Page 2873 - Week 07 - Thursday, 7 June 2012
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Let me turn now to justice and community safety. For this portfolio, one of the best aspects in this budget is the continued investment in Street Law, which is a Greens initiative included in the parliamentary agreement. Street Law is a free legal service for homeless people or those at risk of becoming homeless. It is a crucial investment because it helps people resolve legal issues before they snowball into a court appearance. Funding for Street Law is continued for the next three years, and the Greens welcome that a great deal.
Continued funding and investment is about access to justice through early investment in legal issues. Spending a small amount of time and money at the start of a legal problem is so much more efficient than waiting until it requires court adjudication. This is true for all parts of the community, but it is especially true for the homeless and those who are at risk of homelessness. People who live in these situations are often on a knife edge, living from fortnight to fortnight and dreading an unexpected bill or fine that will push them over the edge into homelessness, and early investment can help bring immediate benefits and alleviation.
Interestingly enough, though, another aspect of the justice budget lacks this kind of long-term vision where early intervention avoids difficulties in the future. This is in regard to the community legal centres co-located at Havelock House. As members will be aware, there is money to relocate the Women’s Legal Service away from Havelock House. We believe this is a short-term patch-up solution, not a long-term solution.
The short-term solution continues a theme for the attorney on this matter. Over the last couple of years we have seen a range of patch-up jobs for the accommodation woes faced by CLCs. First there was some internal reorganisation of the Havelock House, then there was the solution to split the Women’s Legal Centre into two units and locate one at Havelock House and move the other out to North Lyneham. Now we have another solution to bring back the Women’s Legal Centre again but dislocate them from their colleagues, the remaining two CLCs at Havelock House—the Tenants Union and the Welfare Rights and Legal Centre.
The reason this cannot be considered a long-term solution is that it splits up the three CLCs. One of the key benefits of the current co-location in the one building is that it allows them to refer a client just 20 metres down the corridor to their neighbouring centre to get the best advice. The funding that has been allocated will relieve a bottleneck at Havelock House for now, but it certainly is not a longer term solution.
The long-term solution is to create a CLC hub where the centres can be located together in the one building. This was a solution the Greens identified in our action plan on unmet legal need in 2010. The government undertook the feasibility study and identified viable options, but, unfortunately, we see the government going for a short-term and cheap-fix solution.
There are a range of matters that I would like to pursue further. I will obviously be asking a lot more questions in the estimates process and then, when we come back to the detail stage, canvassing some of those issues further.
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