Sensible Tactics or Missed Opportunity? Evaluating the Exceptional Treatment of Migration and Refugee Decisions in the Administrative Review Tribunal Act

The creation of the Administrative Review Tribunal represents a critical redesign of Australia’s federal administrative review system. In this article, we draw on a novel dataset from the Kaldor Centre Data Lab to question the government’s justifications for retaining separate codified procedures and other restrictive rules for the new tribunal’s migration and protection jurisdictions. Our data analysis reveals that historically, there is no evidence that the codification of procedures increases the efficiency or certainty of decision-making. This approach may in fact have the opposite effect, contributing to both inefficiencies and unfairness for applicants. The government’s decision to retain separate procedures for migration and protection applicants represents a missed opportunity and may undermine the new tribunal’s objectives.