Administrative and Judicial Review Legislation Amendment Bill 2026

Ms CHANEY (Curtin) (11:23): The Administrative and Judicial Review Legislation Amendment Bill amends the Administrative Review Tribunal Act and the Migration Act across 12 parts, and most of it is uncontroversial housekeeping: it lets registrars correct obvious errors in tribunal orders; it pauses document deadlines over the Christmas period; it confirms the president sits across every jurisdictional area; it adds a consultation step before non-judicial members are reappointed; and it fixes an unintended gap in the timeframe for taxation review applications.

None of that troubles me. But three parts of the bill go further than housekeeping and reshape how migration and protection matters are decided. The bill would let the tribunal give its reasons for decisions orally rather than in writing, with a written statement provided only if a party asks for one within a set window.

The bill would allow registrars, not tribunal members, to dismiss an application outright if they judge it has no reasonable prospects of success. And it would introduce new identity verification requirements for migration and protection applicants with mandatory dismissal for noncompliance. The detail of that requirement is left entirely to regulations that do not yet exist.

It's these three measures—oral reasons, registrar dismissal powers and identity verification—that I want to focus on today. I want to start by acknowledging that the Administrative Review Tribunal is under real and growing strain. As at 31 May this year, the Tribunal's Protection Division, which conducts independent merits reviews of decisions made by the Department of Home Affairs to refuse or cancel protection—that is, refugee—visas in Australia, had an active case load of more than 37,000 cases, with a median time to finalise them of 155 weeks, or about three years.

The Federal Circuit and Family Court's protection case load sits at over 16,000 cases, with some matters not due for a first hearing until 2029. Migration and protection lodgements now make up 78 per cent of the tribunal's total case load, up from 60 per cent less than a decade ago. The Federal Circuit and Family Court has seen a 116 per cent increase in migration filings since 2022-23, and migration matters now represent 75 per cent of all its non-family-law work.

Now, nobody in this place should pretend that those numbers are acceptable. They're not to the taxpayer paying for a backlog that grows every year, nor to the applicant whose life is on hold because of that backlog. I support efficiency and the timely processing of protection claims.

But here is where I part ways with the government's approach in this bill. The backlog shouldn't be fixed by quietly stripping back protections that exist for good reason because of how much can be at stake for the people making these applications. You don't solve a three-year queue by removing the right to a proper hearing, and you don't protect the integrity of the system by imposing an identity check that many genuine protection visa applicants—including people who are stateless or who fled without the chance to bring any documents with them—will simply have no way of satisfying.

This bill, in its current form, risks undermining the effectiveness and integrity of the merits review system, creating additional burdens for applicants while weakening transparency and accountability. Take the oral reasons provision. Under this bill, the tribunal could deliver its reasons orally, with written reasons provided only if a party specifically requests them within a set period.

For most Commonwealth matters, that might be a reasonable efficiency measure. But, as the Refugee Council pointed out in its submission to the Senate committee inquiry into this bill, protection visa applicants face particular barriers. Many have experienced trauma, persecution or torture that affects their ability to recollect and process complex information.

Many rely on interpreters. Many have limited familiarity with Australian legal processes and, understandably, limited trust in government authorities, after fleeing authoritarian rule. It's not an efficiency improvement to ask a person in that position to correctly understand, in real time, through an interpreter, that they must lodge a formal request for written reasons within 14 days or lose the ability to properly understand and challenge a decision that could return them to persecution or even death.

That is a transfer of risk from the tribunal onto the person least equipped to carry it. Almost two-thirds of applicants are unrepresented at merits review. The Law Council noted that, once you add the 14 days to request written reasons to the further 14 days the tribunal may take to provide them, an applicant is left with barely a week of the 35-day judicial review window to actually prepare and file an application.

This means that most people will be forced to seek judicial review without ever having seen the reasons for the decision they're challenging. Tellingly, the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee saw this too. While the committee recommended the bill be passed, it could not wave through the oral reasons scheme without qualification.

The committee recommended that applicants who receive oral reasons be given clear written notice of the time limits for requesting written reasons and for judicial review, and that the tribunal act as expeditiously as possible when reasons are requested. Now, when a committee that's recommending you pass a bill still feels the need to build a safety rail around one of its central measures, that's the parliament telling the government that the measure is not yet right.

The same pattern shows up with the expanded registrar dismissal powers. This bill would allow registrars—not tribunal members but administrative staff, who do not go through the same merits based, independent appointment process—to dismiss an application entirely if they judge it has no reasonable prospect of success. This goes beyond a procedural function.

It's a substantive judgement, requiring exactly the expertise and independence that the merits review system has until now reserved for tribunal members. Vulnerable, unrepresented applicants may be incorrectly assessed as having no reasonable prospects simply because they lack the legal skill to properly articulate a genuine claim in writing. Many would never even know they had the right to request that their dismissed application be reinstated—that is, their review rights restored, as proposed in this bill.

Then there's identity verification. This is the part of the bill about which we know the least. The bill would allow mandatory dismissal of an application if an applicant cannot satisfy an identity-verification requirement, with the entire substance of that requirement left to regulations that do not yet exist.

Departmental officials were unable to tell the Senate committee how this requirement would work in practice, only that it will be worked through. We should not be legislating mandatory dismissal powers first and figuring out the safeguards for stateless and undocumented people afterwards. I want to speak directly now about the voice of Grandmothers for Refugees in Curtin, a group in my own electorate, women whom I know well, who give their time to advocate for people seeking safety in this country.

In their submission to the committee, they raised the very same concerns I've outlined here—that oral reasons risk creating additional burdens because applicants must first know and understand that they even have a right to request a written decision; that the extension of registrar powers risks weakening procedural safeguards for protection visa applicants because assessing whether an application has no reasonable prospect of success is not a procedural function but one that requires the expertise and independent decision-making of tribunal members; and automatic dismissal for noncompliance with identity-verification requirements risks weakening those same safeguards still further.

Grandmothers for Refugees Curtin has seen firsthand the human cost of a broken review system. The fast-track process, and the Immigration Assessment Authority that sat within it, was introduced in 2014, and, by the time it was finally abolished in October 2024, it was widely regarded as one of the most unfair chapters in this country's asylum history. It was a system that stripped back procedural safeguards in the name of speed, and left a legacy of harm that is still being addressed today.

When Grandmothers for Refugees Curtin identifies that this bill risks repeating those mistakes, I take that seriously, and the House should too. I do not oppose efficiency. I do not oppose a tribunal that resolves matters faster.

But international experience set out in the 2024 Kaldor centre brief shows that fairness can enhance efficiency. Investing in early legal assistance and well-designed case triage, rather than stripping back rights, can speed up asylum processing. That's the model this government should be pursuing.

Instead, this bill asks traumatised, unrepresented people to navigate tighter deadlines with less written information; permits registrars to make substantive judgements on claims without the safeguards that should accompany that responsibility; and asks this parliament to hand over identity-verification powers before anyone can explain how they'll actually work.

There's something troubling in the logic that the committee itself uses to justify this bill. At paragraph 2.59 of its report, the committee notes its concern that 'unscrupulous individuals engaging with merits and judicial review may be deliberately providing incorrect or fraudulent advice to applicants', and identified 'maintaining the integrity' of the review system as a legitimate reason for this bill.

But look at what those measures actually do. Tighter deadlines for written reasons don't touch those unscrupulous individuals; they fall on the applicant who didn't understand the deadline. Registrar dismissal powers don't touch those unscrupulous individuals; they fall on the applicant whose case is wrongly assessed.

And mandatory identity verification doesn't touch those unscrupulous individuals; it falls on the applicant who cannot produce a document. The committee justified this bill in part by the conduct of people who prey on applicants, yet every consequence contained in this part of the bill lands on the applicants themselves. I'm pleased to second the second reading amendment moved by the member for Kooyong.

It doesn't decline the bill a second reading. It asks this House to notice three things about this bill, and it asks the government to fix them. The first concerns a matter of consistency.

This parliament has already accepted that oral reasons are not always appropriate in every jurisdictional area. The bill itself carves out—from the oral reasons discretion—social security matters, veterans entitlements matters, aged-care matters and NDIS matters. Protection visa matters are not carved out.

So we've arrived at a position where the parliament considers a written statement of reasons indispensable when the question is a person's aged-care package but dispensable when the question is whether a person is returned to a country where they may face persecution. I cannot reconcile those two propositions, and I don't believe the government can either. The amendment asks that protection matters be exempt from the oral reasons provision in part 10, consistent with those for other jurisdictional areas.

The second concerns who exercises the dismissal power. Under part 1, the registrar may dismiss an application on the subjective grounds that it has no reasonable prospects of success. This is a function that has, until now, been reserved to tribunal members.

Registrars are not required to hold legal qualifications. The amendment asks that the power be restricted to tribunal members or, in the alternative, that any registrar exercising it hold appropriate legal qualifications and consult a senior member before dismissing a protection visa application. This is the same bar that is applied to every other substantive judgement in the merits review system.

The third concerns identity. The amendment notes that the bill imposes a mandatory identity verification requirement without prescribing in the bill itself the criteria or safeguards that will apply. Many protection applicants are stateless.

Many are undocumented. The amendment asks that the framework in part 12 cannot result in the mandatory dismissal of a protection visa application without the applicant first being given notice and a reasonable opportunity to respond. These are modest targeted requests which will not prevent this tribunal from working faster.

I welcome the opportunity to work with the government on the amendment to address the genuine resourcing crisis at the tribunal without asking the most vulnerable people in our migration system to bear the cost of that fix. Efficiency and natural justice are not in conflict. This bill, as it stands, treats them as if they were.