Ministerial Intervention

There are a number of sections of Australia's Migration Act (ss 351, 391, 417, 454, 501J) which allow the Minister for Immigration to substitute a more favourable decision to a visa applicant after the review process is finalised - this is known as "ministerial intervention".


The powers are non-delegable and non-compellable and should only be used where the Minister decides it is in the public interest to do so. This usually arises if there is some compassionate or compelling circumstance or in a situation where there is some unintended consequence in a strict application of the Migration Act.

The current Minister (Senator Evans) was the subject of adverse comment, by the Shadow Minister in parliament on 15 June over his use of this power. In the 18 months that he has been Minister, this intervention power has been used over 100o times. In contrast Minister Ruddock (1996-2003) only used it 1916 times in that whole period. I suspect that Minister Vanstone used it even less!

I am a supporter of the concept of discretion (in all areas of law) and I am not sure if the use of this power is a reflection on a more compassionate Minister or whether there was a backlog from the previous government that is now being cleared. In any event, I'm not sure the criticism is warranted.

If you want to read the whole debate it's in the House of Representatives Hansard (ie the daily transcript of parliament) which is downloadable in PDF format from this link. The relevant part starts at page 116 and is a speech by Dr Stone.

Photograph used under creative commons licence: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chazoid/2836358990/sizes/s/