Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal was fatally compromised by the former government, which appointed as many as 85 former Liberal MPs, failed Liberal candidates, former Liberal staffers and other close Liberal associates without any merit based selection. They undermined the tribunal's independence and eroded the quality and efficiency of its decision-making. Let me just say that number again: 85 members. We're not talking about the occasional blip on the radar and we're not talking about something that wasn't known. I'm hopeful that with this legislation, the Administrative Review Tribunal Bill 2023, the public will be able to rebuild their confidence in a new tribunal. We know that this has been an issue since at least 2019, when those sitting opposite now were in government. They commissioned a statutory review by the Hon. Ian Callinan AC KC, which made recommendations that they chose to ignore.

I thank the member for Indi, who spoke previously and raised that critical issue around robodebt and what the ART is about. It is about a pair of eyes on government administration. If decisions that were taken or recommendations that were made were reviewed by the AAT when those opposite were in government, thousands upon thousands—tens of thousands—of people would have been spared being accused of criminally defrauding the Commonwealth when in fact they had not.

It's a significant reform, a necessary reform and a reform that underpins good government that we're suggesting here. And, as I said, it's been a public issue since 2019. The Albanese Labor government announced on 16 December 2022 that we would abolish the AAT. It went into consultation processes across April and May in 2023 and has had other parliamentary committees look at what would be the best way forward.

Those opposite have come in here and argued that this seems a rushed process. Well, everything must seem rushed to those opposite, because they find a way to say no to—to oppose—even the best ideas. Opposing good oversight of government administration doesn't seem a sensible response from any opposition. The public needs to know that we have a government the public can trust to make decisions. We need to have an independent body with oversight of our administration.

This impacts not just one or two members of the public. From the numbers that were presented and referenced in this place by speaker after speaker, in 2022- 2023, there were 41,037 lodgements in the AAT, 42,689 finalisations and 66,131 cases still on hand. These are 100,000 Australians who were at the AAT seeking clarification and seeking what they perceived to be justice over a government administration issue. These are not small things. These are pensioners in my electorate, making queries about dealings with Centrelink. These are the hundreds of people in my electorate who were affected by the robodebt notifications that they received that we now know were unlawful. These are thousands of people in my electorate who may be seeking support from the AAT in terms of a visa application or a spousal visa application.

The AAT exists so that the public can have confidence in the government's administration. It is there to review individual decisions. It needs to be accessible to the public, and it needs to be affordable for the public. They need to have confidence that, when they go into these processes, they will be heard by someone independent, someone credentialled, who will be looking at the issue, and someone that they can trust to have their back and to have another set of eyes across what could be an administrative error by government.

But, instead, what we saw across the previous government's nine years of tenure was a Liberal government finding jobs for their mates, on salaries worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm not going to stand here as a member of this parliament and say that former MPs should not be allowed to be appointed to an appeals tribunal, because some in this place are very well credentialled to do this work. In fact, there's a long history of some former MPs doing excellent work on the AAT. But when you're getting to the number of 85 former Liberal MPs, former Liberal candidates and people with clear lines of donorship to the Liberal Party, or even lobbyists, then we are in a state where the public have a right to not have confidence in the decisions being handed down. And as every member of parliament here knows, if there's a bad-news story about government you can bet your bottom dollar that 10 times more people heard about it than heard about the good story of government.

This government is working incredibly hard to build back public faith in government, in government administration and in government decisions as well as confidence that the Australian Commonwealth government supports people's rights—the accessibility and the affordability for them to question a decision if they see fit to do so. We saw under those opposite a dysfunctional mess where people were waiting months—even years—for a review of a basic decision, often one that had significant ramifications for the lives of these Australians. These were decisions such as whether an older Australian receives a pension, whether a veteran is compensated for a service injury or whether a participant of the NDIS receives funding for an essential support.\

I can say that in my electorate many families have sought an AAT ruling on an NDIS issue. These are real people—tens of thousands of people—and every single one of them deserves the best quality of administrative oversight. They deserve it, they expect it and now they have a government that's bringing legislation into this place to deliver it.

I want to thank the member for Indi for the way she has worked with the Attorney-General in this space. I want to thank her for the speech she just made and say to her that I agree that she should reserve her judgement until she is satisfied, because the people of Indi deserve that, just as the people of every electorate in this country deserve to have their members in this place stand up for fairness, stand up for good governance and stand up for transparency to ensure that we get this right. This is an opportunity to ensure that we never go back to the dark days of the last decade under those opposite so we can start to build back trust in government.

We need a government that's prepared to do the hard work. We need an opposition that's prepared to join a government to put in place things that will better protect Australians and to support us to build back trust in government. We need a government that recognises when people are struggling and takes swift action to make necessary changes. And that is exactly what's happening in this case: thoughtful, careful preparation; legislation in here. The debate continues, and as a government we will land something and start that process of building back trust.

We've had to clean up a huge mess that was dumped on our doorstep by those opposite when we came to office, and we started fixing it immediately, because that's the Labor way. That's why we're here today—to bring forward legislation that will restore confidence and trust in Australia's federal administrative review body by replacing the AAT with the Administrative Review Tribunal. The design of the new body has been heavily informed by public consultation, as our government promised it would be. The new ART will be user focused, not used to provide income for mates. It will be efficient. It will be accessible, independent, timely, fair and, hopefully, trusted.

That is why an important feature of this new body will be a transparent and merit based selection process for the appointment of non-judicial members. This is critical. It is critical also for existing members—those people who have done solid work over many, many years—that their reputations not be besmirched by what the former government did. It's absolutely critical that this legislation go through this parliament so we can get on with delivering for everyday Australians.

I want to assure everyone that cases currently in hand when the AAT is abolished and replaced by the new body will be transferred across. And, as others have referenced, there will the case management system will be modernised to ensure that things are not stuck because of process, or a lack of process, to make sure things can move more quickly to an actual appeal.

The former government's mismanagement of the amalgamation of the AAT with the Social Security Appeals Tribunal, the Migration Review Tribunal and the Refugee Review Tribunal is at the heart of the problems here. The former government combined all of those tribunals into one tribunal, a tribunal that they then went on to undermine not just by appointments but by not taking advice or not taking the implications of the administrative cases in which the tribunal made a judgement against the former government, as we saw in the case of robodebt. We saw months and months of pain for robodebt victims because the government even refused to listen to its own tribunal. That went on for far longer than it needed to go on. In fact, ultimately it needed individual Australians to join together and go to the courts to get a decision. So, when the former government oversaw the administrative oversight procedures for the Commonwealth, they not only undermined them but ignored them, leading to the tribunal being perceived by the public as useless. There isn't anything more damning that I can think of to say about the way the former government mismanaged this space.

The AAT has existed for a long time. It was established on 1 July 1976 following reviews of the administrative decision-making that took place in 1971. There was a need for a mechanism for external review of government decisions that was accessible, informal and relatively affordable. It was necessary. The Whitlam government tried to bring this legislation in. It was eventually brought in by the Malcolm Fraser government. So it's a legacy that both of the major parties, I assume, would say that they are proud of. I encourage those opposite today to support this bill in the House so that good governance can be trusted by the Australian public and so that people in my electorate and electorates around the country will believe, if there is a decision made, that they have a right of appeal to a trusted source where they will get a fair go. It's pretty simple. For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone in this House would oppose this legislation.

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