Page 3093 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (10.41): I would like to speak about both the legal side of justice and community safety and, on behalf of Ms Bresnan, on the corrections elements. I will just touch on a couple of elements of JACS in the time that is available. Firstly, on community legal centres, I would like to note the recommendation by the estimates committee, recommendation 101, around the review of funding arrangements for all community legal centres prior to the 2010-11 budget. This is a very good recommendation.
We know that community legal centres operate on an absolute shoestring more often that not. We have seen the example in this budget where the Women’s Legal Centre has not received the funding needed for its Indigenous liaison service. The Women’s Legal Centre will now struggle to maintain its liaison officer position and will certainly not be able to provide a qualified lawyer as part of improving the program. This seems a shame, because the reason it was applying for extra funding was that the program has been successful in building the numbers of clientele and reaching out into the community. Surely these are the community groups that we should be encouraging to develop—groups that successfully provide the services that government often cannot.
Why is this issue important? The key here is the gap in services. There is a massive group of people who do not qualify for legal aid but cannot afford the full costs of a lawyer. Certainly I have heard anecdotes about people who have received legal bills nearly as much as their settlements at the end of, perhaps, a divorce matter. I even heard one anecdotal case where the lawyer withdrew near the end of the case because the likely settlement would no longer cover the fees. These are obviously some of the more serious examples, but they point to the dire situation in terms of the unmet need for legal services that exists in our community in many places.
There is also a gap for community legal centres between commonwealth funding and that of the states and territories. We have seen that exchange in this place over the past week: the states and territories and the commonwealth point at each other, and the community organisations get stuck in the middle, spending way too much time worrying about how they might stay afloat and where they might get the next grant from rather than providing the services that their clients rely on.
I would like to now turn to restorative justice. I would like to speak about this briefly because it is a very good success story as part of the JACS program. Currently the restorative justice program is available only to juveniles. The Greens would like to see it expanded to include adult offenders, and we look forward to seeing the government move forward on that.
The government is to be congratulated for implementing this program; the figures on the effectiveness of the program have been very heartening. Through questions on notice, we have been able to ascertain that over 89 per cent of all victims say they were pleased or very pleased with the outcome and 91 per cent of offenders say that they would recommend the program to others. Having that sort of response rate on both sides of the equation, to frame it as such, points to the real value of such a program.
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