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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2349 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

those rights. That is on page 40 of the poverty task force report. But free community legal services provided by groups such as Care were targeted at such a problem.

The failure of social capital rests in not only the failure to fund this service but the process of this refusal and the dismissive, antagonistic treatment of Care itself and of related community legal centres through the budget hearing process.

I would also raise as an issue of concern gender bias in legal aid. I have heard other members talk briefly about legal aid. I realise we are under constraints because of federal funding, and I realise that this government has had some success in increasing funding from the federal government. But the point is that we still need to see from this local government an analysis of the impacts of the reduction of funding to legal aid.

I am particularly interested in the gender bias aspect, because I do not see it raised anywhere, not even in the women's action plan, unless I have missed it. I went through it again tonight and I did not see it. It is a fundamental issue if women are being disadvantage because of cuts to legal aid funding. A number of reports have been produced by the Women's Legal Centre to show that this is a factor, and has been for some time, in the delivery of legal aid services. I am sorry to see that that is not in the budget. This government claims that, through the women's action plan and the audit, it has started to address some of the issues which obviously have been lacking in its approach.

I recall that in my first year here I asked the Chief Minister in the Estimates Committee why there was not a women's policy, and she said that they did not have a short person's policy either, or a tall person's policy-I have forgotten which. We seem to have progressed somewhat since then, in that we have had an audit of women's issues across departments, although I was really sorry I could not see a copy of the results of that audit. I did ask for the analysis that the audit must have involved. It would have been really interesting to see. I do not understand why it was not something that I could see.

However, we have ended up with a women's action plan at least, although once again I have to repeat my concerns about these sorts of plans which do not have targets that bring accountability to how government will deliver on their commitments.

MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (11.11): I will be quite brief about this. It sounds to me as if much of the comment about the justice budget this evening has been not a comment so much on the justice budget per se as a recycling of the press releases that people have put out in the justice portfolio in the course of the last few months. We have heard about all sorts of issues, some of them which have very little bearing on the budget, the best example being the statutory interest account. The statutory interest account is not fed by the budget. It has nothing to do with the budget. It is irrelevant to the budget. It is a bit of a tribute to the budget that, rather than talking about the budget, members have chosen to talk about something else, other related but not necessarily directly relevant matters.

Even when the budget or topics close to the budget have been spoken about, the logic applied as to how a member will vote on the budget is twisted at best. We heard Mr Stanhope, for example, complain about crime rates in Canberra, about more burglaries and more car thefts in Canberra. Then he said, "I am going to vote against the

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