Australia helped invent community mediation. In fact, the genesis of mediation here was driven by an aspiration to ‘balance the scales of justice’ through the provision of early, accessible decision making where parties themselves could determine their own futures. At its heart was a desire to empower those whose voices were being lost, a social justice lens that seems to be drifting into the past. The NSW Community Justice Centres were among the first services of their kind in the world, and for four decades governments of both persuasions built dispute resolution infrastructure that other countries studied and copied. That legacy is now being dismantled: a program closed here, a network defunded there, a service narrowed to tribunal overflow, a research centre amalgamated, a degree quietly dropped from a handbook. Almost none of it has been announced, consulted on, or evaluated.

These decisions are landing in a society already marked by disillusionment with access to justice and by deepening mistrust of institutions: an eroding faith in the ability of our systems to deliver safe and fair outcomes. That makes this more than a question of service funding. It is a question of culture, society and democracy. A society whose members cannot access justice, cannot trust the institutions that administer it, and cannot safely say no to power begins to look less like a democracy and more like an autocracy.

The paradox sharpens at the international level. Australia signed the Singapore Convention on Mediation in September 2021, celebrating mediation as essential infrastructure for cross-border commerce, yet five years on it has still not ratified the Convention, and at home it is defunding the community services where most citizens would ever encounter mediation. Meanwhile, mediation itself is increasingly drawn into the orbit of the legal profession: recast as a procedural hurdle, a billable stage, another stick to be wielded in litigation strategy, rather than a place where parties hold their own conflict and their own outcomes.

Community mediation, at its best, was the connective tissue between community and access to justice: free, local, trusted, and capable of evening out power dynamics that courts and markets amplify. It was also able to bring differences together at the table, a process that brought people together and reminded them of our shared humanity. Where once we aimed for a win-win solution, it seems that across societies the desire is for winner takes all. So what does this mean for mediation, and is there a role for us in shepherding towards another option?

This special issue invites honest and rigorous scholarship and reflection on whether that promise was real, what is being lost, what has been co-opted, and what the future of mediation could and should be.