Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This year's Abbott-Truss federal budget is a vicious attack on our community. The cuts to health, education, pensions and family benefits have been widely canvassed; but the cuts in this year's budget go much further. I want to talk about the significant cuts to community legal centres.

This cruel budget delivered a further $6 million in cut s to Australia's community legal centres on top of the $43.1 million cut to legal assistance services last December. People who cannot afford a private lawyer rely on their local community legal centre to get the free legal advice they need. It is impossible to plan for when legal issues might arise. People do n o t plan for marriage breakdown, unfair dismissal, eviction, discrimination, getting ripped off or debt problems. People do no t plan for police charges, fines or summons es . When pe ople face such serious problems, they need someone who can help. The Federal g overnment cuts announced in the budget will force centres to turn away needy clients. In 2012-13, community legal centres funde d under the Commonwealth Community Legal Services Program provided 248,970 advices and , in total , assisted 211,896 clients across Australia.

There is a significant demand for legal services in our community, and centres will struggle to meet demand over this year and into the future as the Liberals' budget cuts hit. These cuts will leave vulnerable people without proper legal advice and support when they are in crisis. This could lead to bankruptcy, jail or other significant complications.

But, critically, as well as cutting frontline services, the government also plans to stop community legal centres from working to change unfair laws, policies and practices. Through the thousands of people they see each year, community legal centres are perfectly positioned to see how laws, regulations, policing and the legal system impact upon our community. Working to address wider problems, through submissions to government, test cases and public advocacy is a critical part of the work of community legal centres. Through this work they can help hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.

Labor foresaw that one of the likely actions of an incoming coalition government would be to insert gag clauses in funding agreements. Last year the federal Labor government passed the Not-for-Profit Sector Freedom to Advocate Bill 2013. Any clauses in Commonwealth agreements that restrict or prevent not-for-profit entities from advocating on Commonwealth law, policy or action will be prohibited by that legislation. The coalition government is trying to get around this piece of legislation and silence community legal centres. After the budget, community legal centres were notified of a new clause to be inserted in their agreements:

The services funded by the Commonwealth will, in the period of the new Agreement, not include law reform or policy advocacy.

This is a blatant attempt to curtail advocacy work.

There is a long history of important legal reforms being initiated by the work of community legal centres. For example, new domestic violence laws introduced in Victoria in 1987 addressed many of the issues that had been raised by local community legal centres, such as Essendon Community Legal Centre. And just recently the Flemington and Kensington Community Legal Centre helped to transform practices of the Victorian police force toward the African migrant community.

Between October 2005 and August 2009 the Flemington and Kensington Community Legal Centre received over 50 reports of human rights abuses against African Australians in Flemington and surrounding suburbs. The centre was so concerned about the sheer number of incidents that they established the Police Accountability Project to track and respond to these incidents. The legal centre made official complaints to the Office of Police Integrity, the OPI, which is the body responsible for reviewing complaints made against police. In 2006 alone the legal centre lodged 17 well-documented complaints to the OPI about the treatment of local African Australian males by police. In three of those matters, the complainants themselves had been charged with resisting, hindering or assaulting police, charges that were subsequently thrown out by the courts. In every instance, after a long delay, the OPI returned the same verdict: 'not substantiated'.

In 2007, concerned by the number of formal complaints the OPI was receiving about the Flemington police station, senior police commissioned an internal investigation into the Flemington police station. As a result of the internal review the lead officer and another officer were moved from the station. However, the complaints continued.

In 2008, after the continual failure of internal complaints to solve the matter, with the support of the community legal centre and lawyers acting pro bono, sixteen young men lodged a complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission. They alleged that they were repeatedly stopped, harassed and abused by members of Victoria Police, sometimes violently. Lawyers detailed 140 incidents constituting a systemic pattern of racial profiling, a breach of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.

Nearly two full years passed in delays and conciliation. The commission had no power to decide whether or not discrimination occurred. It could only help parties reach agreement, and these parties could not agree, with police unwilling to accept the basic premise of there being a problem.

Victoria Police's LEAP data, analysed by eminent statistician Professor Ian Gordon, revealed that between 2006 and 2009 Africans in the Flemington and North Melbourne area were 2.5 times more likely to be stopped by police than were other groups, despite having a lower crime rate. All this evidence appeared to confirm the use of racial profiling by Victoria Police. They singled out these individuals due to the colour of their skin, not due to any actual crime.

In 2010 a case was lodged in the Federal Court of Australia. The case, Haile-Michael and Others v Commissioner of Police and Others, concerned the daily treatment of seventeen young men by the local police. The case stemmed from allegations that the young men were regularly stopped by police, mostly in Flemington and North Melbourne, for no legitimate policing reason, and were subjected to racial discrimination, including assaults, racial taunts and abuse, and racial profiling.

Part of the evidence of racial profiling comes from internal police documents themselves. Operation Molto was conducted by the Flemington Police Station in 2006 and, to quote from the Molto operation order:

There have been a spasmodic and yet continual increase in the number of robberies and armed robberies occurring in and around the Flemington Housing Estate.

The as yet unidentified suspects for these serious offences are primarily young African males.

Even though they are yet to be identified. It continued:

The increased level of visible police presence will assist in the identification and targeting of offenders.

Individual police reports help reveal the mindset of police officers at the time. One of the individuals in the court case was stopped with a friend late one night in the car park at the flats. The police report noted that they were 'known criminals loitering in the area'. Just downstairs from his own home in the high-rise flats, another individual was checked by police with two friends at 8:30 pm one evening. He was 16 at the time. The police record read:

Checked loitering around park bench near basketball court. High criminal area of robberies and assaults. All wearing 'home boy/gangsta' clothing.

In November 2007, Flemington police station conducted Operation Square, targeting anti-social behaviour. The operational order stated that local police had identified about 30 youths responsible, most of whom:

… identify themselves as the ‘Flem Boyz’.

The legal centre again approached senior police about the stream of young African-Australian males being stopped. Senior police advised that:

The station had a multicultural liaison officer and a youth officer, who organised the activities with the local community. One day, the whole station was required to attend a training session about people from the Horn of Africa.

However, this internal police training appeared to actually exacerbate the problem.

'African/Sudanese community cross cultural advice' was delivered to over a thousand members of the force between 2007 and 2010. In this training, police were informed that Sudanese males:

… are typically inducted into a rebel army or warrior tribe as part of their teen years and consequently, develop a strong ‘warrior’ ethic.

And that they will:

… openly challenge anyone who threatens them regardless of potential consequence.

Among the final words of advice of the police training was:

… despite not even knowing you, they may hate you.

The training was shelved after a complaint from Kot Monoah, an unsworn liaison officer who was born in South Sudan. He had attended a session and described the seminar to senior police as gross professional negligence and not cultural awareness but misinformation and ridicule. Internal police attempts to deal with excessive policing of the African-Australian community were not effective. Police efforts completely missed the mark and the practice continued.

Police were unable to see the fault in their approach to the African-Australian community. As Anthony Kelly, CEO of the Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre said:

Our clients say they were continually trying to explain to police they weren't part of a gang, they were just hanging out.

Complaints properly referred to the OPI and appeals directly to senior police did not change police behaviour. It was the work of the Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre, through the courts, that finally had a result. In February 2013, two weeks before the case was scheduled to begin in the federal court, they reached an out-of-court settlement with Victoria Police. The African-Australian males agreed not to go to trial, providing Victoria Police agreed to widespread institutional change. As part of the settlement, Victoria Police launched a three-year action plan to address community concerns about discriminatory policing.

The December 2013 report Promoting equality inVictoria Police engagement and enforcement outlined their response to the issue:

It is expected that police members make objective, evidenced-based decision-making in the field, and that this is clearly communicated to the individuals affected by these decisions.

We commit to reviewing our training and education to address unconscious bias and how it can impact police practices.

As part of these reforms, officers will receive clearer guidance on when they can legitimately stop people and definitions of what is meant by grounds of reasonable suspicion and high-crime locations. The force will revise its data collection so it can analyse disparities among the ethnicities of people being stopped. The force agreed to conduct a six-month trial of a receipting policy, where individuals stopped by police are given a written receipt outlining why they were stopped and by whom they were stopped.

Commander Sue Clark is responsible for a new division in the Victoria Police that has been established as part of police's response to the court case. It is called the Priority Communities Division. Clark is renowned for her work on cultural change both in her earlier stint at Victoria Police and then at the AFL, where she was responsible for reshaping the code's attitude to women, vilification and racism. The 20-odd staff members in the Priority Communities Division are tasked with managing reforms of the police force.

This is just one example of how a community legal centre can help change unjust behaviours through advocacy. The work of Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre since 2006 has helped a significant and growing community have their voice heard. The internal police processes failed at every step to address the problem internally. It was not until the Federal Court case, brought on by the community legal centre and lawyers, that the issue was properly addressed by police. Community legal centres have been undertaking advocacy since their inception. Their advocacy is a critical part of our vibrant democracy.

I condemn this mean-spirited government. Their attempts to silence community legal centres is in breach of federal legislation passed in 2013. I call on the government to repeal these clauses and let our community legal centres continue with their work unhindered. I call on the government to reverse their cruel cuts to community legal centre funding.