00:00Right now I'm standing outside an office of NT Legal Aid. Now Legal Aid services provide free
00:08legal support to people who can't afford their own lawyer but in the Northern Territory the
00:13Legal Aid Commission has been going through a financial crisis. Last month the ABC revealed
00:18it would no longer be offering any free legal support through extensions of aid or grants of
00:24aid to people who are accused of a crime unless those people are in custody or the service had
00:31capacity in-house. At the same time they also posed an overall limit on the amount of aid that could
00:37be issued each month and in the first month of those restrictions being in place the ABC can now
00:43reveal that that limit has been reached. In a letter that we've been leaked overnight it's revealed that
00:49the Legal Aid Commission reached that limit on December the 23rd so it will no longer be
00:54offering any new grants of aid or extension of aid even if someone is in custody. So that means
01:01Legal Aid will only represent people where it has capacity in-house for the rest of the month until
01:07the new year. The Northern Territory's justice system has been under a lot of pressure recently
01:12and legal advocates have said that this will just add to the pressure that the justice system is
01:17already under. Since the country Liberal government came to power about a year ago we'd already seen
01:23the number of people going through the courts and in prisons climbing steadily but since the country
01:28Liberal Party came into power those numbers have simply skyrocketed thanks to a number of bail
01:34restrictions, youth justice changes and law and order crackdowns in the criminal justice code passed
01:41by that government. Now today we asked the government what they made of Legal Aid's latest announcement
01:47to lawyers in the NT and they said that Legal Aid was responsible for its own financial management
01:53and standing on its own two feet to manage its finances sustainably for the long term. They have
02:00previously offered extensions of more funding to Legal Aid about four million dollars last time Legal Aid was
02:07in a similar position but this time they haven't offered anything similar. We've contacted Legal Aid for
02:14comment but what we understand is that any applications for aid which cannot be considered this month under
02:19the new restrictions will instead be considered in January.
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