Page 997 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 21 April 2021
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violence. This includes $1.1 million to support our courts dealing with applications for family violence orders and $1.3 million to fund Legal Aid’s family violence unit, which is based at the court building. This funding is vital for our community in an area where timeliness and responsiveness are of paramount importance. In a situation of vulnerability such as when experiencing family violence, we need to make sure that the system is ready to care for that person, and that is what this funding will help to do.
We also see $1 million this year, in 2020-21, for the Justice and Community Safety Directorate, Legal Aid and Community Services Directorate to develop and introduce a therapeutic care court for care and protection matters. The confiscated assets trust fund will contribute $400,000 towards funding this initiative. A therapeutic care court aims to reduce the number of children in out of home care and to reunite families sooner by ensuring that parents get access to the therapeutic services that they need.
As we know, it is very important that children are given every opportunity to have continued family connection. Whether or not parents get adequate and attentive support can often make the difference in care and protection matters. This court helps shift things in the right direction and we believe that this investment will prove to be an effective intervention.
In this year’s budget there is also $600,000 provided for additional capacity in the Magistrates Court to quickly address the backlog of cases that developed as a result of reduced court activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Half of this funding is provided from the confiscated assets trust fund. As members have previously noted in this chamber, the Magistrates Court has been under immense pressure recently, in large part due to the pandemic. These delays prolong the already stressful experience of being before the court. This funding will help to make sure that our court system is able to handle people’s business in a more timely manner and ultimately improve the wellbeing of parties, the judiciary and court staff. As a proactive measure to assist court functioning, the budget includes $448,000 over three years, commencing in 2021-22, to manage the anticipated increase in the court’s workload resulting from the introduction of mobile device detection cameras as part of the ACT’s road safety camera program.
This budget also provides an additional $1.1 million in 2020-21 to JACS’s legislation, policy and programs branch. This is vital to improve the stability and security of the workforce so that they can continue to deliver the government’s legislative and justice program priorities. This is an incredibly high-volume workplace, handling, among many other things, the policy development for most of the legislation that comes before the Assembly. This funding will help ensure that we continue to get high quality legal policy work from a healthy workplace.
I certainly know many of the staff that work there and they do work on very complex policy matters. They are asked to work on a large number of things, not just the government’s agenda but private members’ bills where they come forward and a range of other matters. I am pleased that we are able to provide additional support to this part of government, which I think will improve the overall performance of the ACT government and the ACT Assembly.
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