Case: Public Service Board v Osmond [1986] HCA 7 ; (1985) 159 CLR 656
Outcome: cited
With respect, I also have difficulty with this ground of review. Indeed, counsel for Dr Mathews accepted that there is no 'general law' requirement that administrative decision-makers must give reasons: Public Service Board v Osmond [1986] HCA 7 ; (1985) 159 CLR 656. In that case, it was acknowledged by Gibbs CJ (at 670) and by Deane J (at 676) that there may be 'special circumstances' where natural justice requires reasons to be given, however, only one instance was cited in which 'special circumstances' have been found in the intervening period. This suggests that 'special circumstances' are particularly rare. 24 On behalf of Dr Mathews, it was submitted that the legislative context in the present case gives rise to such 'special circumstances'; the statutory provision regarding the drawing and provision of a draft report and permitting further submissions on it from an applicant would be meaningless unless the reasoning were to be exposed both as a necessary matter of statutory construction and as a matter of procedural fairness to Dr Mathews. Whether or not this is so, it was submitted on behalf of the respondents that the Committee did give reasons in its Draft Report see ground 4 above and it is idle to suggest that an applicant who is able to produce submissions responding to virtually every sentence in the Draft Report was not informed about the reasoning process which the Committee had adopted. I agree with this submission. 25 Ground 5 is as follows: ' [The Committee's] Draft and Final Reports, considered together, give rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias, in that a fair-minded lay-person, properly informed as to the nature of the proceedings and the matters in issue, who is aware of the evidence and submissions in the proceedings, including the further evidence provided by [Dr Mathews] after the hearing, would consider that [the Committee] was biased against [Dr Mathews] , in the sense that their mind was closed to the issues raised by [Dr Mathews] and nothing [Dr Mathews] said after the preparation of the Draft Report could have changed the view that [the Committee] had taken about [Dr Mathews'] case.' 26 The Application contains the following particulars with respect to this ground of review: '(i) Nowhere in the appendices to the Final Report, in which the purported reasons for the material findings were outlined, is there any express acknowledgment of the further written evidence of [Dr Mathews] . (ii) But for formal acknowledgement that the submissions and evidence were received, and several minor modifications, no change to the findings or reasons for findings is made as a result of the further written evidence of [Dr Mathews] . (iii) [Dr Mathews'] oral evidence, accepted with little comment at the hearing, is barely referred to in either the body of the report or the appendices. (iv) [The Committee] failed to undertake its own random sampling in accordance with s 106K of the Act, relying instead on a pool of samples drawn by [HIC] and already examined in detail by the [Director] (in his investigation prior to the Adjudicative Referral) and already found by him (or his officers, servants and agents) to have been sufficiently deficient and/or adverse to [Dr Mathews] to cause him to refer the matter to [the Committee] . The pool was accordingly, no longer a random sample by any definition of that expression.' 27 Dr Mathews submits that the Final Report contains only the most grudging and minor amendments (styled by the Committee as 'clarification' see [98] of the Committee's Final Report), makes no acknowledgement of Dr Mathews' further evidence, and, in the main, ignores Dr Mathews' submissions entirely and is, for those reasons, affected by apprehended bias.