Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Like the member for Lyons, I'm very supportive of this important reform, the Administrative Review Tribunal Bill 2023. I'm very supportive of the re-establishment of a high-quality, high-integrity tribunal adjudicative function in Australia. We need it, and unfortunately it's been missing because of the actions and decisions made by the former government. Having a tribunal function of this kind is a crucial part of life in Australia. It was a very good idea of Labor advocates back in the seventies, and it was implemented by the Fraser government, to their credit. There should be lots of things like that that we can look at that are effectively conceived, introduced, established and then defended and maintained as a bipartisan matter. I cannot imagine that anyone would look at the role this tribunal has provided and needs to provide and say: 'Look, let's run that down. Let's use that as our own-kind warehousing opportunity when it comes to people from our side of the political fence who have missed out on something and need a place to spend a few well-paid years.'

The bottom line is that Australians deserve and must have a timely high-integrity avenue through which they can seek fairness and justice. And, as the term 'administrative review' suggests, there are always going to be circumstances where a member of the community is, quite rightly, intent on testing or challenging a decision or determination of a government agency. First and foremost, it's our role in government and as a parliament more broadly to make sure the function, capacity, resources and morale of those agencies is as good as it can be so that the decisions made are of the highest quality in the first instance.

But nothing is perfect, and it will always be possible that something isn't quite perfect. In any case, in order to have confidence in decisions made by government and particularly by government agencies, when you have a tribunal, a review opportunity, that builds confidence. Some people will think the determination they've got isn't quite right, and they can go and test that, and that's an opportunity they should have. In some cases they might be proved correct and in some cases they won't be. But either of those outcomes builds greater trust in the system.

As the member for Lyons said, there'll be lots of Australians who never have cause to think, 'In the past I needed to go off to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal'—the AAT, in future to be the Administrative Review Tribunal. But there's not an inconsiderable number of people who at some point will receive a determination that has a massive bearing on their circumstances, on their wellbeing, and who will feel that it's in their interests to go and test that. It could be for an age pension or a disability pension. It could be an Australian veteran. It could be a single parent. It could be for a migration or visa related matter, or something to do with the Australian tax office or the NDIS. You don't need much imagination to think about how a determination in one of those areas that is categorically not in your favour could have a massive impact. It's basically about income support. It's about support for a person with disability and their broader family. It's about access to different parts of our migration system. Decisions that don't go the way you'd expect in any of those areas are not small matters, and you should absolutely have the right to go and have them tested in a way that can properly be described as high integrity, transparent, efficient and timely.

Unfortunately, because of the way the AAT was run down under the previous government, that has not been the case. So both the substance and the perception—both of those things are important—of the way the AAT worked fell into poor disrepair. The tribunal wasn't dealing with matters in a timely way, to take the old saying—I don't know who it's attributed to—that justice delayed is justice denied. Again, when you think about what this covers—income support, disability support—if you have to wait forever and ever in circumstances where you may well have been cut off from one of the very few sources if not the only source of income that you have available to you, then every single day that you remain cut off from that support is a massive problem for you.

So we are making sure that a tribunal will exist that can make determinations about these matters carefully, fairly, responsibly and accurately. We know, from some of the acute kinds of incompetence and maladministration under the previous government, what happens when those mistakes occur in the course of the conduct of Australian government agencies. What particularly happens when those mistakes manifest plainly before the eyes of thousands of Australians in their living circumstances is that they are then incapable of being corrected. We saw that through the robodebt fiasco. I hope that there's never again something as catastrophic, in terms of scale and acute harm, as the robodebt fiasco. We can never forget that.

As the member for Lyons said, the government has taken on the responsibility of putting a high-quality, high-integrity and transparent tribunal and adjudicative function back into the centre of Australian life, and we've not done it by licking our finger and holding it up in the wind. We've done it with the guidance of some very serious reviews—the three separate reviews that the member for Lyons mentioned. Core among them was the review into the robodebt fiasco. It is worth remembering that the problems that manifested in the AAT—the way in which people were appointed, the kinds of people that were appointed, the delays and backlog that became characteristic of the system and the fact that the support structure in terms of electronic case management and other things was rundown, as resources were run down in the Public Service in Australia across the board—didn't just happen as the years went by. That happened because of the decisions of the previous government.

The previous government has never had much regard for Australia's Public Service. It's always been looking to crunch Australian's Public Service into smaller and smaller pieces, outsource its work, underpay its staff, knock people's morale around and casualise roles within those sectors. That is part of what happened to the AAT. It was certainly the case that at the core of how the AAT functioned—and how the new ART will also function—is that people will take on the very serious and sober responsibility of reviewing matters and making decisions. There was a situation where you had quite an extraordinary proportion of people appointed to those roles who really were chosen on the basis of how they were affiliated with the government of the day, the Liberal and National parties. There was a situation where, in one of the three terms of government, the ratio approached one in three. Then, in the Morrison government—the last term of the Liberal-National government—nearly four in 10 people were being appointed to a tribunal who had a clear connection to, or affiliation with, the Liberal Party. In many cases they had gone into those very well-paid roles immediately after losing an election, as a failed Liberal candidate or member or after coming adrift from a Liberal staffer position.

You get people who aren't properly qualified and don't have the requisite experience. Just as problematically, you get people who, by their nature and chosen course in life—which is perfectly valid—are affiliated with a political party and fight that ideological battle in the way that they see fit. To then find yourself being required to sit in judgement on the policies and the administration of the policies and programs of that government creates a clear conflict of interest. We saw that manifested in many instances.

We are not going to allow that to continue to be the case. In barely two years of government we've taken on the clean-up task in a whole range of areas. This is one of them. Australians deserve, and must have, a high-integrity, high-quality, transparent, fair and timely review process that they can have access to when they receive a very impactful decision from a government agency in some of the areas I've mentioned. That is what we are going to ensure is the case by providing the resources for the new Administrative Review Tribunal and, crucially, changing some of the settings around the way in which people are appointed, to make that absolutely a transparent and merit based process to make sure that where possible reviews are reported—I said before that justice delayed is justice denied. It's also true that justice needs not only to be done but to be seen to be done. The more people are able not only to experience for themselves but to see more generally in the broader community that there is an ability to go and challenge determinations and to have that occur fairly and properly, the more people will have faith in our system as a whole. It does contribute to not just the health but the health through faith in democracy, which is under threat. We need Australians to shape the governments that serve them, to shape the policies that serve them and also then to have faith in the outcomes of those processes. That's the virtuous circle of a healthy democratic system, and that's one of the things that we're doing here.

There will be a lot of people who, if they were to flick on the TV and find that there's currently a debate about the Administrative Review Tribunal, probably won't—

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