2. Australia’s Legal Assistance Sector

In Australia, providing access to justice is largely undertaken by the legal assistance sector, our national legal safety net for poor and marginalised populations. This sector provides essential, free, public legal services to population groups who often experience multiple and intersecting legal needs. They include women and children, young people, people on low incomes, people from culturally diverse backgrounds, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, people with disabilities and people who are incarcerated.

A diverse mix of organisational providers make up the Australian legal assistance sector. Some, like legal aid commissions, are very large, providing statewide legal services. In contrast, community legal centres can be relatively small. They are often place-based organisations that are embedded within a local geographic community. Lawyers working in the private legal profession also come under the umbrella of the legal assistance sector workforce if they deliver pro bono or low bono services (free or reduced services) — often in partnership with community legal centres — or through grants of legal aid in criminal, civil and family law matters.^[1]

This variety of legal service providers means that the legal assistance sector is commonly described as a ‘mixed model’ sector. There are significant benefits to having a diversity of service providers catering to different communities and areas of law, but a mixed model can also bring challenges, especially around service funding, collaboration and coordination. However, despite the variety, scale and type of legal assistance that these organisations provide, they all share a common aspiration: that all people, regardless of financial, social, cultural, linguistic, racial, geographic, environmental or climate barriers, deserve access to justice.

The legal assistance sector is guided by a National Strategic Framework for Legal Assistance.^[2] The National Strategic Framework encourages a unified and coordinated approach to legal service delivery, to ensure that the justice system is focused on areas of greatest legal need. It describes the overarching purpose of legal assistance services funded by the government as intending to help:

… vulnerable people facing disadvantage, who are unable to afford private legal services, to access and engage effectively with legal solutions and the justice system in order to address their legal problems.^[3]

Six key principles guide the sector to achieve this objective: (1) service delivery is focused on people facing disadvantage; (2) services are appropriate and client centred; (3) services are delivered collaboratively and through integrated approaches; (4) responses are appropriately timed and include preventative action; (5) services empower people and communities, and build resilience; and (6) services are supported to continuously learn and improve.^[4]

2.1 The Rise of Disaster Legal Services

In recent years there has been a sharp increase in public funding for the legal assistance sector to deliver climate related legal help, often in the disaster recovery space. Disaster legal help is recognised as an important element in supporting individuals and communities to recover from devastating extreme weather events. Research shows that people impacted by climate disasters find it difficult to associate that event with their subsequent legal problems.^[5] This can make it difficult for legal services to know the best way to help their clients, when clients themselves don’t realise they even have legal problems after a disaster. This is especially difficult when problems take years to surface and are often harder to resolve than non-disaster related legal problems.^[6] As climate change continues to intensify, we can expect to see more funding for the legal assistance sector to deliver increasing amounts of disaster legal assistance. This will require access to justice organisations to develop and deepen their organisational resilience to climate change in the coming years.^[7]