Liberals fight against Labor ‘purge’ on tribunal stacking

Liberal appointees facing the sack from the tribunal that reviews government decisions are pushing to limit the scale of a Labor overhaul the opposition has labelled a McCarthyist partisan purge.

A potential target of Labor’s push to end political appointments insists the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) has performed above expectations and should be spared from wholesale changes that could dump dozens of Liberal-aligned tribunal members.

Anthony Albanese and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The Albanese government announced in December that the AAT would be abolished and its 128 members – who make decisions on migration cases, NDIS applications and veterans compensation claims – would have to re-apply and prove their qualifications to work at a reshaped tribunal.

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has declared that the AAT lacked quality, efficiency and independence, partly resulting from the appointment of a slew of former Liberal MPs, candidates and party members.

But Liberal MP Julian Leeser, speaking last month in his then-role as shadow attorney-general, and AAT deputy president Denis Dragovic, a former Liberal preselection candidate who earns more than $500,000, have argued against what they describe as radical reform proposals.

“It is important to ask the question, why have thousands of surveyed users experienced a substantially improved interaction with members and staff of the tribunal?” Dragovic said in a leaked submission to the government’s review, that has been circulating in the legal community.

Denis Dragovic is a former Liberal preselection candidate and now an AAT deputy president.

Dragovic is not a trained lawyer and is arguing against a proposal to mandate legal qualifications for senior tribunal members. This change has been floated by the Law Council of Australia, the Centre for Public Integrity and a government consultation paper, but Dreyfus has stated those without legal qualifications would still have a role in the new body.

The AAT deputy president, who has outperformed the caseload benchmark in his time on the tribunal, said members without law degrees brought invaluable experience as specialists. As an example, he argued those who had worked in war-torn countries better understood concepts of refugee law than a lawyer who had not worked in the field.

“It is easy to see a hard swing in the composition of the membership away from the diverse profile of decision makers appointed by the previous government towards a more homogenous one,” Dragovic wrote in his submission.

“Some may applaud this as righting a past wrong, but while opinions may differ on the Coalition’s approach to appointments, the data shows substantial improvements and impressive outcomes through this period that aligns with an increased diversity of membership.”

Reforming the tribunal is a key plank in Labor’s agenda to weed out cronyism, which it argues was rampant under previous Coalition governments and spurred the creation of the first national anti-corruption agency, which was central to Labor’s 2022 election pitch.

A spokesman for Dreyfus pledged the AAT’s successor would appoint people based on merit and attacked the opposition for “using it as a Liberal Party employment agency, appointing at least 85 of their mates to cushy, very highly paid, secure jobs”.

Dragovic wants to reduce Dreyfus’ influence in the recruitment of new members by substituting an independent community member for a panel member picked by Dreyfus, whose vision for reforming the tribunal was panned by Leeser in a speech last month.

Leeser, who quit his role as shadow attorney-general this week over the opposition’s stance on the Voice to parliament, invoked Stalin, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and former Chinese president Hu Jintao as he argued against the changes, and cited data showing the AAT had out-performed benchmarks on the number of decisions it published and user satisfaction.

Julian Leeser said in a speech last month the AAT had out-performed benchmarks on decision numbers and user satisfaction.Credit: Brooke Mitchell

“The Attorney (Dreyfus) is like Stalin’s henchman, Lavrenty Beria, who says, ‘You find me the man I’ll find you the crime’,” Leeser said in a March 7 speech, and also described Labor’s approach as a McCarthyist purge.

“He doesn’t care whether the people he is targeting are qualified or not. What he really wants is a supine tribunal that will rubber stamp the decisions of the Labor Party.”

The AAT had 128 full-time members, 172 part-time members and 11 judges as of June 30 and many could be paid out parts of their salaries if they are not appointed to the new body.

The AAT had 67,720 cases awaiting finalisation as of the middle of last year. The government has allocated $63.4 million to hire 75 members to address the backlog of cases as the new body is established.

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