Derryn Hinch (Victoria, Derryn Hinch's Justice Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Cormann) to a question without notice asked by Senator Gallagher today.

In question time today much was made about funding cuts coming up in the upcoming budget and also in the omnibus bill. Much has been made about these cuts to funds, and especially about the cuts to legal aid and community legal centres. I have in the past opposed some aspects of the legal aid funding which has gone to convicted killers, but I do support legal aid in principle.

The disturbing thing about the planned cuts that are coming now is that legal aid funding has steadily decreased. Both coalition and Labor governments are to blame for this. In 1997 the federal government spent $11.22 per capita, and today we are spending $7.84 per capita. Around 10,000 Australians are forced to represent themselves each year due to these cuts. We are finding that in places like Sydney and Melbourne, where community legal centres are being forced to amalgamate, we are having a problem where victims of domestic violence are having to travel by train or by bus for up to an hour or by car for 45 minutes to get to one of these amalgamated centres. It seems only eight per cent of people these days qualify for legal aid under the current means test. We also find that middle-class Australians are often cut out of the legal aid system. Quite often we have Australians living below the poverty line who do not qualify for legal aid. Look at what is happening overseas: in the United Kingdom they spent double the amount on legal aid per capita that we do.

Legal aid and these community legal centres help more than 200,000 people a year, but the centres are forced to turn away more than 150,000 people, often due to a lack of resources. This affects the Family Court. Lack of funding within the Family Court and the Federal Circuit Court is resulting in family law issues being forced to wait up to three years for a final trial. We are also finding that victims of domestic violence and victims of sexual assault find themselves in Family Court often having to be cross-examined by the very man who allegedly attacked them.

These cuts that have been coming all the time here affect the most vulnerable and the most disenfranchised. They affect the elderly, the young, the disabled, the homeless, the Indigenous and people in rural areas. The list goes on. They affect people from low socio-economic segments of our community. As I said, with the waiting periods of the Family Court and Federal Circuit Court increasing, this delays access to justice. As the founder and leader of the Justice Party, this is just not on.

The cuts to legal aid and the community legal centres bypasses access to justice altogether by forcing people who do not meet the means test for legal aid to represent themselves. With the government implementing policies such as the debt recovery system within Centrelink, many defenceless people who do not understand how to respond to a debt recovery notice or do not know what further action to take are hindered of the opportunity to respond as the community legal centre resources are depleting.

And that is why I am very pleased to endorse what has been announced by the Law Council of Australia. They are forming a justice project led by the President, Fiona McLeod SC. They say their project will uncover systematic flaws and ensure the path towards equal access to justice and make it clearly mapped out. They will report their findings by the end of November this year. I am pleased to say that a steering committee of eminent Australians, chaired by the Honourable Robert French AC, the former justice of the Australian High Court, will oversee this project. The president of the council, Fiona McLeod, says:

Access to justice is a bedrock principle for our society and a means of protecting, promoting and defending the rule of law and human rights of all people. It is a core tenet of our modern democracy, yet unfortunately there are many who are missing out. A person's formal right to justice and equal treatment before the law is of no value if he or she cannot effectively access the legal system or secure protection of basic rights.

I think the cuts to CLCs and legal aid—and we are also talking about cuts to women's refuge centres, which is an abomination—have to be reversed.

Question agreed to.