The number of Supreme Court bail applications has skyrocketed placing more demand on busy courts, the Honourable Chief Justice Bowskill told the Queensland Law Society Specialist Accreditation Christmas Breakfast recently.
Her Honour gave her annual address or ‘Spotify wrapped for the courts’ to the Brisbane audience at the recent Brisbane City Hall event on 11 December.
“All three courts have been incredibly busy to make the understatement of the year,” Her Honour said. “We are actually all short of judicial resources and we’re just trying to do what we can with our ever-increasing workloads.
“Across all areas of all the courts work, the workload has increased considerably, which means, of course, that you are all very busy too.
“In the Supreme Court, I’ll highlight just one area in which the number of lodgements has increased dramatically, and that is bail applications.
“Just by way of comparison, in the 2014-2015 year, so 10 years ago, we had 405 bail applications, and in the 2024 to 2025 year, we had 1556.
“That number just increases each year. The top line of the graph is on a 45-degree angle, just going straight up.
“We don’t quite know what the reason for that is, but we have to deal with it.”
The Chief Justice said civil applicants in recent months have been told they can’t have a hearing dates for three weeks or even more.
“As I think Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So we’ve made a change.”
From the start of 2026, bail applications in the Supreme Court will be dealt with in a separate list. The applications list for civil matters will still have two judges making more time available for those applications.
“A new Practice Direction 6 of 2026 was recently issued, outlining our new approach to dealing with bail applications,” she said.
“We are viewing this as a pilot initially, and we’ll see how it goes.
“It is a substantial change, including mandatory review hearings for all applications in the first instance.
“But rather than this being a cause of delay, we’re actually expecting greater efficiencies because often applications have to be adjourned to do the inadequacies in the material.
“We very much appreciate the support that we have received from the profession for what we are trying to do. We’ll work together and we’ll see how it goes.”
The Chief Justice said a really significant development this year was the introduction in June of the ability to electronically file the documents in the civil claims and the Supreme Court, both new ones and continuing ones.
“Hooray! So that’s a muffled response from you,” Her Honour said to the audience.
“I know it’s a small step, and it’s not everything we’re waiting for, but it is something.
“Work continues steadily and positively on the broader project of digitisation of all civil files in the Supreme Court, the District Court and the Land Court.
“The aim is for that to be live, as they say, in August 2026. So with a bit of luck, this time next year, it will all be one and truly in place.”
The Chief Justice wanted to reassure practitioners once again that she continued to be centrally involved.
“A number of judges are centrally involved from all the courts,” she said.
“Deputy Chief Magistrate Gett, for example, has been an absolute driving force in terms of the digitisation, which has been implemented in the Magistrate Court and he continues to be involved.
“So we’re doing everything we possibly can from our perspective, which is, in some sense, it’s limited because we’ve got to work with the funding and the bureaucracy.
“We know it matters enormously to the profession and we’re doing everything we can.”
Another legal development was the publication of Practice Direction 5 of 2025, dealing with accuracy of references in submissions, the Chief Justice said.
“Courts around the country are gradually developing their response to the issues presented by the evolving use of generative AI by lawyers outside, unrelated to court work,” she said.
“Our practice direction, which has also been adopted by the other courts, was published to address one of the current problems, which is the inclusion of non-existent references.
“We have had few instances of that this year in our court by practitioners as well as the self-represented litigants.
“For self-represented litigants, there might be an excuse, but for practitioners, there is absolutely no excuse.
“The practice direction is intended to draw attention to this issue, but also to alert the practitioners that if you breach the rules in this way, it’s likely the court will refer your conduct to the Legal Services Commissioner.
“You may have seen an article yesterday, I think, in the Financial Review about a case in Victoria where this occurred and a reference was made.
“It is a serious matter. Apart from anything else, it’s a complete time waster for the courts that do not have time to waste, particularly in the applications list that I’ve just mentioned.
“We need to be able to, and we used to, look at submissions and if a case was referred to or quoted from by a lawyer, accept that that was very likely to exist.
“It might be a matter for us to determine whether it would apply. But there are concerns that maybe we can’t do that. We have to double check.”
The Chief Justice said another big event this year was the Australian Legal Convention last month in Canberra which Queensland judges, magistrates and lawyers attended.
Her Honour said the convention was brought to life by the Council of Chief Justices and the National Judicial College of Australia.
“When one thinks of an organising committee made up of a bunch of Chief Justices, I feel like there must be a joke in there somewhere,” she said.
“How many Chief Justices does it take to try and change a lightbulb for example. Microsoft Copilot had a few suggestions for me for this joke.
“So how many Chief Justices does it take to change a lightbulb? Just one, but only after hearing submissions from the lamp and the power point.
“So I decided AI is useful for something because I got a laugh.”
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