The Guardian 9 April, 2008
Aboriginal legal aid
thrown in the mainstream
Bob Briton
Labor’s pre-election promise to increase funding to Aboriginal legal aid to the level of mainstream services has turned out to be decidedly "non core". All over the country, Aboriginal legal aid services are considering how to deal with the federal government’s refusal to increase funding, which has been frozen at 1996 levels. While Indigenous imprisonment has increased 31.9 percent since 2000 — an Aboriginal person is still 13 times more likely to be imprisoned than a non-indigenous person — Aboriginal legal aid services have been forced to consider shutting down or suspending services to clients.
Neil Gillespie of the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement (ALRM) in Adelaide said the service will shut down in May and June in an effort to stay within its budget. Lawyers will seek adjournments to cases being heard in the already heavily scheduled court system.
A plea to the Rann South Australian government to fund 33 percent of the ALRM budget as a stopgap measure has been turned down. SA Attorney General Michael Wright has written to his federal counterpart Robert McClelland about the "historic underfunding" of services but, like other state governments, SA is hiding behind the Commonwealth’s constitutional responsibility for Aboriginal affairs.
In NSW and the ACT, the hotline for Aboriginal people taken into custody could be wound up in June. The service, which was a recommendation of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody, receives between 200 and 300 calls a week. Police in NSW are required to phone in whenever an Aboriginal person is taken into custody.
Aboriginal Legal Aid Services from all over the country petitioned the Federal Minister for Home Affairs, Bob Debus, in January for an immediate increase in funding of 30 percent. They pointed out that funding had increased under every federal government since Whitlam, except the Howard government. Services have been "unable to meet community need and retain and attract experienced staff." The 12-year freeze amounts to a 40 percent cut in real terms. A 2003 Senate report and a 2003 Office of Evaluation and Audit report show that there is an annual shortfall of about $25 million in funding to Aboriginal legal aid Australia-wide.
The consequences for Aboriginal legal services have been devastating. The funding ratio per client in mainstream and Aboriginal legal aid is now 9:1. Mainstream services have had their funding increased 120 percent in the same 12-years that Aboriginal ones were frozen. Aboriginal legal aid salaries are 65 percent of those of their mainstream legal aid colleagues.
"It’s cost-shifting all the time. The federal government says it’s a state responsibility and the state government says Aboriginal people are a federal responsibility," Trevor Christian of the NSW/ACT Aboriginal Legal Aid Service told The Sydney Morning Herald recently.