Blitz on AAT visa appeals boom

The government plans to overhaul the Administrative Appeals ­Tribunal to deal with the boom in ­migration and refugee challenges.

Attorney-General Christian Porter.

The government plans to overhaul the Administrative Appeals ­Tribunal to slash its bureaucracy and deal with the boom in ­migration and refugee challenges, which last year grew 43 per cent.

Attorney-General Christian Porter is considering cracking down on repeat appeals by disappointed visa applicants and cutting the tribunal’s support staff.

In an interview with The Australian, he defended the government’s record in appointing large numbers of new tribunal members and described it as a method of ­ensuring the AAT reflected “community values”. This had not been the case with some of the tribunal’s refugee and migration decisions.

“Very significant evidence has existed that people have lied on their applications, or have engaged in identity fraud and a minister has determined not to provide a relevant visa and those decisions have been overturned,” he said. “I don’t really think they are arguably a matter of concern to the community; I think they are,” Mr Porter said.

He rejected Labor’s criticism that 14 of the government’s 86 ­recent AAT appointments were former Coalition MPs or staffers and said the tribunal had never been intended to have a membership comprising only lawyers. Parliamentarians often had a breadth of decision-making experience that made them well placed to judge what was fair and lawful.

Mr Porter is considering limiting the ability of visa applicants to drag out their claims by introducing fresh evidence during the ­appeal process that would have been available at an earlier hearing.

The changes are being drawn up as part of the government’s ­response to a review of the AAT by former High Court judge Ian Callinan and the surge in migration and refugee challenges.

The AAT revealed in its last ­annual report that the migration and refugee division could not keep up with the surge in new cases. This had left it with 44,000 active migration and refugee matters at the end of the financial year.

Mr Callinan’s report has not been made public but Mr Porter said the growth in the migration caseload required serious attention. The migration and refugee division received 37,933 applications last financial year, the highest since the establishment of the division or its predecessor tribunals. This was 43 per cent more than the previous year and double the number in 2015-16.

The government had asked Mr Callinan to consider the extent to which AAT decisions meet community expectations and promote public trust and confidence in its decision making.

His review was commissioned last July after the AAT overturned a series of decisions cancelling the visas of criminals to allow them to remain in Australia.

Mr Porter said some of the Callinan recommendations would be the responsibility of the Department of Home Affairs, but he was particularly interested in measures that would allow visa challenges to be finalised efficiently.

“You are meant to argue your case when your case is being heard,” he said. “Having matters come back and back again after a ministerial decision with new ­issues being argued or evidence being put that was reasonably available at first instance seems to be creating a system that is both ­inefficient and outside community expectations of what is a fair and proper process.”

Mr Porter’s defence of the ­appointment system comes soon after Law Council president ­Arthur Moses SC called for a transparent selection process based on merit, similar to that ­recently announced by Labor. Mr Porter said such an appointment system would mean “transferring some responsibility from a democratic body to a non-democratic body”.