Hear Me Out

Hear Me Out is a public, AI-enabled complaints navigator developed by the National Justice Project (NJP) in partnership with UNSW’s Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, with support from the NSW Government’s Access to Justice Innovation Fund. The tool lets users recount what happened—in plain language—and then recommends appropriate complaint pathways, including how and where to file. It focuses initially on New South Wales and Federal complaint bodies and is rolling out to Victoria, with a roadmap toward broader coverage.

The platform organizes resources and factsheets for more than 75 complaint bodies, addressing a common barrier: people often do not know which oversight agency has jurisdiction or what each body requires. During its six-month NSW pilot, the site supported more than 400 complaints. Roughly one-third of matters related to police, legal, human rights and discrimination issues (areas central to NJP’s mission); nearly a quarter involved public-sector concerns, with many users appropriately routed to the NSW Ombudsman. The Ombudsman’s office contributed to the design so that matters without a clear destination could still be directed to the correct intake.

Hear Me Out is positioned as a direct-to-consumer, generative-AI legal self-help tool: it does not provide legal advice, but helps users navigate options, surface eligibility and process information, and generate next-step guidance for lodging a complaint. The initiative aims to reduce drop-off caused by complexity and to expose systemic pain points by aggregating de-identified pathway data (e.g., where users get stuck, which bodies see demand spikes).

The project is a collaboration across universities, nonprofits, law firms, and technology providers, including Portable Australia, Macquarie University, K&L Gates, Microsoft, and Josef.