Next Tuesday marks a concerning milestone for free legal assistance in Australia. From that day, community legal centres will be unable to use their federal funding to progress law reform or advocate on policy to prevent or deal more effectively with legal problems affecting thousands of people.

The widening gap between the most disadvantaged who may qualify for legal aid and those who can afford a private lawyer is getting wider. Those who rely on community legal centres typically have low incomes and face a host of common but often serious legal problems, flowing from relationship breakdown, tenancy disputes, credit and debt, consumer issues, family violence, fines and mistreatment in the workplace.

The new restriction initiated by George Brandis, the attorney-general, seeks to create a stark division between helping in these individual cases and working to change laws, practices and policies to prevent legal problems in the first place – including, where needed, through speaking out in public about what needs to change.

Brandis claims that with limited resources available to deliver access to justice – resources that were cut further still in the recent federal budget – funding for legal assistance through community legal centres should be confined to “frontline” services. Essentially, he means we should deal only with the people walking through the doors of approximately 200 community legal centres around Australia.

The move is at odds with the Productivity Commission, in its recent draft report on access to justice arrangements. The commission recognised the efficiency and value of law reform and policy advocacy, and its central role in the work of community legal centres.

If the restriction can’t be justified on efficiency grounds, it’s tempting to see it as a move to limit the engagement of community legal centres in public debates and discussions because – in a small proportion of cases – they question government policies. While the right to question is an important one, it is secondary to achieving essential change. There are also many cases where law reform and policy advocacy are welcomed by government.

Here's an example. Few would agree that women facing family violence, who are “silent electors”, should be exposed to their assailants through federal electoral rolls that disclose their electoral division. In some cases this may narrow their location to a small country town that could be easily identified by perpetrators.

Community lawyers are working to have this changed, to be consistent with state and local government electoral rolls, on which such details are not exposed. Their work has been welcomed by a senate inquiry.



In Victoria alone, community legal centres initiate more than 8,000 family violence cases each year. Over the past decade, community lawyers have drawn on their clients' experiences of trying to seek protection. We've contributed to numerous reforms, including the Family Violence Protection Act 2008, that, over time, seek to improve a fragmented and flawed legal system so that it responds more effectively to women and their children who are trying to escape violence.

Community lawyers are also working to protect vulnerable people from being targeted by unscrupulous door-to-door salespeople, debt collectors and payday lenders. Community legal centres work with government on these issues, but where necessary they rightly speak out on where the system is failing and how laws need to change or regulators need to improve their responses.

Community legal centres have a vital role to raise public awareness of the value of law reform and policy advocacy, the sheer demand for legal help, and the chronic underfunding of the community legal sector – a failure of investment that is contributing directly to more than 500,000 people missing out on legal help every year.

If we can’t work to change flawed or unfair laws and practices and to prevent future legal problems arising, the access to justice crisis in Australia will only worsen. That’s what’s at stake next Tuesday.