Page 2941 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
We also know that, in December 2009, the Senate’s legal and constitutional affairs committee tabled a report on access to justice. In its summary, the committee notes:
Clearly, weaknesses in the legal [aid] system could be partially rectified, or rectified in the short-term, with increased, and targeted, levels of funding.
There will be more work required to be done in the ACT to discover the scope of need, the cost, the benefit and the outcomes before any government of any stripe can commit to funding to completely close that gap, which is what Mr Rattenbury’s original motion asked for. I understand the motivation for Mr Corbell’s amendment, which he has moved, to wind back the call for an immediate funding commitment. The government’s amendment would require us to engage in the process of study and the process of discovery and diligently finding a way forward that would include appropriate funding, and we will be supporting that amendment.
I do note that the amendment that Mr Rattenbury has circulated is somewhat different to the amendment that we spoke about in my office at lunchtime. I understand that things have moved on since then and I will take the time to consider that amendment as it was first proposed to me about lunchtime or just before lunchtime. I thought that I could not support it but I shall give the wording, as it now appears, some more consideration in the course of this debate.
The work that is done by community legal centres in this community and elsewhere is laudable. It is hard work dealing with people with really troubling situations. When we set about the process of looking at the unmet need, we also need to be fairly rigorous about whether all of those services provide the sorts of services that we would expect, to the level that we would expect. We should be looking for those services that do the best work in ensuring that we fund those for the best outcomes for the community and we should be encouraging other organisations, which may not be completely up to the mark, to lift their game.
One of the things that I am a little disappointed about is that Mr Rattenbury, for all his good intentions in this motion, seems to have forgotten a very important piece in the puzzle, and that is the interchange between community legal centres and the Legal Aid Commission. The Legal Aid Commission does, for the most part, slightly different and slightly to the side work from the work done by community legal centres but they do work substantially together. I think that we, as a community, following the research done by the Legal Aid Commission, should be actually looking at this issue in the context of the funding for the Legal Aid Commission as well and how those fundings might interplay together.
I want to congratulate Mr Rattenbury for the sentiment, which I applaud, but I think that there are some things that his motion asks for that are not supportable in their present form and I am happy to work with the Assembly through that process to come up with a better and more reasonable consensus.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (5.05): I move:
Omit paragraph (2)(c), substitute:
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video