Page 3590 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 24 November 2021
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consequences of the withdrawal of commonwealth funding and what role the ACT can play.
It is no secret that I value highly the contribution that our community legal centres make. Many years ago, I campaigned very heavily in this place to get them all put into a single hub. They now have that hub on Barry Drive in Turner, and I know that has been very beneficial to them. We will need to continue to work with the community legal centres to support them, where we can, to continue to deliver the services they do.
In that vein, I would like to speak about the funding for the Legal Aid Commission. This budget provides an additional $2.5 million over four years to support Legal Aid here in the territory. Legal Aid is a vital community support, serving the needs of vulnerable Canberrans at the times they need it most. As most people know, Legal Aid provides support for people charged with criminal offences, to ensure that they are treated fairly, but its service provision extends far beyond this. Legal Aid lawyers provide lifesaving assistance to people needing family violence protection; and they support people through family dispute resolution, employment, discrimination, and residential tenancy matters, just to name a few. The team at Legal Aid are incredibly dedicated. The breadth of what they do is not fully appreciated by those in the community who do not seek out their services.
Legal Aid has been reporting a sustained increase in demand for services since the start of the pandemic, with no signs of that slowing yet—just as we are seeing with the community legal centres. This funding will help meet that demand for the commission’s services, including its telephone advice service and services to support victims of family violence and elder abuse. This funding also supports Legal Aid’s ongoing involvement in the intermediary scheme, which I spoke about earlier. In that capacity, Legal Aid supports vulnerable people engaged in the criminal justice system.
Finally, as I mentioned in the context of additional funding for our courts, part of the criminal case conferencing funding goes to supporting Legal Aid in facilitating that process.
In terms of other matters that were raised today, let me speak briefly on the issue of justice reinvestment. It is a core focus of the government’s justice policy and there have been a number of observations in the debate about it.
I remain deeply committed to a justice reinvestment agenda for this government. It is government policy that we go down this path—that we continue to seek to spend money up-front to avoid people ending up in jail; that we spend our resources in a way that is more preventative than, to use the old expression, being the only ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. We want to make investments that make this community safer but also provide support to those at risk of being involved in the criminal justice system, so that we intervene at an earlier point. That makes everybody safer. People are not involved in those criminal activities and, therefore, our community is not subject to those incidents of crime.
A particular topic of discussion has been the reintegration centre. Mr Cain made the inaccurate observation that it had been withdrawn from the budget. It is very clear in
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