Australian Administrative Review Council: Best Practice Guides for Administrative Decision Makers
The Australian Administrative Review Council has released Best Practice Guides for Administrative Decision Makers. Margaret Harrison Smith, Executive Director of the ARC, talks to Adjust about the guides.
Established under the Commonwealth Administrative Appeals Tribunal Act 1975, the Administrative Review Council has an important statutory function of overseeing and suggesting improvements to the Australian system of administrative law.
In discharging this function, the Council has placed particular emphasis in recent years on the need to maintain high standards of administrative decision making.
This emphasis is reflected in the release by the Council in August 2007 of a series of five Best Practice Guides for administrative decision makers in government departments and agencies.
Content of the Guides
The Guides follow on from a 2004 Council publication entitled Legal Training for Primary Decision Makers: a curriculum guideline. The purpose of that publication was to help Commonwealth departments and agencies to develop suitable administrative training programs.
Using the curriculum guideline as a foundation, the Guides are designed for use as a training resource and as a reference for primary decision makers in government departments and agencies. The Guides do this by providing a step by step outline of the key issues that need to be taken into account in making an administrative decision.
Guide 1 – Decision Making: lawfulness – provides an overview of the legal requirements for lawful decision making, including requirements that have developed through the grounds for judicial review.
The other Guides in the series cover the following areas:
Guide 2 – Decision Making: natural justice – discusses the implications of natural justice (or procedural fairness) for decision makers and its connection with Australian Public Service values and standards of conduct relating to conflict of interest.
Guide 3 – Decision Making: evidence, facts and findings – deals with the role of primary decision makers when receiving evidence, determining questions of fact and accounting for their findings.
Guide 4 – Decision Making: reasons – looks at the requirements of two important Commonwealth Acts that impose on many decision makers a duty to provide reasons for their decisions.
Guide 5 – Decision Making: accountability – outlines a range of administrative law accountability mechanisms that can be used to review primary decisions.
Written in clear and succinct terms, the Guides provide a valuable benchmark for administrative decision making across government. From feedback received to date from departments and agencies, the Council anticipates that the Guides will be incorporated into departmental and agency internal training programs and on-line training resources.
The Guides will allow government decision makers to acquire and retain a fundamental knowledge of good administrative decision making: a knowledge that will be transportable and relevant across the Australian Public Service.
The legal framework in which Australian state and territory and local government agencies operate is broadly similar to that at the Commonwealth level, but the Guides do draw attention to areas where there are important differences. The Council anticipates that the Guides will also be useful at these levels of government. This view is supported by the steady demand for copies of the Guides from those sectors.
Supplementing the Guides
Importantly, the Guides can be used as building blocks that can be supplemented to meet the specific legislative and policy needs of individual departments and agencies.
In recognition of this potential, the Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Citizenship has worked with the Council to produce supplemented versions of the Guides for internal departmental use.
The Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman and a number of other Commonwealth government departments and agencies are also in the process of producing their own supplemented versions of the Guides.
The Guides are available on the Council’s website.