Good Decision Making: Like Grey By Georgia Boulos

For Grey, intelligence was not an important ingredient for good decision making and neither were corresponding visions of rational administration. For Grey ‘it doesn’t matter how smart you are.’ Instead, good decision makers were multi skilled and had life experience in different countries and cultures that enabled them to truly understand the depth of issues faced by applicants. The law was a superficial body of rules that did not allow for deep understanding or analysis of the plight of the applicant, which was crucial for the production of good administration and the attainment of substantive justice. In this discussion, Grey was cynical of the process that the decision maker engaged in in applying law to achieve a result for the applicant,

As an immigrant to Australia herself, Boulos had experienced difficulties of relocation and stigmatisation that she believed were crucial cultural components to understanding applicants in migration contexts. She reflected on her time working with migrant women’s collective movements in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s and then moving on to conduct migrant related research for a number of commissions and councils after having completed her university degree in the humanities. Boulos was at many points skeptical of the role of law in providing a mechanism for good decision making, claiming that the legally trained staff often performed what she thought was ‘mindless research,’ whereas she preferred a ‘holistic approach.’ She discussed how she had done a range of work for the Premier of an Australian State and had also worked extensively in Ethnic Affairs. She discussed how she transposed a number of these experiences and the knowledge she had gained from this work into her RRT decision making to enrich her decision making. She described, for example, that she introduced a system into her own office when she worked in state government where she transformed a file number system into one arranged by topics. Boulos discussed that she applied this approach to the RRT, introducing a system where

She recounted that ‘the guy seemed to me really sophisticated and his English was very good. He had an accent but it was very very good. And he was too sophisticated for the claims he was making.’ She went on to say that because she had lived in South America, she knew when a South American person was telling the truth. She recounted that the applicant claimed that part of his job in Guatemala was ice fishing, but Boulos was proud to declare: ‘well let me tell you there ain’t any ice fishing in Guatemala’ and went on to explain ‘and I didn’t even have to think about it. He just knocked himself out. See it’s not something that I could overlook because it is just so second nature to my basic knowledge.’ Boulos reiterated the importance of individualised substantive justice through fair outcomes for applicants claiming: ‘I feel that you really need to address yourself to the particulars. It’s not a simple method kind of