The Federal Court held that a delegate of the Attorney-General did not fail to exercise personal discretion or give proper, genuine and realistic consideration to a parole refusal decision under s 19AL(1) of the Crimes Act 1914 (Cth), notwithstanding that the delegate's reasons were near-identical to draft reasons proposed in the departmental submission. The Court found that even minor amendments to proposed reasons — including a syntactical change and a substantive substitution linking reasoning to a statutory purpose — supported an inference of active intellectual engagement with the material. The Court also rejected an apprehended bias claim, holding that a departmental submission containing a recommendation against parole, when read as a whole and in context, did not give rise to a reasonable apprehension that the delegate might not bring an impartial mind to the decision.
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