Page 970 - Week 03 - Thursday, 23 March 2017
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Since the election of the current government to the federal parliament, the community legal sector has struggled through a period of constrained funding, while demand for services ever increases. As of 1 July this year, the two ACT-based community legal centres will directly suffer cuts of a combined $265,000 under the national partnership agreement on legal assistance services. This represents a loss of almost a quarter of funding provided under the national agreement.
This is a trend that is replicated across the country, with funding cut to community legal centres across all states and territories. This will further impact on the targeted services provided to people, from our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to refugees, people with disabilities, young people and women. These cuts remain in place for the remainder of the national partnership agreement, as a continuation of the chronic underfunding of community legal centres.
I would like to recognise the crucial work that all community legal centres do for our community, in particular the community legal centres that serve our citizens of Canberra.
The Women’s Legal Centre here in the ACT served over a thousand clients in the last year, providing more than 2,200 pieces of legal advice. Likewise, Canberra Community Law served over 800 Canberrans through their core services, as well as targeted disability and street law initiatives. This is in addition to the work that our other community legal centres do for our community, including the Tenants Union, the Environmental Defenders Office, and the Aboriginal Legal Service of NSW and the ACT.
These funding cuts will give our community legal centres no option but to turn people away through the necessary constraint of services that will result from the reduction in resources. This will include some of the most disadvantaged people in our community, and those who are seeking legal assistance at a time when they are particularly vulnerable.
Community legal centres are often the first point of contact for people in need, providing a crucial referral role to other support services. This is important to stress, as this unfortunately involves situations where people are trying to escape violence or facing homelessness, so this referral role can have a very real impact on people’s lives; in fact, perhaps going as far as even saving people’s lives in the most challenging of circumstances.
It will mean that members of our community will lose access to important advocates within our legal system. Community legal centres take on cases that other firms do not, or they take on clients who cannot afford to go to a private legal firm. Community legal centres take them on because they know that doing so is in the public interest, that their clients deserve and need access to justice. They stand up for those who may well be facing discrimination because of their life circumstances, be they economic, social or cultural.
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