannot objectively meet the visa criterion because the law requires them to be in Australia when the application is made and they are in fact outside of Australia.

There is little public benefit in requiring a tribunal member to conduct a full hearing simply to discover the objective fact already capable of determining the application. There are also safeguards. The president can impose conditions on a registrar's authority, and an application dismissed in error can be reinstated.

I recognise concerns have been raised that registrars should not drift into making substantive decisions that properly belong to tribunal members, and that is a legitimate issue for parliament to scrutinise. The distinction between efficient case management and merit decision-making needs to remain clear, but the answer cannot be to insist that every procedural step must always be performed by the most senior person available.

A well-run legal institution should have appropriately qualified people exercising appropriately defined powers with review and safeguards where they are required. The bill also allows obvious errors in a registrar's decision or reason to be corrected by an authorised member. Again, that is another sensible provision.

If someone writes '2025' when they plainly meant '2026', we should be able to fix it without recreating the battle of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. There is even a provision excluding the period from 24 December to 14 January when calculating certain deadlines for original decision-makers to provide documents. It may be one of the few propositions capable of securing complete agreement across Commonwealth bureaucracy.

Very little is happening between Christmas Eve and the middle of January. We may as well legislate for that reality. But the most significant reform in this bill concerns identity verification in migration cases.

The bill creates a power to require applicants seeking review of prescribed migration or protection decisions to verify their identity. The requirement can apply both in the ART and in the Federal Circuit and Family Court. The detailed requirements, including when verification must occur, whether it can happen in person or virtually and what information must be provided, will be established through the regulations.

Classes of applicants can also be exempted. But why do this? If someone is asking an Australian tribunal court to review a migration decision made about them, it is reasonable to establish that the person exists, that they are who they claim to be and that they actually know the application has been made.

We know there is a cohort of applications made on behalf of people without their express knowledge or consent, and that undermines the system. Review rights exist to protect genuine applicants. They should not become a mechanism for third parties to lodge applications merely to extend the process.

Identity verification creates an early point of active engagement. The applicant is effectively saying, 'Yes, this is me; yes, this is my application; and, yes, I want this review to continue.' That is hardly an unreasonable expectation. For ART proceedings, if an applicant who is required to verify their identity does not do so, the application must be dismissed.

But that is not necessarily the end. A person who has had genuine reason for being unable to complete verification can seek reinstatement and explain what occurred. The tribunal can then decide whether another verification attempt should be required.

The Federal Circuit and Family Court operates differently. Because it is a chapter III court, exercising judicial power, the legislation preserves greater judicial discretion. A person who has failed to meet the identity requirement needs leave to continue.

The court can extend the period for compliance. It can dispense with the requirement. It may dismiss the proceeding rather than being required to do so.

And it can permit a dismissed proceeding to be reinstated. That distinction is deliberate. It respects the constitutional role of the court.

There have also been concerns raised about how identity verification could affect vulnerable people, including people who are stateless or have had difficulty obtaining identity documents. Those concerns deserve proper consideration. That is one reason the legislation allows exemptions to be created and flexibility in how verification occurs.

It can be conducted virtually as well as in person, and, importantly, the regulations themselves remain subject to a parliamentary scrutiny and disallowance. So parliament retains the ability to intervene if the rules do not operate as intended. The objective here is not to create another obstacle for genuine applicants; it is the opposite.

Every hour spent dealing with an application lodged without a person's knowledge or an application that plainly cannot succeed is another hour that cannot be spent on somebody genuinely waiting for a decision. Delay has a human cost. For an applicant with a legitimate claim, a backlog is not an interesting statistic in an annual report; it is months of uncertainty.

That is why efficiency and fairness should not be treated as competing ideas. A slow system is not necessarily a fair system. A system buried in unnecessary process does not become more simply because it produces more paperwork.

Good administration means giving each case the attention it requires, no less but also no more. That principle runs through this bill. It gives the tribunal greater flexibility in how reasons are delivered.

It protects written reasons where applicants are more vulnerable. It improves the information received when migration applications are lodged. It gives registrars carefully defined additional powers.

It makes it easier to correct obvious errors. It provides greater flexibility in the deployment of tribunal members, and it introduces an identity check designed to ensure migration review applications involve real people actively participating in their own proceedings. These are not dramatic changes and that is not a criticism.

Parliament is sometimes at its most useful when it fixes the machinery. The Albanese government undertook a major reform when we abolished the discredited AAT and established the Administrative Review Tribunal. We replaced political appointments with a merit based process.

We restored integrity to an institution that Australians need to trust, and we are doing the less glamourous but also equally important work of making that institution operate better. The coalition may object to our record on the ART and I understand why—we abolished one of their more successful post-election employment programs—but Australians did not need an administrative appeals tribunal designed as a soft landing for failed political candidates; they needed an independent review body, and that is what Labor created.

It is our responsibility now to make sure it remains independent, fair and capable of doing its job in the face of a rapidly growing caseload. The standard should be straightforward. Government decisions need to be capable of review.

Genuine applicants must receive procedural fairness. Decision-makers must be independent and qualified. Our system should not waste months doing work that adds nothing to the quality of the result.

This is what this bill advances. It strengthens the tribunal we created, it protects the integrity of migration review and it helps ensure Australians who need administrative review receive something that every good justice system should aim to provide: a fair decision from an independent decision-maker within a reasonable time period. I commend the bill to the House.