Migration inquiry
Submission Date: 27 February 2026
The Law Council of Australia provided a submission in response to the Issues Paper released by the Administrative Review Council in November 2025 for its migration inquiry.1
The Issues Paper poses 18 questions concerning the migration jurisdiction of the Administrative Review Tribunal (the ART or the Tribunal). This submission addresses most of the questions in the Issues Paper informed by the legal profession’s experiences to date with the primary decision-making of the Department of Home Affairs, and the migration jurisdiction of the Tribunal and related processes.
The Law Council emphasises that this review is another opportunity to review the utility of the Special Procedural Provisions (SPPs) that apply to the ART’s migration jurisdiction. A dominant theme in practitioners’ feedback is that the SPPs represent a serious flaw in the ART’s jurisdictional scheme, that they cause substantial problems for applicants and representatives, and that the ART’s procedures in conducting review of migration decisions should be identical to those of its other jurisdictions. These issues have been raised by the Law Council in previous submissions on these matters over a number of years.
The Law Council further notes that we are little more than one year into the ART’s operation. The Law Council comments are therefore necessarily based on the experience of legal practitioners over a short time period.
1 Administrative Review Council, Migration Inquiry: Issues Paper (November 2025) <https://www.ag.gov.au/legal-system/publications/arc-migration-issues-paper-november-2025>.
Last Updated on 03/03/2026
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