David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to say that I, together with my colleague Senator Cox, support this motion. I thank Senator Thorpe for bringing it to the chamber.

On 5 March this year, the Attorney-General received the Mundy report into NLAP, a report the government itself commissioned—an independent report commissioned by the government, to work out how to fix the crumbling Legal Aid, CLC, First Nations legal services and domestic violence legal services across the country.

This was an independent report from a highly-credentialed expert who knew his stuff. He went out and he spoke to all of those services. He consulted in detail with them. He looked at hundreds of submissions and saw the crying need. At the core of the recommendations that came back in the Mundy report is an urgent need, in this financial year that's just started, for an additional $215 million in urgent funding, just to stop services collapsing. That's the shortfall that's been caused in the sector by a disgraceful lack of funding by the coalition government over the last decade. So, it's no wonder coalition senators come in here and oppose this motion, because they are, in large part, responsible for the crisis we see in the sector.

You might think $215 million is a lot of money, and for any one individual or any one organisation it's of course a huge amount of money. But for a government that's willing to spend $45,000 billion on a couple of ships? Or $368,000 million on nuclear submarines? You're telling me you can't find $215 million to fund community legal services, Aboriginal legal services, domestic violence legal services? You're telling me that can't be found? This is about choices.

Instead of $215 million, what did we get from the government? Well, after interrogating them at length in budget estimates, we found out that the total additional funding that the government is offering to the sector this year is $44 million, and most of that is just an indexation to keep up with this year's inflation. It's not just treading water but watching the sector slowly drown over the next 12 months. That's what the Albanese Labor government have offered. And when we're talking about $215 million, of course it's a lot of money, but this year the government chose to have a $9 billion surplus. This is a $9 billion surplus, paid for in part by First Nations women who can't get legal support when they're leaving domestic and family violence. That's, in part, how this surplus is being paid for. The government knew this. I want to repeat: the Attorney-General had this report from 5 March—months of time—in order to put into the budget the $215 million needed to save the sector.

This report says that the sector can't wait and that, without some urgent injection of funds from the Commonwealth, this next 12 months will see disastrous job losses, service cuts and, potentially, the closure of a series of critical services. I've been around the country and spoken to many of these services. I remember being in Tasmania and talking with some of the women's legal services. They said they can't deal with the scale of the problem. Many of them just get legal funding. But when a woman walks into a domestic violence legal service in Tasmania, they often don't just have a legal problem; they've got a counselling problem, a financial problem and a housing problem. They've got this package of problems. Again, the Mundy report says, provide the wraparound services, fund these services as though women are full human beings, not just a legal problem, and the same for First Nations legal services. Legal problems don't walk in the door of these centres; human beings, with complex problems, walk in the door, and that's what should be funded.

I want to highlight some of the recommendations that were ignored. Recommendation 17 of the Mundy report was that an additional $12 million to ATSILS and $4 million to family violence prevention legal services should be funded. What did the government give? Not one cent. Recommendation 18 said that $44 million is needed for legal aid. And what did the government give towards that independent recommendation from the independent report about legal aid for the next 12 months? Not one cent. There's a chance for the government to turn this around, but it requires money, it requires listening and it requires implementing this independent report.