The poor old Administrative Appeals Tribunal has been trashed and stacked with the flotsam and jetsam of the Liberal Party … Cronyism … Peter Dutton’s “Australian values” … The defenestration of the administrative review functions of the Commonwealth … Investigative reporting by Inq laid bare the extent of the political rort
These appointments have reached the acme of abuse under attorneys general Brandis and Porter, and in the process a dual purpose has been fulfilled – finding a home for hapless party has-beens while at the same time reconfiguring the tribunal into a spear carrier for the Coalition cause, particularly on migration and refugee cases.
Concern about this perversion of the federal administrative review process has been building over many months, so it is timely to find that a team of investigative reporters at Crikey has dug deep to provide insight into the scale of the political fix.
They found that 66 of the 333 AAT decision makers are associated with the Liberal Party and of those all but one were appointed in the last six years by Brandis or Porter. Twenty-five of the 66 have no legal qualifications including seven of the tribunal’s senior members.
Most of them were appointed without a transparent or rigorous selection process.
Usually it is said that both sides of politics stick their cronies on the AAT as a grace-and-favour gesture, however when Labor lost office in 2013 only 16 members across the then Commonwealth tribunal system had any political affiliation, and of those only a small handful had been appointed by the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labor government.
The Administrative Appeals Tribunal Act says that an appointee must be a legal practitioners, “enrolled for at least five years”, or “in the opinion of the governor general, has special knowledge or skills relevant to the duties of a senior member or member”.
In his review of the AAT, tabled in July, seven months after the AG received it, Ian (Capital-C Conservative) Callinan recommended that all appointments or reappointments be legally qualified, observing that the “capacity to undertake forensic analysis and write reasoned judgments is essential”.
The Inq investigation turned up information that Callinan’s daughter Fiona Meagher is a member of the AAT. The former High Court judge disclosed to Porter that one of his “immediate family” was on the patch he was to investigate.
While the inquiry was underway the attorney general promoted Meagher from a part-time to a full-time member, with associated pay increase and a term that expires in 2023.
Callinan went on to criticise the lack of an independent appointments process, the appointment on non-lawyers and noted that morale among members was dire.
While sitting on Callinan’s report before tabling it, Porter announced 86 new or reappointed members, 19 of who had close Liberal Party connections, including ornaments such as WA state Liberal minister Joe Francis and former funeral parlour director and president of the senate Stephen Parry.
Eight of the 19 have no legal qualifications.
One of the consequences of the top-heavy layer of unqualified political operatives is that decision-making has slowed quite remarkably. Inq reports that in 2013/14, before the stack got underway in earnest, the migration and refugee tribunal decided 24,729 cases and since then output in that jurisdiction has dropped 25 percent.
Among the investigatory revelations that took Justinian’s fancy were:
It would be folly to suggest that these appointments uniformly inject the AAT with bias or that everyone should be lawyers. What can be said is that given the nature and quality of these people the decision outcomes are likely to be more predictable.
They are all on fixed-term contracts that makes then awfully susceptible to government approval or disapproval. The ministerial autocrats are in pole-position.