Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I speak today to raise my concerns over the new funding arrangements that the federal government has imposed on our community legal centres. Community legal centres such as the Barwon Community Legal Service, in my electorate of Corio, deliver an important range of legal services to assist those most in need, from legal information and advice to community legal action. But their role in a strong legal system goes far beyond this. An integral part of what these centres provide lies in their role as advocates for reform. They stand as strong, independent bodies best placed to draw on their specialist expertise and experience to advocate for complex reforms and deliver targeted programs to support their client base, who are vulnerable to the flaws they identify in our legislation. Additionally, they frequently instigate invaluable community awareness initiatives, which are also threatened by these unfair funding agreements. Restricting the Barwon Community Legal Service to only providing front-line services to clients simply does not make sense. This huge restriction misses the opportunity for legal professionals to feed back their firsthand insights into how the legal system could better deliver for our community.

Furthermore, effective community legal centres deliver initiatives to both empower those who are vulnerable to exploitation and raise awareness of broader community issues which the legal system faces. An excellent example is the success of the Do Not Knock campaign instigated by Victoria's Consumer Action Law Centre and implemented in Geelong by the Barwon Community Legal Service. The campaign recognised that some people were being ripped off in their own homes by some salespeople using high-pressure tactics to sell them overpriced products that they did not need, did not want and could not afford. Addressing the specific needs of our local community, the legal service ran workshops which educated newly arrived migrants about how to assert their rights to not be approached by or to refuse persuasive salespeople who sought to take advantage of them.

The Executive Officer of the Barwon Community Legal Service, Nick Hudson, believes that a consequence of these new arrangements will be to place greater stress on the delivery of their services and result in the inefficient use of resources. Their being able to work with the government to assist in law reform is invaluable because theirs is an experience from a local and a considered base. Nick Hudson says, 'If you cannot fix the big things, you need to keep patching up the little things, which ultimately is unsustainable.'

Unsurprisingly, the Abbott government is trying to make this invaluable work almost impossible for our hardworking legal professionals. By prohibiting the use of federal funding for all forms of advocacy, the government is effectively attempting to gag our legal services. At the same time, since the Liberals have come to government, the Barwon Community Legal Service has received large numbers of requests to provide submissions to a broad range of inquiries. On the one hand, the Abbott government is seeking the expert advice of our community legal centres, but, on the other, it does not want to listen to them. It makes no sense. I sincerely hope that the Abbott government reconsiders this unfair and illogical funding arrangement.