We are nickel-and-diming legal aid for desperate people

Thank you, Senator Thorpe, for affording us the opportunity to speak on the funding shortfall for legal assistance services. People going through their most vulnerable moments are being turned away from legal assistance services because these services just don't have enough resources or funding to help everyone who needs them.

Imagine how you would feel if that was you in one of the worst situations of your life. It might be a domestic violence situation, a relationship breakdown or maybe even a criminal offence done out of desperation. You've been broken down. You've been pushed to your absolute limits. You just need someone to talk to you to help make sense of it all, and then you're told that no-one can help you. What is someone supposed to do in that situation? Legal assistance services don't want to turn people away. It's heartbreaking for the staff at these services to say no to people who desperately need their help, but there are only so many of them and only so many hours in a day.

Governments past and present have failed to ensure that legal assistance services have adequate funding. These services are running on the smell of an oily rag. They're struggling not only to keep the lights on in their offices but also to pay their staff the wages they deserve. Funding for legal assistance services has been indexed by only 1.9 per cent over the past five years. This means that the services have basically been watching their funding go backwards. Staff are being poached to work in private firms that can offer attractive salaries and better working hours. Tassie has one of the lowest ratios of legal practitioners per population in the entire country. There are just not enough lawyers to go around, so when someone leaves legal aid or community legal services to go to work for a private firm, there's no-one to fill the gap. It's hard to persuade people to come and work in beautiful Tassie when you can only offer a short-term contract on less attractive wages.

The Mundy review of the National Legal Assistance Partnership 2020-25 has highlighted all of these issues and more. The review estimates the funding shortfall for legal assistance services right now is around $215 million. That's not small change. The Labor government say they help the most vulnerable people in our communities and that no-one will be left behind but, because of their failure to adequately fund these services, thousands of people are being left behind every single day. For these people, the consequences of not receiving help could be devastating. That's why all attorneys-general from every state and territory, including the federal Attorney-General, need to urgently commit to funding legal assistance services to the levels the Mundy review recommended. Every day they don't means more people will be at risk.