John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to raise a matter of importance to every member of this House and, indeed, every citizen of Australia—the issue of financial and geographic access to justice, legal representation and legal aid. Specifically, I grieve this afternoon for those citizens who cannot get legal aid because of the savage cuts to the amounts budgeted for legal aid by the Howard government, particularly since 2004, and I will provide to the House the government’s own figures later in this speech.

My electorate of Lowe has of late experienced a surge in family law litigants and child support inquiries. As members of this House well know, the all-too-familiar story is the tragedy of unwilling litigants to a family law matter or a dispute concerning payments regularly finding their way into an electorate office. Often, the matters are resolved by clarifying legal issues by referral of the constituent to available pro bono legal systems, including our state and territory legal aid commissions and community legal centres. Frequently, these constituents are either under-represented—that is, they commenced a litigation or administrative process but simply ran out of money and can no longer persist with the arduous and very expensive legal process—or they simply receive poor advice resulting in costly administrative or legal tactical errors.

Either way, it is a fundamental tenet of any functional legal system that access to law—both geographic and financial access—be reasonably available to all. Never should it be that one party to a legal proceeding should be disadvantaged, either financially or geographically, in their ability to access competent legal advice in preparation of advocating on their own cause. As I say this, I have particularly sympathy for legal matters involving children, including family law and child support matters. It is easy to say that federal funding for legal aid is too low. I can only speak for my constituents in the electorate of Lowe when I note the marked increase in distressed Family Court litigants and those parties involved in the administrative strictures of the child support system.

Regularly, I refer matters to legal aid, community legal centres and the New South Wales Law Society Pro Bono Scheme. These and other legally aided bodies do a wonderful job. However, I am confident when I say that only a very small number of people actually qualify for legal aid, due to the strictures of asset and income means tests which are deliberately very low. If you own your own house and have a paltry income, you are essentially ineligible for legal aid. You may be in effective poverty but you are ineligible to defend your case and act for yourself or your interests, including preservation of apportionment of your asset base or access to your children.

This year, media reports have given much attention to the Commonwealth budget on the topic of legal aid funding in the latest round of appropriation bills. Two years ago, the Commonwealth Attorney-General, the Hon. Philip Ruddock, announced in his news release of 11 May 2004 that more money was to go to legal aid. The Attorney-General specified in that news release the:

... provision of $52.7 million additional funds over four years, including $1.3 million for program administration.

The Attorney-General went on to state that:

... this means a total of $599 million will be provided over four years for Commonwealth legal aid for family, criminal and civil matters arising under Commonwealth law.

In the Attorney-General’s 2004-2005 Budget Fact Sheet titled Improving Legal Services, Mr Ruddock announced under the heading ‘Legal aid for Commonwealth matters’ that:

Additional funds will be available to State and Territory legal aid commissions when they enter into new legal aid agreements from 1 July 2004.

These new funds allow for ‘a new duty lawyer service for those who seek to represent themselves before the Family Court and the Federal Magistrates Court’. Another innovation from the new funding agreements is the provision of a minimum rate of pay for legal aid solicitors undertaking Commonwealth family law matters of $120 per hour. These new funding arrangements under the new legal aid agreements are woefully inadequate. I refer to an article entitled ‘Legal Aid plagued by underfunding: NLA’ dated 28 May 2004. In this it is reported that National Legal Aid Chairperson George Turnbull ‘called on the government to address the federal budget’s failure to provide enough funding for legal aid services’. The article goes on to quote Mr Turnbull, who is reported to have said:

The Federal Budget was the Commonwealth Government’s chance to inject adequate funding and prevent the looming crisis in the family law system ...

Further, the article notes:

Although there had been an increase in funding to legal aid services, it was a case of too little, too late, Turnbull said. “The new funding levels outlined in the Budget have put us back to the levels we were operating with in 1996/1997 … before the Government slashed legal aid funding.”

I note that the damage to legal aid funding has occurred on the Howard government’s watch. The damage to legal aid funding began in 1997. The slashing of legal aid funding continued in 2004, and put this funding back to its 1997 levels in real terms. The government’s budget papers and final budget outcomes statement show that in 2003-04 the legal aid budget was $732,276,000 and in 2005-06 it had dropped to $38,778,000. That is a decline in legal aid in 2005-06 dollar terms of some 51.5 per cent since 2003-04.

On 4 October the Attorney-General was in the media again, this time on ABC Radio National’s Breakfast program, on the topic of legal aid cuts. In this radio program journalist Fran Kelly reported that there were ‘new accusations the federal government is trying to gag its critics’ as Attorney-General Philip Ruddock had ‘revealed plans to overhaul funding for community legal centres’. Fran Kelly noted:

In the latest edition of the Liberal Party Journal The Party Room, Mr Ruddock has accused the centres of running private political agendas using taxpayers’ dollars to promote left wing causes.

Mr Ruddock, I do not know about the community legal centres throughout Australia promoting so-called left-wing causes. What I can say, from the streets of Lowe in Sydney’s inner west, is that there are a lot of suffering people who are denied justice because they are incapable of paying for adequate, competent legal advice. I say, in passing, that I also believe this point resonates with members who represent rural and remote areas of Australia and who see access to justice through legal aid equally compromised by the present round of legal aid funding.

It would take too much time to list all the peak bodies, churches, lobby groups and other agencies who have persistently called for increased funding. ACOSS, the various major churches, community legal aid centres and an array of charitable agencies are amongst those who must deal with the community every day and limit or turn away clientele who have legitimate cases but simply cannot be funded for legal aid. Today I call upon the Attorney-General to put aside such notions of left-wing agendas and look at the totality of what National Legal Aid chairman Mr George Turnbull rightly described as the looming legal aid funding crisis that is now, in 2006, upon us. I, therefore, urge the Attorney-General and this government to radically increase funding for legal aid and thus permit greater financial access to justice for those people who desperately need it. I seek leave to table the government’s own budget papers and final budget outcome which lists the amount budgeted for legal aid from 2002-03 to 2005-06.

Leave granted.