Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (NT, Country Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians) Share this | Hansard source

The coalition opposes this motion, and the first reason is to do with Dr Mundy's review itself. There are significant fair and legitimate criticisms of the Mundy review. Dr Warren Mundy was first commissioned over 10 years ago, by the then Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, to conduct a report into the legal sector during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd days. In both reviews, Dr Mundy adopted an access-to-justice approach.

The reality is: this review has been informed by stakeholders with entrenched political and vested interests. That is why it's appropriate to apply scrutiny to it and examine its true independence.

The review recommends that taxpayer money be spent on things like the community legal centres engaging in law reform and advocacy rather than assisting clients. Fifty-nine per cent of CLCs wanted to be funded to spend somewhere between one and three days per fortnight solely devoted to advocacy work; 25 per cent of CLCs wanted funding for up to 50 per cent of their time to be spent on advocacy and also in an attempt to support LGBT Australians and the legal needs of sex workers.

This is not to say that the whole report should be disregarded. It makes important recommendations: for example, the competing interests of Legal Aid and family violence prevention legal services. Often, these groups are in direct competition. So there's a need to get the balance right regarding this funding; it warrants close attention. However, given some of the more overt political aspects, it needs to be interrogated in a robust way and approached with a degree of scepticism.

The NLAP was set up by the coalition government and the review was commissioned for the purpose of renegotiating the NLAP. A key tenet of the NLAP scheme as set out by the coalition was that it required full buy-in from states and territories and thereby recognised that the funding for legal services was not simply the responsibility of the Commonwealth but, rather, a joint effort. This is another reason we do not support this motion: it undermines that partnership that is the foundation of this scheme.

The current government is doing a terrible job, mind you, of administering NLAP. We don't need to look any further than what's happening with the spectacular failings of NAAJA in the Northern Territory, where there have been over 90 unrepresented clients since October 2023, 27 of whom have been remanded due to inadequate service delivery at NAAJA and not enough lawyers in place. A grant controller was established in December 2023 because NAAJA, in fact, was not administering funds appropriately. The Federal Court recently found that former CEO Priscilla Atkins was unfairly dismissed by the board after she raised allegations of corruption against the financial officer at NAAJA. The recent chair of the board, Hugh Woodbury, was appointed to his position in March 2024 when the board knew that he had pled guilty to charges of domestic violence against his pregnant partner in 2020. The deputy chair of the board, Colleen Rosas, admitted that NAAJA rejected requests from the NIAA and the Northern Territory government to observe NAAJA board meetings. Leeanne Caton, the deputy chief executive and the most senior female executive, left NAAJA on 21 June 2024, only five months after coming in to the position. There were notices issued by the Northern Territory government to recoup approximately $2.69 million unspent from NAAJA. An audit is of course being undertaken regarding NAAJA's possible misuse of funding.

The redirection of any funding under the NLAP, as sought by Senator Thorpe, should reflect the agreement of states and territories in accordance with how the NLAP was founded. This motion is not a productive or an effective way of achieving this, and that's why the coalition will not support this motion.