National Legal Aid welcomes the finalisation of the 5-year National Access to Justice Partnership released on Friday by the Commonwealth and State/Territory Attorneys-General.
We welcome the increased investment across the legal assistance sector that aims to address wage parity for Community Legal Centres, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services and Family Violence Prevention Legal Services and provides more sustainable service delivery.
The Partnership includes the prioritisation of legal assistance to help end gender-based violence and National Legal Aid welcomes the additional funding for Women’s Legal Services and Family Violence Prevention Legal Centres. Legal Aid Commissions are the main providers of family law legal representation in Australia for people experiencing disadvantage and delivers over 130,000 family law related legal assistance services a year. Approximately 86% of all matters include a risk of domestic and family violence.
The ongoing funding outlined in the Agreement ensures that Legal Aid Commissions can continue to deliver vital services to disadvantaged women and children, through their family law legal representation, Family Advocacy and Support Services, Domestic Violence Units and Respect@Work legal assistance services.
It is disappointing that whilst the additional funding provided to Legal Aid Commissions will enable continuation of family law service delivery, due to ongoing demand it will not address critical funding pressure points for Legal Aid Commissions:
- There will be no expansion of Legal Aid family law or independent children’s lawyer program legal representation services, creating continued unmet demand and resulting in disadvantaged victim-survivors missing out on support.
- There will be no increase to the Legal Aid means test, which will continue to limit access to Legal Aid to only 8% of Australian households, resulting in clients needing to be well under the poverty line to access legal representation.
- Private practitioner fees will be unable to be raised to appropriate levels which will continue to create market supply issues in delivering services, particularly in rural and remote areas of Australia.
National Legal Aid will continue to work with the Commonwealth and State and Territory Governments to look at options to address these ongoing service delivery gaps.
We look forward to working in partnership across the sector to develop an integrated approach to providing legal assistance to best address gender-based violence.