David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to indicate that the Greens will be supporting the Administrative Review Tribunal (Miscellaneous Measures) Bill 2024 as a result of amendments that will be moved by the government in committee. This bill came before the Senate last year, and we were told at the time that it was effectively a 'rats and mice' provision, dealing with modest amendments of an administrative nature to the ART bill. By and large, that's what this bill actually provides for. It is the Administrative Review Tribunal (Miscellaneous Measures) Bill 2024, and the great bulk of the amendments are of a genuinely modest administrative nature. Some of them are needed to deal with some unforeseen stressors that have occurred within Services Australia with the provision of documents, and we think it's important that those amendments get made.

But hidden in this bill were two proposed amendments to sections 347 and 348 of the Migration Act which sought to deal with a High Court decision not on the ART bill but that interpreted certain provisions in the coalition's previously drafted AAT bill. The High Court said that, when there is a challenge to an application being made because there are minor defects in the application, provided an application is genuinely put before the tribunal, the tribunal has an obligation to deal with it. It doesn't matter if a name is missing or if there is a small piece of information missing. If it's an application in relation to someone's migration status, their refugee status, provided there's a substantive application there, the tribunal has to deal with it.

Of course, that is a beneficial interpretation. It can be absolutely critical that someone's application, once it's filed, is valid. There are so many unfair timeframes and hurdles and prohibitions relating to migration and refugee claims when they're sought to be filed or lodged with what was the AAT and is now the ART. If an application was filed but was found to have some administrative defect in it and therefore was rejected, that person might have lost all their independent review rights, and they might have been stuck with a deeply unfair determination from Home Affairs, as happens thousands and thousands of times a year.

So, to deal with that decision and that interpretation from the High Court on a mirror provision in the former AAT Act, the government proposed amendments to sections 347 and 348 of the Migration Act to provide that an application to the ART in relation to migration matters—that includes refugee matters and people desperately seeking asylum, needing protection—is only properly made where it's made within a specified period, being seven days for those in immigration detention, and is accompanied by the prescribed information and whatever prescribed documents the government sets. Then it says that, unless that information is provided, the ART would have no jurisdiction and therefore must not review an application that isn't properly made.

I want to thank all the NGOs and human rights organisations who reviewed this piece of legislation and belled the cat, saying, 'This is incredibly dangerous.' I want to thank the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Refugee Legal, the refugee and immigration national community law coalition, the Refugee Council of Australia and the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, who all raised what an unfairness this was and raised how some of the most vulnerable people in the country would have their applications rejected with no capacity for the ART to even consider them. It would just be as though they were never made. And that could be because they misspelt their name in the application, got their date of birth wrong or didn't include one of the five documents that were required. This legislation, as initially drafted, as drafted now before amendment, would have meant that those applications would have all been rejected with no discretion. It would have been like they'd never been made.

Of course the coalition jumped onto this and loved it. They like cruel processes. They like unfair, cruel processes that apply to people seeking asylum. They like unfair, cruel processes that apply to people who are seeking to migrate here or bring their family here. They actually specialise in cruelty, so of course the coalition grabbed these amendments with both hands. They love that kind of stuff.