The courts fell thirty thousand matters further behind last year

The Productivity Commission's Report on Government Services 2026 contains a figure the profession should be quoting far more often than it does. Nationally in 2024-25, there were 4.8 full-time equivalent judicial officers per 100,000 people in the criminal and civil courts. That is the same as 2023-24, and the same as 2022-23.

Against that flat line, the caseload arithmetic: 750,028 criminal matters lodged, 725,538 finalised. In the civil jurisdiction, 404,652 lodged and 399,280 finalised. Across the supreme, district and county, magistrates' and children's courts, the system took on roughly 30,000 more matters than it disposed of in a single year.

Backlog, in the Commission's framework, is the age of the active pending caseload at 30 June. It is a measure of how long people wait. It is also a measure of something the profession experiences daily and rarely quantifies: every adjournment consumes capacity that would otherwise have gone to a new matter.

What the number does not capture

It does not capture the accused on remand whose trial date recedes. It does not capture the family whose parenting matter outlasts the childhood it concerns. It does not capture the practitioner who has now carried the same brief across three listing dates and two changes of instructing solicitor, and who will write off most of the preparation done for each abandoned hearing.

Nor does it capture what happens to settlement dynamics when delay becomes a litigation strategy. A defendant who can outlast a plaintiff is a defendant with leverage that has nothing to do with the merits, and the longer the queue, the more that leverage is worth.

The uncomfortable part

Judicial appointments continue. Three new judges joined the Federal Circuit and Family Court in July. Each appointment is genuinely useful and none of them changes a national ratio that has been static for three years while lodgements have not been.

This is not a crisis in the sense of a sudden event. It is an accumulation, and accumulations are hard to report because nothing happens on any given day. Thirty thousand matters, though, is a number.

Read the report here: https://www.pc.gov.au/ongoing/report-on-government-services/justice/courts/