The Tribunal's reasoning
33 The earlier protection visa application was an offshore application, said to have been made by a person then located at a detention centre in Indonesia. The application states the individual has a brother, who is his sponsor for the visa application. The name and address given for the brother is the name of A3 and an address in Orange, New South Wales. The protection visa application later states that the applicant had help filling out the form. The application states the individual will need an Arabic interpreter. The form is filled out in English and there is different handwriting on parts of the application. The form does not have a signature as such, but rather a single printed name. These features taken cumulatively are likely to indicate a number of factual possibilities about this earlier protection visa application, none of which were explored at all by the Tribunal, which is remarkable given the agreed position that the applicant's photograph appears on the application. For example, an obvious factual possibility is that the person named A3 (the sponsor on the earlier protection visa application) lodged this form for the applicant without his knowledge. I make no findings of course, but seek to demonstrate that the earlier protection visa application, with different names, does not necessarily lead to only one conclusion about the identity of the applicant. This is part of why the Tribunal's reasoning is so obviously illogical, when it accepts the accuracy of the applicant's Iraqi identity document. If the Tribunal were reasoning logically, it would have had to explore these factual issues.
34 While I accept the Minister is correct that the Tribunal's reasoning must be examined as a whole, and while I accept the reasons (at [48]-[49]) disclose the Tribunal doubted the credibility of the applicant, I find those doubts were more likely than not caused by the confusion in the Tribunal's reasoning about what could logically be drawn from the circumstances of an earlier protection visa application with the applicant's photograph attached to it.
35 Inconsistently with its doubts about the applicant's credibility, the Tribunal accepts all of the material positively put forward by the applicant to establish that he is who he says he is. I note his narrative also includes being in Indonesia at the time of the earlier protection visa application. This material included testimony from his sisters, to which the Tribunal barely refers which again suggests that it was conflating names with the concept of identity. The Tribunal does not find the material relied on by the applicant was false, or forged. To the contrary, it positively accepts it, and indeed uses that material to conclude that the person in the earlier protection visa application (A2) is the same person as the applicant; see [51]:
they are not two separate identities.
36 This, rationally, should have been a matter in favour of the satisfaction as to the applicant's identity, not against it. The names were different. Some of the details were different, including dates of birth. The photograph was the same. The applicant was in Indonesia at this time. The previous protection visa application on its face suggested it had been filled out by whoever purported to be the sponsor/brother (A3). There was a myriad of factual possibilities about why the applicant might not know or know of A3, including that the previous protection visa had been filed without his knowledge. There were a myriad of reasons why A3 (assuming he is a person, and the person who filled out the previous protection visa application) might have described himself as the applicant's brother when he was not. The applicant's denials of ever having made or authorised such an application could be consistent with this. These are not matters on which this Court makes any finding, other than to point out the need for fact finding on these matters to have occurred, to avoid the irrationality currently present in the Tribunal's reasoning. All these matters required some careful fact finding, which is absent from the Tribunal's decision.
37 Instead, the Tribunal leapt from differences in names and details in documents to a rejection of the applicant's "identity", "despite" (using its language) what all the documents at [25] above revealed on their face, including documents with photographic identification. It did so after in substance accepting that the applicant and A2 could have been the same person.
38 Finally, and tellingly in my opinion, the Tribunal does not explore at all the potential consequences of its conclusion for the applicant's holding of the protection visa granted in May 2011. That protection visa was granted to him as the person he claimed to be then, in 2010-2011, being the same person he claimed to be in his citizenship application and before the Tribunal. The Tribunal did not find the applicant was not the person he claimed to be in the successful protection visa application he lodged in May 2011 after his arrival in October 2010. That is also entirely irrational.
39 In SZMDS, and accepting for the purposes of their Honours' analysis that illogicality can constitute a distinct kind of jurisdictional error to legal unreasonableness (about which their Honours expressed some doubts), Crennan and Bell JJ said at [130] that this kind of error:
is nevertheless an allegation of the same order as a complaint that a decision is "clearly unjust" or "arbitrary" or "capricious" or "unreasonable" in the sense that the state of satisfaction mandated by the statute imports a requirement that the opinion as to the state of satisfaction must be one that could be formed by a reasonable person.
40 In Plaintiff S183/2021 v Minister for Home Affairs [2022] HCA 15; 96 ALJR 464 at [43], referring to Crennan and Bell JJ's reasons in SZMDS, Gordon J further explained the role of unreasonableness in this kind of review:
unreasonableness is concerned with both outcome and process. Whether what is being reviewed is an exercise of a power or the formation of a state of satisfaction, a finding of unreasonableness is not limited to cases where the outcome is one which no reasonable decision-maker could have reached. As Crennan and Bell JJ relevantly said: "the correct approach is to ask whether it was open to the [decision-maker] to engage in the process of reasoning in which it did engage" and a decision might be said to be illogical or irrational (or, it might be added, unreasonable) "if there is no logical connection between the evidence and the inferences or conclusions drawn". Leaving aside the supposed distinction between the exercise of a power and the formation of a state of satisfaction, it is not in dispute that adverse credibility findings are susceptible to jurisdictional error on the basis of unreasonableness.
41 Legal unreasonableness might in this way be described as the umbrella concept, with irrational reasoning going to the material parts of the way in which a conclusion was reached and therefore a power was exercised, being described as one manifestation of legal unreasonableness.
42 While in dissent on the outcome, the reasons of Gummow A-CJ and Kiefel J (as their Honours then were) in SZMDS explain the location of irrationality in judicial review (at [23]-[24]):
In Australia, as Basten JA recently observed, the principles applicable where the jurisdictional fact is a state of satisfaction or opinion are traced back to the use by Latham CJ in R v Connell; Ex parte Hetton Bellbird Collieries Ltd of the terms "arbitrary, capricious, irrational" as well as "not bona fide" to stigmatise the formation of an opinion upon which a statutory power was enlivened. Subsequently, for the Supreme Court of Canada, Iacobucci J spoke of decision making upon an assumption which had no basis in the evidentiary material or which was contrary to the overwhelming weight of that material, and also of decisions based upon a contradiction in the processes by which conclusions were reached or upon the drawing of inferences which were not properly open.
A decision upon jurisdictional fact which has these characteristics is treated as a failure to exercise jurisdiction. There has been a purported exercise of public power in the absence of the necessary jurisdictional fact.
43 As their Honours' reasons at [43]-[53] illustrate, this ground of judicial review can involve close examination of the fact finding of a repository. Such a process is inherent in the nature of the error alleged, which is a reasoning error of sufficient criticality and materiality to cause the statutory task to miscarry, or not to be performed at all. The need for some scrutiny of fact-finding is illustrated by the description of legal unreasonableness in Minister for Immigration and Border Protection v SZVFW [2018] HCA 30; 264 CLR 541 at [82]:
Nor is the abuse of statutory power limited to a decision which may be described as "manifestly unreasonable", or to what might be described as an irrational, if not bizarre, decision that is so unreasonable that no reasonable person could have arrived at it. A conclusion of legal unreasonableness may be outcome focused - where, for instance, there is no "evident and intelligible justification" for the decision. As Gageler J explained in Minister for Immigration and Citizenship v Li, "[r]eview by a court of the reasonableness of a decision made by another repository of power 'is concerned mostly with the existence of justification, transparency and intelligibility within the decision-making process' but also with 'whether the decision falls within a range of possible, acceptable outcomes which are defensible in respect of the facts and law'".
(Footnotes omitted.)
44 The adoption in Li, after SZMDS, of the language of the absence of an "evident and intelligible justification" (my emphasis) bears out, with respect, the earlier reasoning of Crennan and Bell JJ in SZMDS about the overlap in these concepts.
45 In the present case, the Tribunal's fact finding is internally inconsistent on material issues. It is irrational to accept as accurate all the applicant's Iraqi documentation, and supporting testimony, and then to find in substance that he should not be believed because of the existence of other documentation for which there could well have been explanations wholly consistent with the applicant's narrative, but not explored at all by the Tribunal. It is irrational to conflate the factual question of the use of different names with the concept of identity. It is irrational for the Tribunal to have accepted all the documentation put forward by the applicant, and the supporting testimony, and impliedly accept the validity of the grant of the protection visa to him on that basis, and then find itself not satisfied of his identity. It is irrational for the Tribunal to find the applicant was the same person as A2 and then not accept his identity. All these irrationalities were central to the reasoning of the Tribunal on s 24(3).
46 While if the Tribunal had performed its task rationally, it might have examined whether the applicant himself could be held responsible for any falsification of documents in the previous visa application (which may in turn have been relevant to good character), that was not a path of reasoning the Tribunal chose, because of the irrationality which attended its fact finding prior to this point.
47 The s 44 appeal should succeed.