Background
Daniel Victor Farcas, a Romanian citizen who arrived in Australia as a child, held a spouse visa. His visa was mandatorily cancelled after his 2019 conviction for trafficking dangerous drugs, for which he received a four-year prison sentence. He did not pass the statutory character test.
A ministerial delegate declined to revoke the cancellation under s 501CA(4) of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth), and the Administrative Review Tribunal affirmed that refusal on 25 June 2025. Mr Farcas sought Federal Court review 56 days after the applicable filing deadline, relying on circumstances including delays in obtaining legal advice and Legal Aid funding.
The Court’s Holding
Justice Stellios granted an extension of time and allowed the judicial-review application. The Tribunal had accepted, on a hypothetical basis, that publicly available mental-health care in Romania was relatively inferior to that in Australia, but found the resulting impediment to Mr Farcas’s return was “genuine, but not insurmountable.”
That finding was irrational because there was no evidentiary basis for the positive conclusion that an assumed impediment was not insurmountable. The error was not that the Tribunal failed to investigate Romania’s health system or make Mr Farcas’s case for him; it was the Tribunal’s unsupported reasoning after assuming the asserted difference in his favour. The error was material because there was a realistic possibility that a different assessment of impediments could have affected the overall revocation outcome.
Key Takeaways
- The Court extended time under s 477A because the delay was not decisive, the Minister identified no specific prejudice, and the review ground had merit.
- A tribunal may not make an unsupported positive finding that an assumed health-related impediment is not insurmountable.
- The Tribunal’s decision was quashed and must be redetermined by a differently constituted Tribunal.
Why It Matters
The decision distinguishes between a decision-maker’s lack of duty to obtain further evidence and its obligation to reason lawfully on the material and hypotheses it adopts. An applicant bears the burden of presenting representations, but that does not permit an unsupported conclusion adverse to the applicant once the decision-maker assumes a claimed impediment exists.
For migration practitioners, the case underscores that an illogicality challenge may succeed where an unsupported finding is central to the weighting of factors under a ministerial direction and could realistically have changed the result.