Alan Jones trial: four months of court time, no published cost

Four months of court time, and a charge sheet that halved

Four months of court time. One judge and no jury. A charge sheet halved since it was first laid. Those are the dimensions of the proceeding that opened at the Downing Centre Local Court on 3 August against Alan Jones, the 85-year-old former broadcaster and Wallabies coach. He has pleaded not guilty to 22 charges of indecent assault and sexual touching relating to six complainants, alleged to have occurred between 2003 and 2020.^[3]

Judge Glenn Walsh will decide it alone. "I am both the judge of law and the judge of fact," he told the parties in pre-trial argument.^[1] The allegations are untested, Jones is presumed innocent, and nothing here bears on whether they are true. That is Walsh's work, on the evidence. What is fair to examine while he does it is what the public is spending, and whether anyone can say.

A case that halved before trial

The NSW Police Child Abuse Squad set up Strike Force Bonnefin in March 2024. Jones was arrested that November and charged with 24 offences involving eight complainants. By September 2025 the charge sheet had grown to 44 counts across 11 complainants. Then it went the other way. Prosecutors withdrew 17 charges, including all 11 counts of aggravated indecent assault, and dropped two complainants, in what the magistrate called a "reformation" of the case.^[2] Five more went in June and July 2026, leaving 22 charges and six complainants.

That reduction changed the venue, and with it the shape of the trial. "The charges will proceed summarily in the Local Court," the ODPP said.^[4] A Local Court cannot impose more than five years for multiple offences, against seven years for each of the aggravated counts withdrawn.^[2] Summary proceedings carry no jury, which is why the jury box is empty.

Set the two ends against each other. The maximum exposure fell to five years and the hearing grew to four months. When the charges were reduced, the ODPP told the court it expected about six weeks.^[2]

$238.4 million, and no cost per trial

The ODPP recorded total expenses and losses of $238.4 million in 2024-25 and registered 17,322 matters in the same year.^[5] What it does not publish anywhere in that report is a cost per trial, a cost per matter, or any unit figure at all. It does count sitting days when it saves them: plea callovers spared 1,418 District Court sitting days, "sparing the community the cost of running those trials".^[5] The report quantifies what the office saves. It carries no equivalent figure for what it spends.

Police resourcing is no more visible. Asked in the Legislative Council in 2022 what a named strike force had cost, NSW Police answered that no specific budget had been allocated to it. Policing budgets do not itemise strike forces, so the answer was accurate, and no figure for what Strike Force Bonnefin cost will ever exist.

The one comparison available is duration, and it is stark. Criminal trials finalised in Sydney in 2024 ran an average of 14.43 days. At the end of that year the District Court had 1,472 trials waiting, and was missing its own standard of starting every sexual assault trial within eight months of committal.^[6] A four-month listing takes capacity that a queue of other complainants and other accused will not get.

What the comparable cases cost

Craig McLachlan is the closest parallel, for a reason that gets little attention. He too traded a jury for a lower maximum penalty by having his charges heard summarily. His hearing ran across 24 sitting days spread over more than a year, and in December 2020 he was acquitted on all 13 charges. The magistrate also found the four complainants had been brave and honest witnesses. No figure was published for what that case cost.

Nor for any of the others. George Pell was tried twice by a jury in Victoria, the first ending in a hung jury and the second in conviction. He served more than 400 days before the High Court unanimously quashed the convictions and entered acquittals in April 2020.^[7] That prosecution, its appeals and the investigation behind it were never itemised. John Jarratt was acquitted by a jury in July 2019 after a five-day trial. Chris Dawson was tried by a judge alone in 2022, on his own application, because a podcast had made a jury trial untenable. No published cost for any of them.

Acquittal does not mean a prosecution was wrong; the standard of proof is deliberately high and cases properly brought can properly fail. But in a decade of the country's most heavily covered criminal proceedings, not one produced a figure for what the public paid.

The coverage, and its costs

More than 30 reporters surrounded the car that brought Jones to court on the first morning.^[1] The ABC has given the trial its own podcast series; the Guardian ran a preview, a news report, a live blog, an analysis column and a podcast episode inside a week. The defence, having failed to stop the reporting of complainants' evidence, told the court its client had endured a trial by media.^[1]

Coverage carries its own public cost, and Pell is the proof. Twelve media companies pleaded guilty to 21 counts of contempt over their reporting of his verdict and were fined more than $1.1 million, with $650,000 in costs on top. Every hour a court spends on suppression and contempt is an hour not spent on the case.

The record he brings with him

Jones arrives with a public record set out in documents. He coached the Wallabies from 1984 to 1988 and won 23 of 30 Tests, including the 1984 Grand Slam, still the only one an Australian side has completed. He coached Balmain from 1990 to 1993 without taking a fee, and served South Sydney as director of football without payment. He recorded 226 radio survey wins, which no Australian broadcaster has matched.

The charitable record is real but thinner on paper than the legend suggests. No total for his lifetime fundraising has been published. What is documented is specific: a drought appeal in August 2018 in which he pushed a donor on air to lift a schoolboy's total from $50,180 to $100,180, and a live bushfire broadcast from Batemans Bay in January 2020. The strongest evidence is official. His 2004 Order of Australia citation reads: "For service to the community as a supporter of and fundraiser for a wide range of not-for-profit organisations, to the media, and to sports administration."^[8]

His critics are equally documented, and they are not new. A broadcasting inquiry found against him in 2000. The regulator found in 2007 that broadcasts he made in December 2005 were likely to vilify people of Lebanese and Middle Eastern background, and found against him again in 2020. A Queensland court awarded the Wagner family $3.7 million against him and his employer in 2018. Different bodies, across 20 years, all long before any charge was laid. That history cuts both ways. The criticism of him goes back 20 years, and the case before Judge Walsh is a separate question.

What proportion would look like

None of this argues for abandoning prosecutions, and no one outside the courtroom should hold a view on this one. What is missing is a reporting standard: a published estimate of expected cost when a matter of this scale is listed, a reconciliation once it finishes, and a method that lets one case be compared with another. None of that exists.

Until it does, the public is asked to accept two things at once, that prosecutions are properly resourced and that what they cost cannot be disclosed. Judge Walsh will decide whether the charges against Alan Jones are proved, and that is the only question that matters in court 3.1. The question outside it is whether a system that can say it spent $238.4 million, and cannot say what any of it bought, is being straight with the people paying.