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

Minister, I'll take that comment you made about only the former Attorney-General and me defending the old AAT. I should note, in my defence, that I've referred to facts. I've referred to the key performance indicators contained in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal's annual reports year after year with respect to satisfaction rates amongst participants—those who've come before the AAT and their advisers appearing before the AAT—and rates of successful appeal. So I've based my defence of the AAT on the basis of facts, on the basis of objective, empirical data, as opposed to sweeping rhetoric about this or that politicisation. I've actually looked at the facts, and it's the facts that I'm referring to in this interrogation with respect to the performance of the Administrative Review Tribunal, which, as you said, Minister, in your opening statement, was intended to quickly and fairly deal with cases coming before it.

In my first question I referred to the fact that the cases on hand have blown out from 67,000 to 93,000. Apparently that's our fault, because it's dealing with the backlog. But the backlog has now blown out by 26,000, so I don't quite follow that. I'll give you another statistic, and this is in relation to the migration part of the AAT's jurisdiction. On 13 October the AAT had 31,310 cases on hand, and a little over two months later the case load has blown out to 38,495. It's only in a little more than two months that the case load has blown out. Again, why is there this extraordinary increase in case numbers on hand?