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

Minister, whilst I appreciate your flattery—I am a loyal servant of my party—can I say, again, the defence that was mounted in relation to the AAT was based on the statistics and the key performance indicators, which anyone listening to this debate can look at by going to the annual reports of the AAT. They indicate that the AAT consistently met its key performance indicators with respect to successful appeal rates and also to user satisfaction—that's the satisfaction of the Australians actually appearing before the AAT and, even more importantly and perhaps even more persuasively, of the lawyers and representatives who advocated on behalf of those Australians.

When the ART legislation passed the Senate roughly half of all ART members had been appointed by the current government. Now that the AAT has been abolished and replaced by the ART, all of the new tribunal members have been appointed by the current government. There can be no more excuses about this politicisation et cetera. All the members of the existing ART have been appointed by this government. The only difference we're now seeing in terms of performance is a massive increase and blowout in wait times in exchange for much more money. A billion dollars has been invested into this new ART. Why should Australians pay a billion dollars for a tribunal that performs worse than its predecessor, on the basis of objective data, when the only real difference is that the members were appointed by the Albanese Labor government?