Community legal centres in crisis

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Frontline community legal, domestic and family violence services - say up to 1- thousand Australians are being left with nowhere to turn, because of a funding crisis affecting the sector.

Transcript

00:00There is a current national partnership agreement that is due to expire on the 30th of June

00:072025 and at the moment we have less than nine months funding security.

00:12So it is very difficult for centres to offer job security to their staff and we haven't

00:18had a real increase in funding over the life of that agreement.

00:22We're turning away a thousand people a day.

00:24For every person that we help that means two people are turned away and our services are

00:28so overburdened, our staff are close to burnout, we struggle to recruit people and particularly

00:35in rural, regional, remote and very remote areas it is incredibly hard for communities

00:40to access legal assistance.

00:42We offer a really wide range of services.

00:45We have generalist community legal centres who deal with a range of problems from employment

00:51law problems, credit and debt problems, those everyday legal issues.

00:55Many legal centres, about 80% of our centres deal with family and domestic violence issues

00:59as a priority for their services and all centres are assisting people that are financially

01:06disadvantaged.

01:07They can't afford private legal representation and we are really truly a stopgap for the

01:12justice system.

01:13We'd really like to see some leadership from the Commonwealth Government to ensure that

01:18that partnership agreement does get signed off by the end of the year.

01:22We'll have to start winding back services.

01:24People are already starting to think about that.

01:28It is really unethical to offer ongoing services to people in the legal arena when you don't

01:34have certainty that you can continue to provide those services.

01:38It is difficult already to recruit staff and retain staff.

01:41We see a lot of people leaving the sector for that job security in other sectors and

01:47yeah it is a really dire situation that we're in.

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