Legal aid money still not enough

Attorney-General George Brandis might now be full of praise for the community legal sector as “a very, very constructive interlocutor” (Karen Middleton, “Cash money”, April 29-May 5) but he has fought tooth and nail to avoid a reversal of cuts that remains insufficient to prevent thousands of vulnerable people being turned away from free legal help every year. Both Brandis and Minister for Women Michaelia Cash have until recently denied the cuts they are now seeking credit for reversing, with Cash having previously described claims of cuts to ABC Radio National as “a false and misleading campaign of misinformation”. What we are now seeing is damage control from an attorney-general who remains unviable. The community legal sector deserves congratulations for winning back limited funding, but its welcoming of the Brandis announcement should not come at the expense of a public reckoning of the continuing inadequacy of funding to meet legal need. That must include an accounting of how the announcement fails to meet the 2014 funding recommendation of the Productivity Commission, and the significant degree to which it falls short of the community legal sector’s own federal budget submission. It is also worth noting that the gag on community legal centre advocacy introduced by Brandis remains in place within the national funding agreement.

– Darren Lewin-Hill, Northcote, Vic