My colleague Adrian Joel has informed me that because of a failure of DIBP to register a legislative instrument in more or less the same manner as they failed to do in the case of Singh v. Minister for immigration & Anor [2012] FMCA 145 and subsequently followed in Sharma v. Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs & Citizenship [2014] FCCA 2821; that all applications lodged between 10/1999 and 16 March 2016 are INVALID.
The relevant legal problems turns on the failure of DIBP to in effect record all of its Forms as "Approved Forms" via the mechanism of a legislative instrument in the period from 10/1999 to 16 March 2016.
That being the case if Schedule 1 requires an applicant to lodge an application on an approved form then absent any approved form during the relevant period, that defect would render the application INVALID.
You may wish to consider the position of any of your clients who may have been refused a visa in the period from 10/1999 to 16 March 2016 and consider the implications concerning the operation of Section 48, and Section 48B of the Migration Act 1958.
For most of my clients this is nothing short of a MIRACLE.
If the argument about whether the forms are approved ( notwithstanding what Anon says)
then in order to determine whether in each case there was a requirement to use an approved form in Schedule 1; then, to be conservative, the applicant lodged a paper application; under those circumstances, I think that the issue of validity and invalidity is arguable, but in any event the matter will end up in the FCC.