Two Liberals are among the five people newly appointed as members of the administrative appeals tribunal (AAT) by the Morrison government.

Belinda Pola, the former chief of staff to the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, and Donna Petrovich, a former Liberal member of the Victorian legislative council, were appointed by the attorney general, Christian Porter, on Monday.

They joined Deborah Mitchell, previously a district registrar of the AAT, Peter Fricker, a member of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Agency, and Andrew George, a barrister and member of the Northern Territory Civil and Administrative Tribunal, as new appointees.

The AAT reviews government and administrative decisions in areas including refugee applications, freedom of information requests, disability and veterans’ appeals, and determinations around child support payments.

Since it took office in 2013, the Coalition government has been criticised for appointing a high number of Liberal members to the tribunal, including the former MP for Bass Andrew Nikolic, the former Dobell MP Karen McNamara, Scott Morrison’s former chief of staff Ann Brandon-Baker, former attorney general George Brandis’s former chief of staff James Lambie, and former federal Liberal senators Helen Kroger, Grant Chapman and Chris Puplick.

Brandis also famously appointed the failed Liberal Senate candidate Hollie Hughes to the AAT in June 2017, resulting in her being ruled ineligible to sit in parliament by the high court when the disqualification of Fiona Nash created a vacancy.

Pola, a chartered accountant, worked for Cormann from February 2015 to December 2017 first as a senior budget adviser and from August 2016 as chief of staff. Before that she worked as a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and an adviser to Joe Hockey while he was shadow treasurer and treasurer.



Petrovich is a project manager and business consultant who was a parliamentary secretary for health and environment in the Victorian state government and a former mayor of the Macedon Ranges council.

In addition to the five new appointees, eight members were reappointed including Ron McCallum, a disability advocate, legal academic and former dean of the University of Sydney law school.

Bruce Harvey, a well-respected senior member in the social services and child support division, was not reappointed.

Porter said that “all of the appointees have been appointed for a period of between five and seven years and are highly qualified to undertake the important task of conducting merits review of government decisions”.

“On behalf of the Australian government, I congratulate all appointees, and I look forward to the contribution they will make to the tribunal,” he said in a statement.

In 2017 a group of at least 50 AAT members, most from the migration and refugee division of the tribunal, were told they would not be reappointed, prompting criticism from the then Law Council of Australia president, Fiona McLeod.

The home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, has been a persistent critic of the AAT, initiating a parliamentary review and publicly calling on its members to consider community standards before overturning government decisions such as visa cancellations.