Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I want to briefly address the second reading amendment that has been moved by the member for North Sydney. The government opposes this second reading amendment, and I want to make some general comments about these bills. The ART bills substantially harmonise procedural arrangements for review of decisions under the Migration Act, which is a very substantial improvement compared with the current system.

Under the current arrangements—that's the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal Act—none of the provisions relating to the AAT's powers and procedures apply at all to reviews of migration and protection decisions. Instead—and this has happened over many years—there's a separate set of powers and procedures that are set out in the Migration Act called codes of procedure. The Administrative Review Tribunal bills remove this dichotomy. They apply standard tribunal powers to migration and protection matters.

As far as possible, that's the approach that we've taken with the new Administrative Review Tribunal: it's to have standard processes for all of the tribunal's jurisdictions, including—and this is a very major change—migration and protection matters. There are a small number of special procedures retained, as there are in separate legislation for many jurisdictions, to ensure that tribunal reviews are workable within the framework of the migration system. Of course, it's the case that we're going to have to make sure in the coming years—if the Administrative Review Tribunal legislation passes the Senate and we create the tribunal, as we sincerely hope will happen in short order—that the intent of these reforms it being achieved. That's what the statutory review enables us to do.

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