About the crisis

Chronic underfunding and funding insecurity have plunged community legal centres into crisis.

In 2023, community legal centres turned away over 1,000 people a day nationally. We estimate over 340 of these people were victim-survivors of domestic and family violence.

With less than a year’s funding left, community legal centres are now in the most uncertain position we have faced in a decade. Right now, centres are making difficult decisions about which programs and outreaches to cut back, which workers to let go, and when to close their books.

This problem is not new. This crisis was foreseen and could have been avoided.

The legal assistance sector in Australia has long been woefully underfunded. This hurts people and communities, and it also costs governments. Costs to people, communities and governments include:

More people in prisons and hospitals.
Women and children stuck in dangerous situations for longer.
People losing their homes and becoming homeless.
People seeking asylum facing exploitation due to their visa status.
Households and individuals overwhelmed by debt and financial problems.

Over the past decade, many national inquiries, surveys and reports have found high and increasing levels of unmet legal need across the country. In 2014, the Productivity Commission's inquiry into access to justice arrangements recommended an increase of $200 million in legal assistance funding. This recommendation was never met.

Over five years ago, the Law Council of Australia recommended an increase of $390 million per year in government funding to all legal assistance services to address unmet legal need, and since then need has only grown. In its 2024 pre-budget submission, the Law Council revised this upwards to $500 million per year. The budget did not deliver.

Community legal centre funding has gone backwards in real terms in recent years.

The current National Legal Assistance Partnership (NLAP) 2020-25 includes just 1.5% indexation per year. Over the life of this agreement inflation has run as high as 7%, driving up the cost of service delivery.

At the same time, the cost-of-living crisis, ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, various climate disasters and more have all driven escalating legal need in the community. Nine out of ten centres reported an increase in demand for their services in 2022-23 as compared to the previous year. None reported a reduction in demand.

Community legal centres are trying to respond to greater numbers of people needing help, on what is in real terms, less money. In 2023, community legal centres were forced to turned away over 1,000 people a day nationally. We estimate around 340 were victim-survivors of domestic and family violence.

Meanwhile, wages in our highly feminised sector are lower than those for similar roles in the public and private sectors, leaving our workforce struggling in the face of heightened cost-of-living and housing pressures. As the funding crisis deepens, demand grows, workloads increase, and more workers are experiencing vicarious trauma and burnout.

Ahead of the May federal budget, community legal centres asked for urgent funding to meet growing demand for services and increase workers’ pay, and for funding security beyond 30 June 2025. The budget delivered neither of these things.

With less than a year's funding left, community legal centres are now in the most uncertain position we have faced in a decade.

Right now, centres are making difficult decisions about which programs and outreaches to cut back, which workers to let go, and when to close their books.

If December 2024 comes and goes without a guarantee of significantly increased Commonwealth funding under the next legal assistance funding agreement, community legal centres will not have funds in their accounts come 1 July 2025.

Every day that passes without funding security puts the people who rely on community legal centres to stay safe, housed, and financially secure at even greater risk. Community legal centres want to focus on helping people, not be forced to spend precious time and energy planning for redundancies and closures.

It's already too late to prevent the crisis. It's not too late to prevent total catastrophe, but the countdown is on.

About the National Legal Assistance Partnership (NLAP)

The National Legal Assistance Partnership (NLAP) is an agreement between the Commonwealth, state, and territory governments to fund legal assistance services.

Under the 2020-25 NLAP:

The Commonwealth provides money and decides how much should go to each state and territory, and to each type of legal assistance provider (community legal centres, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services and Legal Aid Commissions).
States and territories administer the funding. The current agreement doesn't require states and territories to provide extra funding to legal assistance, but some choose to.

States and territories have their own processes to allocate money earmarked for our sector to individual centres, which can take 9-12 months or more.

This means community legal centres can face a year’s delay between the Commonwealth committing funding to our sector, and actually receiving those funds.

For this reason, over 12 months ahead of the transition between the previous agreement and the current 2020-25 NLAP, the previous federal government included 3 years' funding security in the forward estimates of the 2019 budget. The current government did not do the same in the 2024 budget. This has put us in the most precarious position we've seen in a decade.