The peak body for Indigenous legal services will shut its doors after being denied a portion of federal government funding under the Indigenous advancement strategy (IAS) grants scheme.



More than $680m in funding grants have been awarded to 964 organisations under the scheme, which consolidates Indigenous programs and policies into five broad areas, the Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, announced on Wednesday.

“The latest Closing the Gap report delivered last month is both a lesson in how bad things have become and reinforce the need for a new approach,” Scullion said in a statement.

“For the first time in decades we have had a holistic look at the myriad of services and projects being funded to ensure future funding is geared towards achieving change on the ground that improves the lives of individuals and communities.”

Scullion said organisations were being informed of the outcomes.

Guardian Australia has spoken with numerous organisations, some of which said they did not know if or how much of a grant they had been given, or if funding would continue beyond the next 12 months.

Frank Hytten, CEO of the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (Snaicc), the peak body for Aboriginal children in Australia, told Guardian Australia his organisation had applied for three years of funding for 10 programs across three of the policy areas. Snaicc had received an offer but only for 18 months and said it was not clear yet which programs were included.

Other organisations which missed out entirely said they would have to close offices and wind up long-running frontline services.

The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service (Natsils) will shut down in June after it found out its application for an IAS grant was unsuccessful.

Natsils is the peak body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services, and had provided “cohesive and co-ordinated responses” to requests for submissions to numerous Senate and committee inquiries including into domestic violence, access to justice and discrimination, Natsils chair, Shane Duffy, told Guardian Australia.

The organisation ran on $295,000 in annual funding. “We’re not talking about millions or billions,” Duffy said.

“I’d suggest it was one of the leanest national bodies you’ve ever seen, providing very timely evidence-based responses.”

Duffy said by forcing the closure of Natsils, Scullion had “really missed an opportunity to have first-hand expertise provided to his department.”

Jeremy Styles, chief legal officer at the New South Wales Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS), told Guardian Australia Natsils was “a critical part of coordinated service delivery across the country”.

“It provides a coordinated contact for government between the services in different states and territories,” he said, “and a forum for services to improve the quality of their work by consulting about work that’s being done and how different services provide services in their areas.”

The NSW ALS had its two applications rejected by the IAS scheme, including one for its existing custody notification service, which provides 24-hour legal advice and welfare support for Aboriginal people arrested in NSW.

The service is the only one of its kind in the country and requires police to call a hotline when they arrest an Indigenous person. The service was a recommendation of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody.

“We’re deeply disappointed that the IAS grants didn’t cover that part of our business,” Styles said. “The problem for us is that these IAS grants are in the context of much, much deeper cuts that are crystallising on 1 July. The custody notification service is on the table as something we may not be able to fund after 1 July.

“Generally we’ve got a gross amount of $3m cuts which come in on 1 July out of a budget of a bit over $18m. “

The Katherine Women’s Information and Legal Service (Kwils) was granted $107,000 funding for the Indigenous women’s outreach program which has assisted women living in remote communities for the last 13 years. The funding is for 12 months after which Kwils will need to reapply.

Sandra Nelson, Kwils’ executive officer, told Guardian Australia the amount was the same it currently receives to run the service, and it had applied for a further $150,000 for a pilot traineeship program to train Indigenous women as paralegals to work in remote communities, but it was knocked back.

However the biggest shock was the withdrawal of funding for Kwils’s supplementary legal service (SLA). The $207,000 a year – about 50% of Kwils’ budget – from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which paid for Kwils’s rent, administration, and salaries for two staff.

Nelson claims the department told her the SLA was defunded because it was not included in Kwils’s application, but she told Guardian Australia there was no way to apply for it under the scheme’s parameters because the SLA was a service for all women, and was not Indigenous-specific.

“Nowhere in the IAS application was it mentioned that we would need to include in our application request for funds to continue SLA,” she said.

Nelson said she was given no indication the fate of other Kwils services was tied up with the Indigenous-specific funding.

The cut means Kwils will have to sack two of its four staff and find cheaper office space, and its work in the region will be diminished.

“It means that we will not be able to travel to remote communities to provide outreach legal services for women, which is sorely needed,” Nelson said.

“It means that while the federal government preaches and promotes their domestic violence strategy and Indigenous advancement strategy – what they have done is reduced the capability of an organisation that delivers services that support those two strategies.”

Funding of about $140,000 from the Attorney General’s Department, which covers the women’s information service and family violence legal service, was unaffected.

Scullion’s office did not provide answers to questions about Kwils.

In Wednesday’s statement Scullion said his department would speak to unsuccessful organisations “about other potential opportunities to deliver services that improve the lives of First Australians”.

It was also announced on Thursday that 112 community-controlled Aboriginal health organisations would have their funding extended by the federal health department for three years, at a cost of $1.4bn.