Public officials and government agencies possess wide and often discretionary powers which profoundly affect the rights and liberties of people in Australia. In the absence of an Australian statutory or constitutional Bill of Rights, it is inevitable that human rights claims will attempt to infiltrate existing branches of Australian law and clothe themselves in their language and causes of action. On one hand, writing about the human rights dimension of Australian administrative law is like writing about the human rights dimension of the law of torts, contract or crime. Every branch of law has incidental effects on the protection or infringement of human rights, whether by constraining or enabling actions which affect other people.

Administrative law is, however, particularly vulnerable to the permeation of human rights claims, since, like human rights law, it primarily constrains the exercise of public power, often in controversial areas of public policy, with a shared focus on the fairness of procedure and an emphasis on the effectiveness of remedies. Nowhere is this trend more apparent than in decisions about refugee status, where failed applicants have often sought judicial review to advance what are essentially human rights claims. The perceived generosity of the courts in the migration area, through an expansion of the scope of natural justice and other grounds of judicial review, and a blurring of the legality/merits distinction, provoked a series of political attempts (not always successful) to restrict the quality or availability of review.