Paul Scarr (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Multicultural Engagement) Share this | Hansard source

I will certainly not be mean in my comments. Senator Shoebridge was happy to call those on this side mean and use other pejoratives on a collective basis. I would like to stick to the substance of the issue. There are a number of issues which cause me deep concern.

First, I want to talk about process. The process we go through to pass legislation in this place is important. There needs to be adequate time for scrutiny and review of legislation that has a great impact on the lives of Australians. From the start of this process, I and others have raised our deep concern that, in relation to extraordinarily complicated legislation—hundreds and hundreds of pages long—there was insufficient time for adequate scrutiny and to make sure that this legislation, the Administrative Review Tribunal (Miscellaneous Measures) Bill 2024, was correct and fit for purpose.

We have just heard Senator Cash refer to some deeply disturbing consequences arising from the haste with which this legislation was pushed through this place. Just to recap: this is in the context of women's safety in child support matters. Because of the passage of the administrative review tribunal legislation, Services Australia is now inadvertently in the position where every 28 days it is forced to manually review each customer file that is before the tribunal. It's a new requirement and an incredibly intensive requirement. It involves reviewing thousands of documents and applying redactions to protect Australians from family and domestic violence risk. In this context, it is absolutely an indictment on this process that we have a situation where, for 40 per cent of the matters where there is no family and domestic violence indicator on the file, there is still a need to seek a nondisclosure order because of the inherent risk of this botched legislation to cause either parent reacting adversely to the content of those documents, which could thereby trigger a family and domestic violence incident.

This is serious. I must say, I was absolutely mortified when this was raised with me by Senator Cash. I'm sure Senator Shoebridge, to give him credit, as a member of the committee, would also be deeply concerned and mortified that this was not picked up through the scrutiny process, because we didn't have enough time. The agencies themselves didn't have enough time to consider it. We've got this amendment, item 2 of schedule 4, which, on the face of it, is reasonably benign:

Omit "came into the possession or under the control of the decision-maker", substitute "came into the possession or under the control of the decision-maker, or within a longer period specified in the practice directions—

to give the president an opportunity to issue practice directions so that the department doesn't have to go through this cumbersome process in order to mitigate this inherent risk of either parent reacting adversely to what's on the file. It is astounding stuff—deeply disturbing. Throughout this process, the warnings were there. I quote from the Law Council of Australia in this regard, who were at the forefront in terms of warning that, because of the abbreviated nature of this process, these sorts of things could happen:

On 14 December 2023, following a referral from the Commonwealth Attorney General, the Committee commenced an inquiry into the Bills, calling for written submissions by 18 January 2024. Whilst the Law Council is pleased to have obtained an extension to 2 February 2024 to lodge its submission, it remains very concerned that the Committee's truncated inquiry period will undermine or diminish the democratic and proper scrutiny of the Bills.

And that's what we have. I feel deeply for those public servants in the department who have had to deal with this issue because of the sloppiness of the process and in particular the Attorney's fixation on trying to push this bill through so quickly. This has had a real and negative consequence upon the Australian people, and the Attorney should be held accountable for that. It's an absolutely shameful state of affairs.

I'm on the record as saying, with respect to the ART Bill, that I believe that the administrative review system in this country could have been improved, that it could have been bettered, simply by reforming the existing bill instead of replacing the AAT with the ART. Secondly, the objective evidence did not support the need to abolish the AAT, and I frequently spoke in this place about the key performance indicators of the AAT, in particular in relation to appeals, and that the members of the AAT consistently performed to such a level that they met their targets with respect to successful appeal rates. I also, in this place, referred to the satisfaction with the AAT from both the legal practitioners and the users and how that did not justify the abolition of the AAT and its replacement with the ART.

There was also a strain of vindictiveness in this legislation, which I also commented on—that the Attorney decided to depart from the independent remuneration advice and guidance of the Remuneration Tribunal with respect to those members who were terminated through the abolition of the AAT and the replacement of it with the ART. There was a streak of vindictiveness embedded in the legislation which I think was unbecoming of the Attorney-General. I raised that independent organisations had raised that from a governance point of view, from a public policy point of view, but the Attorney was not for moving in relation to that vindictive streak embedded in the legislation.

So here we are, debating the third iteration of this bill, trying to get it right and having to address the consequences of the Attorney's rushed process. In that regard, I would like, as I did in my additional comments on this bill, which the coalition supports—we're also putting forward an amendment with respect to registries, and I think it's appropriate that we do so—to quote from the Hon Paul Fletcher MP's comments in the second reading debate in the other place. In doing so, I would like to place on record my deep respect and admiration for the Hon. Paul Fletcher MP for the service he has given to this parliament over an extended period of time. I think that should be noted in the Hansard as we debate this legislation. I think it is fit and proper that it is referred to in the Hansard as we look at this legislation.

When he commented on this legislation he pointed out that we were coming here for the third time, that amendments were being introduced to this bill before the bill had even taken effect. That's the situation we were in. Amendments were being introduced to the bill before this bill even came into effect. That was in the context, as I noted in my dissenting report considering the bill, where the government forced the early tabling of the committee report on the bill. We were meant to report by 24 July 2024, and then a deal was done between the government and the Greens. Senator Shoebridge was probably not involved at all in relation to that deal. I can't imagine he would be involved in a deal which would shorten the scrutiny of such an important piece of legislation. I can't imagine he would be involved in that. It must have happened without Senator Shoebridge's knowledge. But the deal was done such that the committee report had to be tabled more than two months before it was meant to be tabled.

Debate interrupted.