Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We all remember the dreadful 2014 Abbott-Hockey budget but many would not know that in the middle of all the other punitive cuts was a 30 per cent cut to community legal centres to take place on 1 July this year. Community legal centres are the hard end of the law. They deal with complex cases where one legal problem leads to another—family violence leading to tenancy issues; unpaid traffic offences—and they handle these interacting cases where other legal services, including legal aid, can only handle one legal problem at a time. They do the early intervention that prevents problems from escalating and saves families and the community both money and a whole lot of pain.

Lawyers are not well paid in this field and it is a place where most of the pro bono legal work is done. They are local, they know the area, they have great outreach and they do an extraordinary job in an area of law that nobody else touches in any real way. On 1 July this year we will see a dramatic downgrading of the services that these centres provide. George Brandis has only visited a handful of community legal centres but his cuts have already impacted in my area.

Former manager Maria Girdler has taken on the challenge of amalgamating three centres. The new Western Sydney Community Legal Centre is the result of a merger between the community legal centres in Hawkesbury-Nepean, Parramatta and Mount Druitt. The head office is in my electorate of Parramatta. It faces a 10 per cent cut from July this year, leaving hundreds of the most vulnerable people in our community without access to much-needed legal services.

It is managed by a volunteer management committee. It has lost two staff in the merger already and that has stretched the workload of those who remain. The centre delivers almost 12,000 case and advice services per year. In the last six months it has served 3,465 clients, including 1,400 within the Parramatta area. Over 64 per cent of its clients are women and the Parramatta office is dominated by family law and domestic violence issues at 37 per cent of its caseload.

As identified by the Stubbs report and the law survey of 2012, large numbers of people in Western Sydney are affected by key indicators for legal need and disadvantage, including single parents, victims of crime, families of children, disability and chronic ill-health, Indigenous, those on benefits, public and community housing, private renters, and people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. We can, of course, add Centrelink debt. These are real people and as Western Sydney expands to over 3.4 million people by 2041 the need for legal services is growing not contracting.

The people of Parramatta deserve access to justice and I call on Mr Brandis to reinstate funding. These are committed people. Whatever money they are given they stretch to its limits, and the need is so great that if you doubled their funding they would still stretch it to its limits. They are extraordinary people doing great work and they deserve the support of this House.