Gavin Pearce (Braddon, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health, Aged Care and Indigenous Health Services) Share this | Hansard source

They're a little noisy over there, aren't they? Thanks, Deputy Speaker. It is a dubious claim made by the Labor-aligned Australia Institute which has been repeated on the apparent basis that saying it often enough will simply justify whatever the attorney wants to do. Importantly, it is not a claim about the performance of that body that I spoke about that the attorney now proposes to abolish. It is not a claim that about the qualifications of the people the Attorney-General will now be purging.

It may surprise people in this place to learn that almost half of the members who currently comprise the tribunal were appointed under the current government. The AAT publishes a list of its statutory appointments, and if you go through that list and sort it out by date, you'll discover that around 160 of the 340-odd members of the AAT were appointed by the current Attorney-General, Mr Dreyfus. All of these 160 will remain after the AAT is abolished. The remaining 180 are not guaranteed a spot. The people who are being targeted are either enrolled as legal practitioners of at least five years standing or have special knowledge or skills relevant to their duties.

As my colleague the member for Berowra has previously pointed out, among the people that the Attorney-General was targeting for purging are people with master's degrees from Ivy League and Oxbridge universities—people with doctorates in law, people with first-class honours and people who are university medallists. These include senior decorated military officers and others who have served in the Australian Defence Force, senior public servants, academics, barristers, partners in law and police officers with decades of experience. They include people who have served on tribunals at a state and territory level. As the member for Berowra has previously said, the people the Attorney-General wanted to target included public servants who headed up departments and agencies, including public servants who have received the public service medal for their work as a public servant. These include a former deputy registrar of a state supreme court, a former sex discrimination commissioner, the chair of the Australian Accounting Standards Board, and the editor of the legal service on practice and procedure for one of the state tribunals. We also acknowledge that there are members of the AAT who have served in parliament or who have served our country through parliamentary service in state or territory legislatures. In itself should not exclude a person from appointment where they are otherwise qualified. To the contrary: the service to our country through its parliament should be valued and should be respected.

It's also worth spending a few minutes addressing the central issue of the tribunal's performance. Ordinarily, when a government body is abolished, it is because there are performance issues that are so deeply entrenched that the only way to address them is to start from scratch. This is why the expense of abolishing and re-establishing the body is justified. It is difficult and certainly not credible to make those claims about the AAT. The last annual report tabled before the Attorney announced his attack on the AAT, the 2021-22 annual report, tells a story of a body meeting or exceeding its benchmarks.

Debate interrupted.

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