Nguyen v Minister for Immigration

The applicant, Nguyen, sought judicial review of a decision by the Minister for Immigration to refuse their application for a Business Skills (Provisional) (Class EB) Business Innovation and Investment (Provisional) (Subclass 188) visa. The dispute centred on whether the delegate who made the original decision adequately considered the information provided by the applicants. The matter came before Egan J of the Federal Court of Australia.

The primary legal issue before the Court was whether the decision-maker failed to have regard to, and intellectually engage with, the claims raised in the information provided by the applicants to the Department. This question concerned the standard of legal reasonableness required in administrative decision-making, particularly in the context of visa applications where applicants present specific information to support their claims.

Egan J found that the decision-maker’s assessment of the applicants’ claims was legally unreasonable. The Court reasoned that a failure to intellectually engage with the substance of the information provided by an applicant, and instead to merely acknowledge its existence, amounts to a failure to have regard to that information in a legally relevant way. This failure to properly consider the evidence presented by the applicants meant the decision was vitiated by legal unreasonableness. Consequently, the Court quashed the original decision and granted the application.