The Case for Common Sense: An Action Plan for Justice Reform in Australia

A. C. Applebee and A. D. Masters

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How to Use This Document

This document is for people with the power to act — politicians, media, academics, advocates. It is not a complaint. It is a plan backed by evidence, with a human story at its centre (shared separately, with consent), and a clear path from where we are to where the evidence says we should be.

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Step 1: Tell the Story

Why the Story Matters

The Australian justice system costs $32 billion per year and fails 45% of the time. That statistic has been published, presented, and ignored for decades.

Statistics don't change systems. People do. And people don't move for numbers — they move when they can see themselves in someone else's pain.

There is a woman in Western Australia whose daughter drowned. She performed CPR under direction from emergency services. The state investigated and cleared her of any wrongdoing. Then a police officer, months later, asked her to relive the worst moment of her life. When her trauma response made it impossible for her to speak — when she put her head down and covered her ears — the officer read her grief as disrespect and charged her on the spot.

She was already cleared. She was charged anyway. What followed was a cascade of systemic failure: three days without bail, placement in the care of a family member who had abused her, a misdiagnosis in a mental health ward driven by that same abuser's narrative, forced medication with suicidal ideation as a known side effect, and a legal battle to fight a charge that should never have existed.

Her full story exists in a separate document. It is hers. She controls it. If she consents to share it, it becomes the centrepiece of this campaign — because no one who reads it and has children can look away.

What We Need

A politician — ideally Senat