Chris Honnery

‘A sentence of death.’ The title of Edelman J’s dissenting judgment in Plaintiff M1/2021 v Minister for Home Affairs (M1) captures the stakes of visa cancellation matters in which a former visa holder claims to face serious harm in their country of origin.

In M1, the High Court addressed whether a decision maker is required to consider claims that raise a potential breach of Australia's international nonrefoulement obligations when determining if there is ‘another reason’ to revoke a mandatory visa cancellation under s 501CA of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) (the Act). By majority, the High Court held that it is permissible to ‘defer’ consideration of non-refoulement claims raised in a request to revoke a visa cancellation on the basis that these claims will be assessed in a protection visa application.

Gabrielle Appleby, Lynsey Blayden, Chantal Bostock & Janina Boughey

In the final post for the Kerr Report series, which examines whether Australian administrative law is still fit for purpose 50 years after the Kerr Committee Report, we reflect on a number of key reforms required to ensure the performance and integrity of Australia’s administrative review system. …

Paul Daly

Before situating the Kerr Report in what I consider to be its historical context, let me begin with a quibble. The Kerr Report considered comparative materials in some detail. This must have taken considerable effort in days where information from the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand …

Geoffrey Watson SC

In the 1970s Australia was poised to move ahead of the world in allowing access to government information. Just before the federal election in 1972 the Australian Labor Party promised legislation for that purpose – but Mr Whitlam faced a hostile Senate and could not get the …

Alan Robertson SC

Dr Amanda Sapienza’s Judicial Review of Non-Statutory Executive Action is an important work because it has as its centre of attention non-statutory executive action, rather than dealing with it, however well, in a more general context of public law. In this second category I would include, for …

Cheryl Saunders

Publication of a serious work on judicial review of non-statutory executive power in Australia is long overdue and Amanda Sapienza’s book is very welcome for this reason. I have watched her ideas on these complex issues develop since her presentation to the Cambridge Public Law Conference in 2016. …

Jackson Wherrett

On one level, Dr Amanda Sapienza’s Judicial Review of Non-Statutory Executive Action is a novel examination of an under-explored area of administrative law. At the same time, it joins a very long line of scholarship that considers the principle of the separation of powers. More particularly, it draws on the …

Amanda Sapienza

Between the pandemic and my post-PhD career choices, an in-person launch of Judicial Review of Non-Statutory Executive Action, which was published by the Federation Press at the end of 2020, was out of the question. So I’m indebted to the editors of AUSPUBLAW for hosting this online …

Brenda Tronson

In this post I provide an overview, from a barrister’s perspective, of the approach I am likely to take when asked for advice regarding a potential judicial review application in relation to a Commonwealth administrative decision. While the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977 (Cth) (ADJR Act) …

Costa Avgoustinos

The Australian climate litigation movement has recently made significant inroads into the field of negligence. In Sharma v Minister for the Environment (2021) (Sharma), the Federal Court held that the Minister for the Environment owes a duty to Australian children to take reasonable care when considering approval of a coal …

Anita Stuhmche

This series celebrates and analyses the ‘new administrative law’ as it has developed in Australia since the Kerr Committee’s report 50 years ago. The focus of this blog is the Commonwealth Ombudsman. My argument is that the institution is no longer fit for purpose. …

Gabrielle Appleby & Rosalind Dixon

Last week, the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law was delighted that the Hon. Margaret McMurdo AC launched the Feminist Judgments and Critical Judgments Projects website (www.criticaljudgments.com). Margaret was the first female president of an appellate court in Australia when she was appointed as the President of the Queensland Court of …

Anna Kretowicz

In March 2021, there were an estimated 2,100 undecided new applications at the Parole Board Queensland (the Board). While administrative backlogs are undesirable (one need only think of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, where a backlog of 53,000 applications in 2018 left the body in chaos), the problem here compounds with the legislative …

Yee-Fui Ng

The Kerr Committee’s vision for a new administrative justice system led to the ground-breaking introduction of the ‘new administrative law’ package in the 1970s, incorporating the establishment of a generalist administrative tribunal, statutory judicial review, the office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman, and later, in the 1980s, freedom of information …

Liz Hicks & Sangeetha Pillai

The closure of international borders has been a key pillar of Australia’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. Australia’s strategy to “aggressively suppress” (in practice, eliminate) COVID-19 within its borders has relied heavily on restrictive measures, including flight caps and travel bans, to limit the importation of the …

Ellen Rock

In May of this year, Bromberg J in the Federal Court handed down a key decision in climate change litigation which has made waves both within Australia and internationally. Sharma v Minister for the Environment [2021] FCA 560 was a negligence claim commenced in connection with an application to expand …

Yee-Fui Ng

Yet another rorts scandal is swirling around the federal government, dubbed the ‘car park rorts’ affair. The Auditor-General has reported that a $389 million car park construction fund has been administered ineffectively and that the Minister had distributed the grants with ‘inadequate assessment’ for eligibility (at [25]). The Auditor-General’s …