Productivity Commission crunches the numbers on the efficiency of Australian courts … Clearance rates … Number of judges required to finalise cases … Cost per finalisation … Court fees … State, Territory and Commonwealth Courts … Chris Orchard sorts the stats
NSW is the most judicially efficient state in Australia, at least in the context of the Supreme Court and Courts of Appeal. It cleared more caseload to June 2015 than any other state, with an 111.6% clearance rate at the Supreme Court level. This means the NSW courts cleared 11.6% more cases than were lodged in the same time period (financial year to June 2015).
In comparison the big wigs in SA and the NT cleared 89.8% and 85.7% respectively, adding 10.2% and 13.3% to their respective caseload. The Commonwealth holds steady at about 90%.
Clearance Rates % – Appeal/Supreme/Federal
By way of context, the NT Supreme Court in the 2015 (calendar) year finalised 87 cases, its Court of Appeal finalised 4. The judgment factories of NSW churned out an industrial scale 1986 judgements at the Supreme Court level in 2015, and 423 at the appeals level, with 332 through the Court of Criminal Appeal.
Although it may appear the efficiency differential between the big and small states is great, it is not for want of effort. Scale dictates that had one more case been finalised in the NT Court of Appeal, it would have boosted its own finalisation rate by approximately 20%, thus dramatically altering the clearance rate for that court.
The higher NSW courts managed to finalise such a large number of cases with fewer judicial officers per 100 finalisations, 0.57, the third fewest.
This is to say it took the labour of 0.57 full-time equivalent judges to put out 100 finalisations each to reach that total. With 58.2 FTE Judges/Justices at the Supreme Court level, it works out to be approximately 34 judgments per judge per year, 48.5 judgments if appellate court decisions are included.
Judicial officers per 100 finalisations, 2014-15
By way of comparison, Victoria achieved a lower percentage of clearance (although still positive) with 0.75 FTE judicial officers per 100 finalisations. Which is to say, Victorian judges required approximately 0.18 more judges to clear fewer cases in the same period of time.
It should be recognised that one of the main reasons for the efficiency of NSW courts, if not the main reason, is the support they receive. NSW judicial officers receive far more administrative support in the form of staff than any other state.
Per 100 finalisations at all levels, there are 0.7 staff, who support 0.57 judges at the Supreme/Appeal levels. Victoria, by way of comparison, has 0.4 staff per 100 finalisations, 30% less than NSW. The ACT, aptly has the highest number of administrative support staff per 100 finalisations, boasting 1.0 FTE staff per 100 finalisations.
Full time equivalent staff per 100 finalisations, 2014-15
Despite all of this, efficiency is, in reality, subjective. It only becomes objective once a set measure of efficiency is chosen against which to compare. If one chose to instead examine judicial efficiency purely from a cost perspective, then both Victoria and New South Wales have some improvement left in them to reach Queensland, which is far and away the most cost effective State in which to try a case on a cost per finalisation basis. Apparently Tim Carmody’s redundancy package didn’t have the financial oomph originally feared.
Cost per finalisation – Net Recurring Expenditure
Equity
Although some states are more efficient than others in terms of clearance, the efficiency matters little if the courts are rendered inaccessible to litigants, due to expense. NSW is the second most expensive state in Australia in which to lodge a case at the Supreme Court level, based on the average civil court fees collected per lodgement. This may perhaps be explained by the volume of commercial litigation that court sees.
Victoria claims the most civil court fees per lodgement at the Magistrate level, $238. Queensland, which maintains commendably low figures throughout its claim range, takes $126 per lodgement, with Tasmania ($89) and NT ($60) the two most accessible in terms of lodgement cost.
Average civil court fees collected per lodgment
In total approximately $28.8 million worth of court fees were either waived or exempted in the various states and territories, with the Federal Court of Australia, Family Court of Australia, and the Federal Circuit Court providing over $18.8 in relief alone. WA’s high lodgement fees for its Family Court system are offset to the tune of $1.7m annually.
As one would expect those states with lower lodgement fees provide less relief and fewer exemptions. Victoria is the outlier here, with inequitable arrangements resulting in no waivers or fee relief in the Magistrates Court, and a miserly amount of assistance in the County Court.
Homicide Clearances
Finalisations of homicide cases at the magistrate level are consistent across states. Which is to say, as a total percentage of all homicide clearances in any given state, the magistrates courts do generally the same amount of lifting as a percentage of the total amount of cases finalised.
What is interesting is the very low number of finalisations at the District/County levels in QLD and SA. Unlike NSW, VIC and WA, these two states tend to finalise homicides other than those heard at the magistrates level, at the Supreme level instead. This results in very low finalisation numbers for QLD and SA, with 6 and 8 respectively.
WA, a state with a population about half way between SA and QLD, finalised 36 homicide cases at their District/County level. More than both states combined.
Homicide and related offences finalisation rates
Homicide and related offences’ is defined according to the Australian and New Zealand Standard Offence Classification (ANZSOC) coding and includes murder, attempted murder, manslaughter and driving causing death. The figures do not take into account whether the defendant was found guilty.
Here’s the Productivity Commission’s report on government services, Vol C Justice, 2016