Page 2940 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
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The kitchen that was available to the Women’s Legal Centre and the other legal services in Havelock House was, when I first visited it, an absolute disgrace. The drains were not working and people had to carry buckets of water out of doors when they did their washing up. It is a bit like at the turn of the 20th century rather than a 21st century legal service in the capital of a first world country. Nonetheless, the Women’s Legal Centre is not the only community-based operator facing these kinds of challenges. Such challenges are not limited to community legal centres either. Almost any community-based organisation faces exactly the same challenges and they provide no less an important service in our community.
For these reasons, the first part of Mr Rattenbury’s motion sets out very succinctly the issues facing community legal centres. We can but acknowledge their pertinence, and we will be supporting them. The government has proposed an amendment to the first part of the motion. That amendment will ask the Assembly to note that some work has already been done to assist community legal centres with minor renovations and the supply of furniture. That assistance is also to be acknowledged, and we will be supporting the government’s amendment.
The second part of Mr Rattenbury’s motion, notwithstanding the comments I have made, and while supporting the premise put forward, the opposition cannot support in its present terms, because of the fiscal implications that it puts forward. I touched on this when I spoke in the previous debate—that there does seem to be a tendency in Greens’ motions and amendments today to ask us to make either open-ended commitments to spending or not worry about where that money might come from. And it is not the way of the Canberra Liberals to do that.
No government should be expected to commit to funding of the unknown. We do not know the extent of the shortfall in resourcing or service delivery, and no government should be committing funding to any program until the unknown becomes clearer. Even this government, with its record of wild spending, its record of budget overruns, its record of poor delivery of projects on time, I would hope, would not run out and spend money on something it knows nothing about. As I have said before, there is some resonance between what was being proposed by the Greens in the previous motion and this one.
In short, we would not expect a government to make funding commitments on something it did not know about. The Greens, as partners of ACT Labor in this place, should not be expecting the government to do that. Further, should the Canberra Liberals be elected to government in just over two years time, we would not be willing to make such a commitment. Before any funding commitment is made, no matter how worthy an organisation or a group of organisations is, an analysis of the need and related costs should be undertaken. There is work being done in this area already.
Mr Rattenbury and the attorney touched on the survey being done by the Legal Aid Commission. The Legal Aid Commission told us in the estimates hearing this year that the report of the survey conducted by national legal aid into legal need in Australia will be published in September next year.
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