Page 697 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 17 March 2015
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Cuts to the Canberra Community Law centre will result in the loss of the organisation’s social worker pilot project from 1 July this year and the loss of half a solicitor position from the end of January next year. The organisation has also made the difficult decision not to replace its senior solicitor because of uncertainty about commonwealth funding going forward.
The social worker program of the Canberra Community Law centre is an innovative project which has only been up and running for about a year. Together with a lawyer, the social worker works intensively with vulnerable clients to address complex social and emotional issues which adversely impact on the successful resolution of their legal concerns. It has led to improved legal outcomes, allowing the lawyer to focus on the legal issues and the social worker to provide the other necessary support.
These are all examples of community legal services funded by the commonwealth that are directly helping vulnerable women and children in our community. We need the funding to be retained, not cut.
Commonwealth cuts to legal services will also, unfortunately, be compounded by decisions to cut funding for the very important translator and interpreter service. Crisis services across Australia rely on translator-interpreter support when supporting non-English-speaking women, who are often more isolated and more vulnerable than others. This means that the Domestic Violence Crisis Service will be required to bear the $20,000 bill for interpreting services; this will further erode their capacity to meet front-line services.
In my motion and in my speech today, I have focused particularly on the impacts of these cuts to community legal centres, because we can restate what we do as a community and as a government and we can restate the critical importance of working together across political lines and across a range of government and non-government sectors.
But there is a very practical message that the Assembly can send today to the commonwealth. It is that these cuts to our community legal centres are running counter to everything our communities are trying to do to respond to family and domestic violence. That is why every attorney-general across the country, regardless of their political persuasion—every single one—has written to the commonwealth attorney saying: “You need to overturn these cuts. You need to provide stability and funding to community and legal aid services. You need to recognise that dollars spent early in prevention through these services stop an escalation into more costly and difficult issues in our courts. You need to reverse these cuts because they are having a detrimental effect on the most vulnerable, including women and children in our community facing domestic violence.”
The motion today, and the action that sits at the end of it, restates the four demands explicitly made by state and territory attorneys in our recent letter to the commonwealth. It restates those terms exactly. What state and territory attorneys-general have asked for is exactly what I am asking the Assembly to support today—to come back to the states and territories with proper funding proposals early so that we
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