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The federal appeals tribunal, revamped to address a backload of cases, is now swamped as a result of volatile policy over international student intake. By Karen Barlow.
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Exclusive: New review tribunal overwhelmed by backlogs
A federal tribunal revamped to restore public trust in administrative justice is bogged down by “unprecedented levels of demand” related to the post-pandemic boom in international students and subsequent caps.
Government sources say the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART), which took over from its decades-old, politicised predecessor on October 14 last year, is struggling with a huge caseload and delays built up from visa decisions by the Morrison government to “fling open the borders after Covid”.
The backlog is compounded by the Albanese government’s subsequent cap on overseas students which, along with departmental integrity measures, has led to thousands of challenges to decisions to refuse student visas.
An update seen by The Saturday Paper, dated April 30, shows an increase of more than 22,000 active review cases since the new tribunal began just over six months earlier, to a total 105,747.
“It was pretty obvious it was going to happen. You could see from the 2022-23 student boom that it would eventually work its way through to the ART,” Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary at the then Department of Immigration tells The Saturday Paper.
When the former attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, announced in December 2022 that the Administrative Appeals Tribunal would be replaced, $75 million was set aside over two years to boost the number of members on the new ART and create a single, streamlined case management system. Millions more were spent across government to support the reform.
The aim was to fix what Dreyfus described as a “shocking” case backlog, which meant that no matter the merits of any given case, its hearing could be years away.
The new tribunal immediately inherited close to 84,000 cases.
Legal insiders say the merits review body had been run down to the point of being “completely dysfunctional”, and Dreyfus and former Labor immigration minister Andrew Giles deserve recognition for difficult reform.
The AAT was set up in 1976 by Malcolm Fraser and has handled challenges to decisions on matters ranging from taxation to the NDIS, social security and immigration. Following Labor’s 2022 election win, Dreyfus declared the tribunal “fatally compromised” by cronyism. As many as 85 members, according to Labor, were Liberal or National Party-linked appointees, although Labor also appointed ALP-aligned members. Salaries range between $245,220 and $549,210 a year at the new tribunal, up slightly on what was offered to members, senior members and division heads before the AAT was abolished.
Some former members, with and without political affiliation, were critical of the tribunal’s recasting through reappointments and new members. The Attorney-General’s Department described it as a “thorough and publicly advertised” merits-based process. Some internal applicants with years of experience were deemed suitable for an appointment but were sent to a merit pool for possible later appointment.
The Saturday Paper has previously reported claims from former members of preferential stacking at the new body – accusations the Attorney-General’s Department rejected at the time. It described the ART appointments as coming from a “large and very strong” field of candidates, where political affiliations and connections were “not relevant”.
One unnamed former member highlights the current strain on the department as indicative of “real problems in the system”.
“Until they’re really addressed, then I just think the caseload is going to continue to blow out. I was really surprised that in six months it had gone up 20,000. It’s pretty worrying.”
On May 5, Simone Burford, a deputy president leading the tribunal’s busy protection area, which covers refugee visa cancellations or refusals, presented the data on cases over the first six months of the ART. The 22,031 increase is largely explained by a jump in migration cases to 50,355, up from 31,817 in October. Protection cases, such as reviews of asylum rejections, rose to 43,494 from 41,500 over the same period.
The breakdown of the migration cases shows well over half relate to student visa refusals. It dwarfs the next biggest areas of migration review, citizenship and partner visas.
“The students have really blown out. But also, the asylum caseload as well in the protection area. I mean, it’s just huge,” the former tribunal member says, adding that the workload is causing morale problems among current members.
“You’ve got a whole bunch of them, 80 to 100, who have never done this work before. And they are not going to be able to hit the ground really running, probably for another year or 18 months. It takes at least that long.
“There’s quite a few people that they’ve taken on who were tax experts, and they’re doing protection work because that’s where the real need is.”
The tribunal is clear about what its members are being asked to do.
“Since it was established in October 2024, the Administrative Review Tribunal has experienced unprecedented levels of demand for independent merits review services,” a tribunal spokesperson said in a statement to The Saturday Paper.
“More than 37,000 applications for a review were lodged with the Tribunal between 14 October 2024 and 31 March 2025, including more than 14,000 applications for review of study visitor visa-related decisions. These lodgements were in addition to the 83,539 cases transferred from the former Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT).”
The statement noted that 19,000 cases were finalised before March 31, bringing the total on that date to 102,182. It says the tribunal is a “demand-driven organisation” based on the applications for review it receives, but how it responds to “fluctuations in demand” depends on a few factors.
“These include the well-documented technological limitations of the tribunal’s legacy case management systems, our capacity to onboard and train new members as they are appointed by the Australian Government, and our ability to recruit and train the new staff required to support new members as they are appointed,” the tribunal spokesperson said.
“While the President of the Administrative Review Tribunal provides advice on our resourcing needs, appointments of members to the tribunal are a matter for government.”
In mid-April, the tribunal released an unusual media statement pointing to “very high numbers of applications for review”.
“This means we are taking longer than usual to respond to questions and to process applications,” it said, offering some assistance for urgent cases only.
Abul Rizvi sees that as more than a message to applicants. “That’s in the context of putting pressure on the government: you’re going to help us,” he says.
One of the biggest providers of free legal assistance in the tribunal system and a long-time advocate for reform is urging patience.
“Fundamentally, the reforms are principled and correct, but it will take time for them to take effect and may require more resourcing,” says David Manne, the chief executive and principal solicitor at Refugee Legal.
“It’s critical that they be given time to take effect, particularly given the extraordinary backlog that was allowed to amass under the Coalition government.
“The recent increase simply cannot be attributed to the reforms.”
After the height of the pandemic in early 2022, the Morrison government invited international students back to Australia to recharge the economy and work in critical sectors to address workforce shortages.
“The government inherited a shocking mess from the Liberals in the student visa program in 2022,” the assistant minister for international education, Julian Hill, says.
“Morrison’s cabal opened the floodgates with a lack of care or proper management, and in particular they corrupted the student visa pipeline with their bad decision to uncap student visa work rights.”
An education source says students were allowed unlimited access to the job market while supposedly in full-time study.
“The result of that was we got a lot of non-genuine students who came in from India, Nepal, who didn’t come to study,” the source tells The Saturday Paper. “They came to earn Australian dollars to send them back to India, Nepal. That caused this backlog.”
The other contributor, according to the source, was the post-Covid-19 Temporary Activity visa, which allowed people on student visas, at no cost, to jump off their student visa or suspend it, and to work unlimited hours.
The federal opposition is not accepting blame. “The blowout in the tribunal’s caseload demonstrates the abject failure of the former attorney-general’s vanity project,” the new shadow attorney-general, Julian Leeser, tells The Saturday Paper.
“He spent more than $1 billion to replace the AAT with another body that does the same thing but with worse performance and worse outcomes.”
Rizvi says the ART needs more resources and the government should look at how it is dealing with onshore student applications. “We’re wasting a lot of money not achieving a lot.”
The cases that are being challenged and reviewed at the tribunal are a small proportion of the enormous number of overseas students in Australia.
Education department data shows 1,095,298 international student enrolments last year, a 13 per cent increase on the same period before Covid-19, while year-to-date December commencements (571,986) are the highest on record.
Federal Labor has sought to bring overseas student numbers to what Education Minister Jason Clare calls a “more normal” or pre-pandemic level. A ministerial direction applied in December set limits to the number of international students a university could enrol, and slowed visa processing. Greater priority is now given, under Direction No. 111, to regional and outer metropolitan universities and to TAFEs.
This decision, along with increased scrutiny for fraudulent applications, upended the plans of thousands already in Australia to attend university here, and led to the new load of ART appeals.
The Department of Home Affairs says the onshore student visa grant rate in October to December 2024 fell to 75.6 per cent, compared with 91.5 per cent during the same period in 2023-24.
A departmental spokesperson attributes this reduction in grant rates to “an increase in overall scrutiny in the student visa program”.
“The department continues to work with the Attorney-General’s Department and the Administrative Review Tribunal to reduce the number of student visa refusal appeals, to help manage pressures while maintaining the integrity of the student visa program.”
Reining in the numbers of international students was also a focus of the election campaign, with Labor proposing to lift the visa application fee for foreign students to $2000 – the highest in the world – in a bid to raise $760 million for spending elsewhere in the budget. This increase takes effect on July 1.
Manne describes the student visa caseload at the ART as an “interruption” to the reforms to the migration and protection system.
“There needs to be serious consideration of the impact that it is having on the ability to ensure that the reform reaches its full potential,” he says.
While there are areas that “still require fixing”, Manne says, “the fact is that the reforms have been working. Numbers have been coming down.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 7, 2025 as "State of the ART".
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