The uproar over the funding of community legal centres … Less money, more work … A constituency of disinterest to Brandis … The ABA says, “let’s get creative”
THERE have been a lot of numbers flung around as an accompaniment to the deepening concern about the funding crisis for community legal centres.
Justinian thought it would be useful to try and crunch the figures and make sense of claims by attorney general George Brandis that “there have been no cuts to payments to community legal centres by the Commonwealth government”.
We need to go back to 2013, when the former attorney general Mark Dreyfus had a four year $33.5 million funding program for 61 CLCs, particularly for environmental defenders’ offices.
Overall Labor increased funding in 2013 for legal services by $52 million or 15 percent over four years – CLCs, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services and state legal aid commissions.
The Abbott government set about dismantling that in its first mid-year budget update, cutting $43.1 million for legal assistance services generally, including $19.6 million from CLCs.
In the 2014-2015 budget another $6 million was chopped from CLCs. There was a huge outcry and about a month later some of the cuts were reversed and $12 million over two years to the 61 CLCs was restored.
By this stage legal assistance funding was in a diabolical mess, as might be expected with anything that Gorgeous George Brandis attempts to manage.
In an attempt to resolve the chaos the attorney general came up with the euphemistically named national partnership agreement whereby 189 community legal centres will receive $142.9 million between 2015 and 2020.
The total Commonwealth allocation for the period is $1.6 billion for all legal assistance services – CLCs, Aboriginal legal services, family violence prevention legal services and state government legal aid commissions.
It is not really an “agreement” at all, because that would assume the community legal sector agreed to serious annual budgetary depletion over five years.
It works like this:
The funding this year for community legal centres is $42.2 million, it drops to $30.1 million in 2017-18, then to $30.6 million in 2018-2019 and $31 million in 2019-2020.
Since the national partnership “agreement” came into effect $16.5 million of the money for the domestic violence package has been allocated to the CLCs.
In a submission to the federal Treasury, as part of the 2017-2018 budget preparations, the National Association of Community Legal Centres says that the women’s safety allocation does nothing to offset the CLCs “funding cliff”.
“The flow-on effects of family violence are clear in a range of the other work CLCs undertake, including for example credit and debt, tenancy, homelessness and access to social security, which means core funding for CLCs is an integral part of ensuring people experiencing family violence have access to the legal assistance they need.”
The national partnership agreement will mean Commonwealth cuts for CLCs of $12.1 million in 2017-18 (29%), $11.6 million in 2018-19 (27%) and $11.13 million in 2019-20 (26%) – an overall reduction of 27.5 percent from the current level of $42.2 million.
And this at a time when the demand for CLC services has never been higher.
The latest stats published by the National Association of Community Legal Centres show the following workload profile for the 12 months under review:
That figure of nearly 160,000 people that the CLCs were unable to help shows the extent of the financial pressures. Predominantly they are the homeless, the mentally ill, the vulnerable, the disabled, those on welfare, in debt to financial institutions, tenants, and those chasing child support.
They are not part of the Liberal-National Party heartland, which is why the Commonwealth government can unflinchingly cut $35 million over three years when the new national partnership agreement starts on July 1 this year.
It’s so dire that the NSW government announced on April 5 it would chip-in a further $6 million over two years to NSW CLCs. This might have the effect of saving from closure the Northern Rivers CLC’s outreach service in the Tweed region.
Tasmania also scraped together $1.2 million in March to “fully offset” the effect of the cuts.
ALP (Qld) Senator Claire Moore raised funding concerns with Brandis in the Senate on March 29, including the plans to close the Castan Centre’s child support unit and threats to the Hobart Women’s Legal Service.
The NACLC submission to the Treasury identifies the critical reductions in services in each state and territory.
Brandis passed the buck to the previous Labor government, calling the cuts “the Dreyfus cuts”.
“If [Dreyfus] was of the view that there was a need for continuing funding, he could have asked for it, but he did not. He engineered a program beyond the life of the government of which he was a member to terminate at 30 June 2017,” he said in a statement the meaning of which is difficult to fathom.
The 34-page extract from Brandis’ ministerial diary that was extracted from him after years of litigation showed that from September 2013 to May 2014 there was no record of the attorney meeting with the CLCs or their national body before getting stuck into their funding.
Of course, the money comes with restrictions, including no lobbying or engaging in public campaigns. Brandis doesn’t approve of that sort of free speech.
CLC submissions to government are permitted by CLCs of “factual information with a focus of systemic issues affecting access to government”.
Brandis said the Commonwealth will only fund services that are, “actually helping a flesh and blood individual”. He equates advocacy with “academic work”.
The NSW government imposes similar sorts of restrictions.
Yet, the Productivity Commission recommended that governments continue to properly fund CLC advocacy activities, “that seek to identify and remedy systemic issues because it reduces demand for frontline services”.
The national partnership agreement has also seen the defunding of peak bodies dealing with housing and homelessness.
Homelessness Australia lost all its Commonwealth funding and has closed its office and the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples looks to do the same.
Clayton Utz pro bono partner David Hillard says:
“Reduced community legal centre funding is a false economy – the costs of unresolved problems will shift to other areas of government spending, such as health care, housing and child protection.”
The Productivity Commission agrees that “narrowing the gap would be socially and economically justified” – even though the costs and the benefits are “difficult to measure quantitatively”.
Australian Bar president Will Alstergren says it’s time to think creatively:
“We should be finding alternate sources of funds and asking the government to match it dollar for dollar. We’ve got to turn the debate around a little bit.”
He suggests a funding arrangement built on revenues from taxes on gambling and alcohol.
It is not as though there have been no innovations. For instance, some CLCs in NSW, Legal Aid, Law Access NSW and the Welfare Rights Centre, are joining forces to create a one-stop hotline to cope with the flood of cases contesting Centrelink’s robodebts.
Brandis has defended the government’s ruthless pruning, saying that claims “the government is withdrawing $6.8 million annually [from CLCs] is misleading”.
It is misleading because, in fact, it is withdrawing double that amount under the partnership agreement.
After delivering the Victoria Law Foundation oration on February 10, former chief justice Robert French was asked whether it would be “a strengthening or a weakening of the rule of law if we only had a solicitor general and no attorney general”.