Sector suffers funding and workforce crisis amid staff burnout and huge workloads
Community legal centres provided free legal assistance to nearly 180,000 people in 2022-23 but had to turn away 368,000 seeking help.Community legal centres provided free legal assistance to nearly 180,000 people in 2022-23 but had to turn away 368,000 seeking help.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Community legal centres provide support in areas including family law, family violence, child protection, tenancy, consumer protection, social security, refugee rights and anti-discrimination. Leach said CLCs provided free legal assistance to nearly 180,000 people in 2022-23 but demand outstripping resources meant they also had to turn away 368,000 people seeking help – more than 1,000 people a day. Nine out of 10 centres said demand for services had increased in the last financial year.
Leach said federal funding contracts for the community legal sector were not keeping up with inflation, with funding only increasing about 1.5% a year – well behind inflation trends. The CLC’s report calls for an urgent funding injection of $125m in the May budget, as well as confirmation of long-term funding for the sector so centres can make decisions for the future.
“Some of them are going to end up with criminal records that they don’t deserve,” he said. “They end up in jails when they don’t deserve to be there.
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