Second, it was assumed that Governments, particularly the Commonwealth Government, would be willing and able to provide sufficient legal aid resources to make access to justice “effective”. Commentators were not naïve enough to expect unlimited public funds to be made available to legal aid. Nevertheless, it was widely accepted that, over time, the government would be prepared to allocate sufficient funds to adequately address the obvious needs. These areas included law enforcement, family law litigation, and civil litigation, where individuals or families clash with recurring actors, such as financial institutions or insurers. The belief that the resources available for legal aid will increase over time reflects confidence in the fundamental principles of the welfare state, which has not yet been shaken by the triumph of the free market. It is even hoped that the Commonwealth will shoulder a greater share of the social burden, making legal aid less vulnerable to the vagaries of public finances. Historically, funding for Community Law Centres (CACs) has been tied to their ability to meet the needs of their communities. Thirty-two centres are funded by a programme run by legal aid. The services that each centre intends to provide are set out in annual strategic plans.
These plans typically include public relations, CLEs, legislative reform and other initiatives. CLCs do not intend to duplicate the work of legal aid or to do work that the CLC combined group would consider foundational work in the field of legal aid. This was recently made clear to me by the CLC combined group with a family rights initiative that I had in mind. CLCs have traditionally focused on people who do not have access to regular services because of their location or special needs, women victims of domestic violence, youth, the homeless, people with disabilities, people in rural areas. Advice and information are an essential part of the work of CLCs. During the 2000/01 period, 34,629 consultations were recorded and 34,700 briefings were held. There are many barriers to justice, in addition to the cost of legal services. Language difficulties, for example, often prevented non-English speakers from understanding their rights or seeking appropriate advice to help them resolve their differences. Aboriginal Australians face particular challenges because of their overrepresentation in the criminal justice system and their vulnerability to discriminatory treatment within that system.
The Access to Justice Movement has sought to address these issues through targeted measures, such as improved interpretation services and special protection for Aboriginal people who are subject to police questioning. We recognize that in recent years, at both the state and federal levels, there have been a number of investigations into specific issues of access to justice for certain disadvantaged groups. These include reports from the Australian Law Reform Commission, the New South Wales Law Reform Commission and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, which provide detailed information on access to justice and the legal needs of certain disadvantaged groups. The group on access to legal information examined practical ways of providing information to particularly socially isolated groups. Low literacy and low English were seen as barriers to information gathering. Participants also exchanged views on various sources of legal information, such as libraries and websites, legal education for non-lawyers, and legal education in the community. They raised issues related to referral and the difficulty of knowing where to refer people and how to avoid entering a “reference carousel.” All right. My name is Constable Miles from the Northern District Police. I reasonably suspect that you have illegal drugs with you because I just saw them in your hand and I saw you putting them in your pocket. Third, many of the reforms of the 1970s and 1980s were aimed at granting rights to individuals who had previously depended on the exercise of administrative discretion or who had to determine their fate within a legal framework favouring more powerful commercial interests. This reflected the view that the best way to enhance individual dignity and autonomy was to replace dependency with rights.
It was implicit in a culture of rights that the jurisdiction and authority of independent courts and tribunals to resolve disputes, particularly between the individual and the government, would be strengthened. Australians were comfortable with the exercise of judicial power. After all, virtually from the beginning of the federation, the Supreme Court had exercised the power to declare laws unconstitutional. Judicial review was axiomatic in Australian federalism. Quantitative research will focus on conducting in-depth surveys to assess legal needs in a number of deprived areas of New South Wales. At this stage, up to six locations should be selected for disadvantages based on the Australian Bureau of Statistical Indices. The selected regions will also reflect a sample of inner-city, suburban, regional, rural and remote communities. It is widely recognized that it is desirable for community members to know their rights. A typical approach is to focus on what we, access to the justice industry, can do to expand community knowledge – for example, by disseminating information and providing education in various forms. Undoubtedly, this is appropriate and effective if done right, but far from guaranteed to create a widespread understanding of when the law might help. Otherwise, we look to other outsiders, such as the formal education system, to do this work.
One suggestion is that the focus – the starting point – should be on specific groups within communities who may or may not want information and education about the legal system. These groups need opportunities to use ways to acquire knowledge that they consider relevant and useful, and to decide whether the law and the legal system are instruments that they can use to their advantage in their particular situation.10 One of the roles of legal service agencies is therefore to help create conditions for certain disadvantaged social groups. to carry out these assessments. I suspect it could be the approach of the legal fraternity or the people who work in the courts, the fact that there is a way for them to come out of the closet as part of their studies and spend time there. The recidivism study looked specifically at Aboriginal youth to see if the conferences worked as well for them as they appear to be with the data on non-Aboriginal children, and found that it is about the same time for Aboriginal children to reoffend after conferences as for subsequent criminal court appearances.3 The concern for “equal justice” gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970. This partly reflected the acceptance that people needed legal assistance to receive the benefits promised by the welfare state.4 Legal aid in the United States and the United Kingdom shifted from assistance in criminal and divorce matters to assistance in the pursuit of social and social rights. At the same time, within the equality movement in the United States and later in Australia, the focus was on more transformative approaches that sought to use the legal system to promote social justice. However, subsequent debates have mainly focused on providing lawyers to help poor clients understand the law and take the case to court if necessary.
Key discussions focused on how best to provide legal aid. They focused on the financing and relative virtues of staff lawyers and the private professions. Logically related issues such as high transaction costs of legal services, barriers to recourse to the courts and alternative “dispute resolution” procedures became problematic areas from the late 1980s onwards. These are important elements of the “access to justice” program that took root in Australia in the 1990s. This also applies to the study of measuring legal needs and the optimal use of new technologies, which have recently attracted the attention of government decision-makers.5 There is a youth legal helpline. You can better understand whether or not you should talk to the police. It depends on how many problems you`ve had so far and why you were arrested this time. It is useful and important to refine the legal system and improve the way we fund and deliver existing and narrowly designed “legal aid” services, but the discussion about improving access to justice – or the transition to equal justice – logically does not need to focus on these issues.
Phillip Français explained how the legal system is a place of great injustice for people with disabilities. He spoke of the disadvantages for them as persons with rights, as victims of crime, as suspects and perpetrators, as civil litigants and as participants in the justice system, for example as lawyers and jurors. Several of those conditions, all essential to the ultimate success of their action, are not fulfilled by the normal range of services offered by legal aid bodies in the context of subsidies to private doctors and by the standardised services offered by in-house lawyers. In addition, the need for legislative changes and the need for support for long-term litigation are generally not recorded as the type of legal needs considered by government legal needs surveys. The third phase of the project will include an assessment of the feasibility and resource impact of a national survey of the legal needs of the general population, similar to those conducted for the Paths to Justice studies in the UK.