Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On International Women's Day, I together with my federal Labor Senate colleagues senators Bilyk, Brown, Polley, Singh and Urquhart launched a petition and called on the community to sign the petition to put pressure on the Abbott government to reverse its cuts to the Women's Legal Service Tasmania. This legal service has been providing very valuable support to the Tasmanian community for many years, but has now had a cut of $100,000 a year to its service.

As the organisation's chief executive, Susan Fahey, says, the cut:

… effectively means a loss of services to several hundred women in frontline services such as advice, representation and advocacy.

In a small service, of what was four solicitors, it's a 25 per cent cut in actual solicitors employed and more like a 30 percent reduction in the services we can provide.

She continued:

Lawyers actually play a really key role in assisting people in family violence because a lot of people actually don't know what they need to do to leave a situation.

We deal with family violence day in, day out.

Lawyers assist in telling people: 'Yes, you can actually take some of the linen. You can take the couch,' or 'Yes, you can leave and that doesn't mean you won't have any rights to the property.'

Ms Fahey said not being able to respond promptly to a woman in crisis was the biggest concern. She said:

In that time some of those women will actually be injured quite badly.

We've seen in other states some of those women they're trying to get help …

The service is now resorting to technology and other means to try to help more people. It has an award-winning app called 'girls gotta know', which is a fantastic app about providing legal advice online, particularly to young people. They are in the process of developing an app, called 'boys gotta know', to provide the same service to young boys in our community. They are also fund raising. They had Five Buck February in which they called on people to give $5 to the Women's Legal Service on Fridays in February so they could continue to provide these critical services in our community.

Federal Labor has said that it will invest an additional more than $42 million to front-line community legal services such as the Women's Legal Service Tasmania. We said that as part of what we said we would do to address family violence should Labor be elected at the next federal election. I call on the Abbott government to do the right thing in the coming budget and do the right thing when it comes to community legal services like the Women's Legal Service Tasmania. It does provide front-line legal services. It is not advocacy that it provides but services to people who need them. I would appreciate the Abbott government taking it in the context in which I am asking for today for that cut to be reversed. (Time expired)