Page 2935 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
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I am aware that the government will be moving amendments to strike out those references in our motion that call on the government to act before the next budget. That is a shame, because I think they are selling themselves short. They have engaged with Street Law, identified their problems and found a solution. But there are other legal providers based at Havelock House who are facing the same problems, who could potentially find equally similar practical and deliverable solutions and who need that assistance from government to deliver the legal capacity that many in our community so desperately need.
The Greens’ position on what is needed is that, firstly, all paid staff positions should be able to be provided a desk. It seems a fairly simple premise that anybody who has a job should have somewhere to sit, with a computer and telephone, to be able to do their job.
The second point is that offers of pro bono assistance should be able to be accepted. Again, this means the provision of sufficient space—perhaps even a hot desk with a telephone and a computer—so that private sector lawyers who are wanting to offer their skills and services on a free basis should be able to come in and have the capacity and the space to do that work and to be able to meet clients and the like.
Our third point is that the government should be able to act to ensure that the first of those two points is achieved. As I touched on earlier, it is a simple and sensible investment for government. Putting some money in now will make a real difference in the future and save money down the line.
The government’s position in opposing parts of our motion appears to be that they do not want to open the floodgates to vast claims from community legal centres for office space. The government do not want to be forced into funding those claims. I do not accept those views. The government’s position misinterprets community legal centres and what they stand for. Community legal centres are there for those people in need and they remain focused on providing legal advice. I simply do not think they are that interested in some sort of land grab or building themselves larger premises from which to operate. The simple fact is they are operating at reduced capacity and they need help to bring themselves up to full capacity. That is not because they want something. It is because they want to deliver the services that the community needs.
The Greens do not believe it is too onerous to require that the government engage with community legal centres and find practical solutions to their problems. It is not too much to ask that paid staff and volunteers have the space to work. The simple provision of a desk does not seem like too much of an ask.
The second aspect of what the Greens are calling for in this motion is action once the survey of legal needs in Australia is published in 2011. The survey will quantify unmet legal need on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis. This is an incredibly important piece of work, because what we know at the moment is there is a large amount of anecdotal evidence that there is unmet legal need in the community but nobody really knows what it is, how much there is and, therefore, by dint of those gaps in knowledge, how to tackle it.
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