Alan Griffin (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise in the chamber to raise concerns about the way that this government is treating community legal centres and to grieve the cuts that have been made to their funding and to remind the parliament and the community of the excellent work that community legal centres do. Not-for-profit legal services are there to help people who need help, people who cannot afford to employ lawyers themselves, often people who cannot access legal aid. They provide very basic services, but very important services that have a real impact on people in the community who are doing it tough. As the member for Holt, who is here, would know, there are a number of legal services in our local area that provide this service, in particular the Casey Cardinia Community Legal Service, the Springvale Monash Legal Service and also in my electorate, the Monash Oakleigh Legal Service. These centres provide excellent services and important services.

When you go to the question of the value of legal services, on average community legal centres have an economic cost-benefit ratio of one to 18, that is, for every dollar spent by government on funding community legal centres, they return a benefit to society that is 18 times that cost. Community legal centres add significant value to their funding by attracting over 4½ thousand volunteers, 24,000 hours of work per week and over 50,000 hours through pro bono partnerships every year. This has come from information provided by the legal centres' peak organisation but it is information which is well and truly attributed. From my own point of view in terms of being a local member, I know that I have had a number of staff over the last 20 years who at various times have volunteered and assisted at local legal centres and I know the sorts of jobs they have had to do and the importance that has with respect to the needs of the local community.

I am also very concerned that the Attorney-General Senator Brandis has also announced changes with respect to the roles of legal centres and what they are actually supposed to be able to do with Commonwealth funding. I quote from the shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus in a recent speech when he said:

The government proposes to amend the Community Legal Services Program service agreement to exclude 'law reform and legal policy activities' from the definition of CLC activities that the Commonwealth funds. The government proposes also to remove clause 5 of the agreement, inserted by the last Labor government. That clause affirmed the commitment of our government that conditions attached to Commonwealth funding to CLCs would not 'stifle legitimate debate or prevent organisations engaging in advocacy activities'.

These activities are actually very important because we have an organic legal system. We have a system which basically we need to continually review, one we have to continually update to take into account the needs of the society that we represent. The fact is that people who are working at the coalface, helping those who are not in a fortunate situation with respect to their capacity to seek legal support and advocacy services, are often the people that will see the harsh, hard end of the legal system.

Those people who are representing them in these environments are often the ones who come to understand the failings of our legal system and are often in a position to be able to articulate and advocate as to what should be the changes that are needed to ensure that our system maintains its relevance to the society that we are all part of. In fact, the Productivity Commission, in its draft report Access to justice arrangements, made a number of points with respect to this. It said:

Legal assistance lawyers, on the other hand, are uniquely placed to identify systemic issues, particularly those affecting disadvantaged Australians.

The commission said:

… advocacy [work] can benefit those people affected by a particular systemic issue, but, by clarifying the law, it can also benefit the community more broadly and improve access to justice …

There is no doubt that these cuts are going to have a terrible impact on the most disadvantaged in our community. There is no doubt that it is going to ensure that we do not have as much information coming forward from within a very active and vibrant part of our legal system to actually suggest what changes need to be made and, in fact, how we can improve our legal system. And there is no doubt we are going to see massive unmet demand.

Even before these changes have been made, even before they have been announced, the circumstances were that the unmet demands with regard to services in this area were already significant, with nearly half a million people in 2012-13 turned away because there just were not the resources there to provide for their needs. If that is what was happening before, then these cuts are going to have a very detrimental effect on the quality of justice within the Australian community; they are doing to have a very detrimental effect on people who need help to just get a fair go within Australian society. These changes need to be reversed, and if members of the coalition are genuinely concerned about those who are not doing so well in society and need assistance, they need to take action to ensure that the Attorney-General and the government change their mind.