Page 3079 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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My simple question is: what is the government’s policy on the provision of assistance with accommodation for community organisations? At various times the attorney has suggested it is not even the government’s role to facilitate this. I am sure some members of the committee would suggest the same thing about the Raiders. A little bit of consistency would be appropriate.
Back on the topic of unmet legal need, I would like to acknowledge in the budget the legal aid funding, and we will come back to that later this evening. Legal aid is a part of the solution to our unmet legal need, and the funding is welcome, but it is only part of the solution. There will be people who still do not qualify for legal aid and yet cannot afford a private lawyer. For those people, the community legal centres are extremely important, and I trust we can continue to look for ways to ensure the community legal centres are as effective as they can possibly be.
I concluded my speech on Justice and Community Safety last year by saying:
The Greens think the best answers to these issues are still ahead of us, and we look forward to engaging with the government, with the opposition and with stakeholders, as we continue to grapple with the task of making Canberra safer and more just.
That is still an accurate thing to say. The best answers to the problems of court delay possibly still lie ahead of us, although I hope some of the changes the Assembly has passed will make improvements. Certainly the best answers to unmet legal need are still ahead of us. On that basis, I look forward to the next 12 months of continuing to seek out those answers and encouraging the government to act on them once they have been identified.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (8.45): I think I will start my comments in relation to the Justice and Community Safety Directorate perhaps in a similar place to where I started some of my previous comments on some of the other agencies, and that is that the government is proposing to spend in the near future more than $400 million on a great big government office block, but at the same time the community legal centres, as Mr Rattenbury has said, are occupying extraordinarily substandard facilities, mainly in Havelock House, and now the Women’s Legal Centre has its work split between its offices that it has at Havelock House and those at the old homestead in north Lyneham, which is even less accessible to clients and harder to manage for the Women’s Legal Centre. As I said before, this is of course against the background of the government wanting to centralise its public servants in the gold-plated, great big government office building.
I think that it behoves members who have not visited them to take the time to go and visit the community legal centres at Havelock House and see the conditions in which they work. It is not a pretty sight. The first occasion that I was there the staff at the Women’s Legal Centre showed me the kitchen, where the drain had essentially corroded and they had a bucket under the S-bend to catch the water. That has been fixed but some water still goes straight out through the wall and into the garden behind it. They have concerns about the fact that the area is constantly wet and is
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