Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to stop and just imagine something for a moment. Imagine if you worked for a service funded by the government and you had been put on notice, since the election in September 2013, that your budget is going to be cut but you have to wait until budget night 2015 to find out what that funding cut looks like. You have been put on notice but you do not know how much you are going to lose. You have no idea whether you will be asked to cut back on particular services or provide services in a particular area or whether, in fact, you will be told how services are to be delivered. That is what the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, the Prime Minister of our country, has said to Aboriginal legal services right across the country: 'Cuts are coming. They are going to come on budget night 2015, but between now and then we are not going to tell you how much will be cut or what will happen to your services.'

I want to focus particularly on the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia. It is a fine organisation. Like most Aboriginal services, it does not get any money or funding at all from the state. It is entirely dependent upon the Commonwealth government for its funding. We know in Western Australia—and, indeed, this statistic is borne out across the country—that there are very high rates of incarceration of Aboriginal people. They are way too high, and in Western Australia we have one of the highest incarceration rates of Aboriginal people in the country. That tells me, and it should tell other senators, that the work of the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia is critical. Not only that, Western Australia is vast and the Aboriginal Legal Service provides services throughout Western Australia from a very small budget. That is what it manages to do: it provides a unique and culturally appropriate service, which employs a lot of Aboriginal people on a daily basis, to assist those Aboriginal people who find themselves charged with a crime.

I want to paint a picture of the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia in just one small part of the north-west. The Aboriginal Legal Service has been around for 40 years in Western Australia, doing a fine job. It is the view of those Aboriginal Legal Service officers that without the ALSWA—if they were to disappear; if the Aboriginal Legal Service were to lose so much funding it could no longer represent persons charged with offences—the criminal justice system in Western Australia would collapse. The ALSWA provides those services across the length and breadth of Western Australia. For those senators who are not Western Australians, that is a landmass greater than that of Western Europe. Unlike Western Europe it does not have good transport links; most travel is done by road and in some areas by air.

In Broome the ALSWA has three lawyers and a court officer. The court officers tend to be Aboriginal people and they have a right of appearance in WA courts. Their circuit covers Broome, Derby and Fitzroy Crossing. On any day the circuit is operating, between 70 per cent and 95 per cent of the clients on the court list are clients of the Aboriginal Legal Service.

What does that look like? We can all trick people with statistics, but the court lists of those three towns vary between 45 and 120 people every circuit. Most of those—in fact, almost all of them—are clients of the ALSWA. In some places where the circuit spills into another day simply because of the case load, Legal Aid—because they too have had cuts and will suffer cuts into the future—is not there. The legal aid service in Western Australia cannot manage that second day, so the ALSWA does the whole list.

The ALSWA in Broome also holds remote courts in the Aboriginal communities of Bidyadanga, Dampier Peninsula and Looma. These are long distances to drive so, in addition to doing the legal work of representing most of the clients before the courts, ALSWA officers then drive distances of 120 or 200 kilometres to represent their clients. That pattern is not unique to Broome. That pattern is represented across the state.

The ALSWA does the full spectrum of legal work from the most serious criminal matters to minor offences. All of that work is done with very limited resources; all of that work is being done under the threat of future cuts—but we do not know how much will be cut and we do not know how those cuts will be applied. All this is being done by a government which purports to be aiming to do its very best by Aboriginal people in this country. When they do something of the magnitude that is being done to the Aboriginal Legal Service you could not say they are doing their best by any stretch of the imagination.

In Western Australia no thought is being given to the remoteness of the communities that the ALSWA attend to or the travelling distances. They have just been told to expect a cut. I spoke to the Aboriginal Legal Service this afternoon to ask them to check that I had all of my facts correct. When I last spoke to the Aboriginal Legal Service—this was in evidence to the select committee on Abbott's Commission of Audit—they told me that at that time they had 12 serious cases. They had 12 people facing charges of murder. Under Labor—and this goes back a very long time—there was a fund that the Attorney-General administered called the expensive case fund. Obviously murder cases are complex. People have the right to be represented in complex cases; they would make a submission to the Attorney-General's office to receive this additional funding to support them with these very serious charges. The ALS now have 14 murder charges and no funds; the funding has completely dried up.

The Abbott government is expecting the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia—and I am sure this is no different for other Aboriginal legal services across the country—to somehow fund very complex, serious cases from their current funding. They are not funded to do this. They do not know how they are going to brief counsel, they do not know where that money is going to come from, but they are very determined that Aboriginal people are entitled to the same access to justice and defence as any non-Aboriginal person. But that is not is what is happening at the moment: funding by the Attorney-General's Department for these particular expensive cases has dried up. The Abbott government has not seen fit to put any additional funds in there, and yet we have the Aboriginal Legal Service of WA expected nevertheless to provide good representation, as it does, without any funds for Aboriginal people facing very, very serious charges.

We have heard over and over that cuts to Aboriginal legal services would not affect front-line services, but ALS are a front-line agency. There is no getting away from that. There is no getting away from the fact that the ALS are in the front line, they are in our court systems, they are out in Aboriginal communities. I urge the Abbott government, between now and the budget next year, to get its act together and give some assurance to the ALSs across this country that they will not be cut. This is not fair and it has got to stop; the ALS must have some confidence in their ability to represent people into the future.