This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Community legal centres are pleading with the Coalition to reverse a looming 30% funding cut, saying it will have a devastating impact over the next few years.

The cut will begin on 1 July, unless the government uses its May budget to reverse it.

Labor and the Greens cosponsored a Senate motion on Monday with crossbench senators Jacqui Lambie, Derryn Hinch and Skye Kakoschke-Moore (Nick Xenophon Team), calling on the government to continue the funding.

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They say the public needs to know about the consequences of the Coalition’s decision to reduce funding to community legal centres (CLCs) across the country – worth $34.8m over the next three years.

“This is a small amount of money when it comes to the federal budget, but it’s going to have a devastating impact on the services that we provide,” the chief executive of National Association of Community Legal Centres, Nassim Arrage, said in Canberra on Monday.

“Some community legal centres will need to close and others will have to cut back on the essential frontline services that they provide.”

The fight for adequate funding for community legal centres stretches back to 2013. When the Abbott government was elected in September 2013, it used its first mid-year budget update to cut $43.1m for legal assistance services over four years, including $19.6m from community legal centres.

Six months later, in its 2014-15 budget, it cut another $6m from CLCs.

A month later it made one-off grants worth $1.55m to just 14 CLCs. Then in March 2015, following intense community pressure, it reversed some of its 2013-14 budget update cuts, reinstating $12m in funding over two years for the sector.

A few months later, in mid-2015, it signed a new five-year national partnership agreement on legal assistance services. The agreement provided Australia’s 189 community legal centres with $42.2m funding in 2016-17, but that funding drops to $30.1m in 2017-­18, $30.6m in 2018-­19, and $31m in 2019-­20.

The reduction in funding levels from 2016-­17 amounts to $34.83m over three years, 30% of CLC funding.

Mark Dreyfus, the shadow attorney general, said the government must use its forthcoming budget to restore the cuts, saying community legal centres serve the most disadvantaged people in Australia.

“Among them are victims and survivors of family violence,” Dreyfus said on Monday. “It’s shocking that a government that says it wants to do something about family violence has failed to understand the frontline against family violence is in fact community legal centres.”

Lambie said it was disgraceful that the Turnbull government would allow the planned cuts to continue.

“Last week we’ve seen welfare cuts to some of the most vulnerable, which seems to be a pattern of behaviour from the [Coalition],” she said. “By denying justice to those who are already the most vulnerable Australians is an absolute disgrace on behalf of the government.

“Leave those people on welfare alone. Stop sledging them with a hammer. It’s enough.”

The attorney general, George Brandis, in a speech to the Bar Association of Queensland annual conference on Friday, denied any funding had been cut.

“There have been no cuts to payments to community legal centres by the commonwealth government,” Brandis said. “It has been claimed by some that the government is withdrawing $6.8m annually. That claim is misleading.

“That money … was money provided for under a four-year program, announced by the previous federal government in the 2013 budget, which was deliberately designed to terminate on 30 June 2017. When that program terminates that money will no longer be available.”

He said the government was providing $45m for frontline legal assistance services through the women’s safety package and the third action plan of the national plan to reduce violence against women and their children.

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He said it was the responsibility of state and territory governments to also contribute funding for community legal services.

Community legal centres are one of four publicly-funded legal assistance services in Australia (along with Aboriginal legal services, family violence prevention legal services, and legal aid). Brandis referred to the government’s $1.6bn allocation for all legal services in his speech, a fraction of which goes to CLCs.



CLCs are funded from a range of sources, including commonwealth, state and territory governments, philanthropic grants, donations and fundraising, interest, and other activities – but the majority of CLC funding comes from government.