Jenni McManus
There was a time at the height of the pandemic when Chief District Court Judge Heemi Taumaunu says he despaired of ever clearing the backlog of 1000-plus jury cases awaiting trial, mainly in the Auckland courts.
In more normal times, the number would have been closer to 250, he says.
“And as chief judge you get to the point where you have to ask yourself the question in that sort of circumstance, which was extreme, ‘have we got to the point of no return? Are we actually in free fall? Can we recover from this sort of backlog and the high caseload?’”
Fast-forward about five years and the answer is clearly ‘yes’.
“Progress is tracking in the right direction,” the chief judge told a Criminal Law Forum hosted late last month by The Law Association. In the six Auckland Metro district courts, more than 50% of the backlog has now been cleared.
“Prior to August 2020, progress was actually going the other way,” Taumaunu said. The backlog had, in fact, been on a vertical rise since 2015, five years before the pandemic. Covid simply exacerbated it
The fix
To reverse the trend, the chief judge oversaw a combination of initiatives that were rolled out across the District Court at the same time as he was trying to implement and embed Te Ao Mārama – a program of mainstreaming some of the most successful (but resource-consuming) practices of the therapeutic courts.
Taumaunu had two objectives: speeding up the flow of cases through the court while at the same time ensuring that justice was being done. There was one essential principle, he says – insisting that meaningful progress was made towards disposing of a case at every court event or hearing.
There would always be outliers where progress couldn’t be made towards disposition “because of the justice of the case”, he said, but that should be the exception rather than the rule.
Otherwise, what was happening in the court was simply churn. “And nothing is more frustrating for everyone involved, and not just the people at the end of this – the defendants, the victims, complainants, witnesses waiting for a hearing – but every professional involved in the system is frustrated …if no progress is made.”
But there was another issue: the chief judge says there was still little understanding about why the caseload continued to pile up.
Eventually a team of experts was brought in who recommended the courts change tack and send as much judicial resource (judges and courtrooms) as possible into the areas with the largest backlogs.
“Now, in hindsight, that sounds pretty simple,” the chief judge says. “But that’s not necessarily the way we’d been doing things in the past”.
From May 2023, under a new system of priority rostering and scheduling, “we had a lot of courts running in areas where we didn’t have courts running in the past, particularly in Auckland Metro, where nearly half of New Zealand’s criminal backlog was,” he says.
“I think the thought behind that was if we could get on top of Auckland Metro, we would be able to make progress nationally.”
Other initiatives
But that wasn’t the end of the reforms. In July 2024, a Timely Justice Protocol was introduced, setting timeframes for 90% of cases to be completed, from the day the charge was filed until completion.
A system of local timely justice plans was set up with executive judges around the country. Associates were appointed to the Family Court, which was also suffering backlogs. A bail framework was set up, for certification of bail applications that were ready to be heard.
“Again, that goes back to that essential principle of ensuring meaningful progress is made at each appearance,” Taumaunu says. “This is the fundamental principle behind the bail framework.”
A timely justice dashboard was set up to help identify systemic issues that might be obstructing progress. Protocols for judge-alone hearings went nationwide, along with guidelines for case review hearings. A checklist for judicial case review was revised. Remote participation protocols have recently been released.
And at the end of 2024, a framework for Te Ao Mārama was published which, the chief judge says, is a very good blueprint for how it will be implemented in the district courts. To date, it is operating in Hamilton, Gisborne, Kaitaia, Hawke’s Bay, Kaikohe, Whangarei, Tauranga and Huntly.
But concerns remain. Judge Janey Forrest told the forum that timeliness should not be considered in isolation and needed to be linked to timely access to justice.
She pointed out that as of December 2024, Corrections statistics showed that the remand population made up 41% of the total prison population and in September 2025, more than half the women detained in prison were on remand.
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