New information obtained under s 473DC must necessarily mean there are exceptional circumstances

One would have thought this was obvious, despite attempts to constrain the meaning and operation of s 473DD and excessively defer to the IAA. The High Court has now confirmed that proposition. In ABT17 v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection [2020] HCA 34 at [16] the plurality said:

.. The new information so got by the Authority would then meet the preconditions to its consideration by the Authority on the basis that it was not and could not have been before the Minister when the delegate made the referred decision[29] and on the basis of the Authority's satisfaction that the existence of any informational gap is sufficiently aberrant within the scheme of de novo review for which Pt 7AA provides to make existence of the informational gap in the particular review alone enough to constitute "exceptional circumstances" justifying its consideration irrespective of how frequently such an informational gap might arise in practice[30].

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