The report highlights the critical service that the legal assistance sector and other community organisations provide for the most disadvantaged communities affected by floods.
The Committee commented:
Without the efforts of legal aid solicitors, financial counsellors and the broader community sector, many more flood victims would have faced financial and personal ruin.
The Committee acknowledges and honours this work (8.203).
However, Legal Aid Commissions and other legal assistance providers are faced with major funding restraints, which denies legal assistance to the most disadvantaged by floods and other disasters, creating downstream impacts for government.
The Committee commented:
The Committee has heard clearly that these organisations are unable to meet the growing community demand for their services with current funding levels. The Committee notes that for many of these organisations, caseload increases as successive waves of consumers reach personal or financial breaking points.
However, government funding tied to the 2022 major floods is drying up, while baseline funding levels do not reflect the burden of ongoing flood recovery or resilience work; nor are they adequate to sustain a standing disaster recovery capability and expertise between major events (8.204).
The Committee recommends that a portion of the additional funding package announced to the legal assistance sector during 2025-2030 be allocated to the work of disaster recovery.
New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia have received temporary funding over the past two years to deliver and co-ordinate a disaster legal response. The capacity to service demand is hampered by short term funding, with the regular loss of skilled expertise.
Disaster legal assistance evaluation and planning indicates that around $20 million for the delivery of disaster response and recovery legal services is required nationally by the legal assistance sector to deliver a sustainable response that supports communities.
This includes resourcing for ongoing, sustainable disaster legal assistance services beyond the emergency period, planning and service coordination and the capacity to stand up place-based surge legal assistance in disaster affected areas.
Disaster legal assistance provides a cost-benefit to government by minimising the financial and other impacts of disaster on individuals and communities. Timely legal help reduces the risk of long-term dislocation and homelessness by supporting access to insurance and other entitlements, financial hardship relief and assistance for tenants.
For example, at the peak of service delivery between March and July 2022, Legal Aid NSW lawyers simultaneously attended eleven Recovery Centres across Northern NSW and Greater Sydney and coordinated the wider legal assistance sector response.
As disasters become more frequent, destructive, widespread, impacting larger numbers of people, it is critically important for governments to fund legal assistance disaster services to assist with specialised matters relating to disaster support.