National Legal Aid (NLA) welcomes the second release of national legal assistance data by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) as an important step in providing national data and evidence of access to justice in Australia. This is the first time that we can compare two national data sets in legal assistance across two years.
The data is an outline of 2023-2024 legal assistance services provided and funded under the current National Legal Assistance Partnership (NLAP). For Legal Aids, this primarily provides a picture of family law legal services.
Legal Aids play a critical role in ending domestic and family violence as they are the major providers of family law duty law and legal representation services in Australia, and the only providers of the Independent Childrens’ Lawyer Program, which provides court appointed legal representation for the best interests of children in parenting matters, particularly where there are safety and other risks.
More than 86% of Legal Aid grants for family law matters include a risk of domestic and family violence.
Legal Aids provided over 246,000 legal assistance services in 2023-2024, including legal information and advice, legal tasks and legal representation. The 2023-2024 data is comparable to 2022-23 and highlights that:
- Over 15,000 family law duty lawyer representations were provided, with over 11,000 of these being for parenting arrangements;
- Over 31,000 family law representation services were provided, with over 19,000 of these being for parenting arrangements;
- Over 7,000 Independent Children’s Lawyer representations were provided;
- 10% of clients are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people;
- 51% of clients are women, receiving over 63% of duty lawyer services and over 54% of legal representations;
- 11% of clients are over 55 years of age;
- 12% of clients are under 25 years of age;
Legal Aids also play a key role in providing duty lawyer and legal representation services in criminal, domestic and family violence, child protection and state civil law areas not funded via the NLAP. Therefore, this data set is only a proportion of Legal Aid service delivery and is by no means a complete representation.
The incoming federal funding agreement for legal assistance services, the National Access to Justice Partnership, is developing a data strategy as a long-term reform initiative. This recognises the important role of the ABS dataset in improving data for the legal assistance sector, to better understand our services and clients.
NLA looks forward to working with the ABS to integrate data on our state and territory funded services in forthcoming releases to develop a more complete national data set on legal assistance.