Where do you sit in the eyes of justice?
If you suddenly needed legal assistance, could you access it?
This is not often something that we think about in our everyday lives. It’s usually something that happens to other people or that we see online or in a newspaper.
The reality is, many Queenslanders would not be able to access fully-funded legal assistance if they ran into hard times. There is an emerging ‘missing middle’ where we are seeing low and middle-income earners who are above the poverty line but not wealthy by any stretch of the word. These people are our colleagues, our friends, our neighbours, the parents of our children’s friends.
But according to means-testing done by our legal aid system and the lack of resources available to both legal aid and community legal centres (CLC), they may not be able to access justice should they need it.
Yes, they could scrape up the money to fund their own legal assistance, continue to try to find a pro bono service or get into a different community legal centre, but it is not as simple as we would assume.
Firstly, it is important to understand the three main options if you can’t afford to fully fund your legal assistance:
- Legal Aid Queensland (LAQ)
- community legal centre (CLC)
- pro bono lawyer (often found volunteering at a CLC).
Most of the time, an individual will go first to Legal Aid Queensland to see if they can gain assistance. LAQ has a stringent means-testing system whereby they take into account your income and situation. This means testing shows that a family earning $43,100-a-year would not receive fully-funded assistance.
The poverty line in Australia (as of 2016) equated to an after-tax income of less than $895.22[i] per week for a couple with two children. This means that those just above the poverty line would not qualify to have their legal assistance fully-funded. To put that simply, a couple with two children who earn $722.81[ii] per week would need to chip in to cover their legal assistance costs. This is below the poverty line, and this family would end up under even more financial pressure during difficult times.
Of course, LAQ have only a limited number of cases they can take on due to resourcing. If someone is unable to obtain assistance from Legal Aid, they often then seek assistance from a community legal centre. Unfortunately, due to lack of resources, CLCs turn away almost 170,000 vulnerable people a year. Out of this enormous number, only 68 per cent[iii] are able to be given an appropriately accessible and affordable referral elsewhere. This ‘elsewhere’ can include pro bono lawyers or firms which provide pro bono services.
Queensland lawyers provide almost 300,000 hours of free legal advice each year whether it be through their firm’s pro bono services or by volunteering at a CLC or in another community organisation.
A 2014 report conducted by the Productivity Commission found that out of those with moderate or severe legal problems, 41.3 per cent tried to fix the problem without seeking advice, and 7.4 per cent could not take action due to stress, time, cost or uncertainty. In that same report, they estimated that only the most disadvantaged of Australian households would be eligible for legal aid funding. This was estimated at 8 per cent of Australians.
But what can be done? There are multiple options. The one that is perhaps most talked about is an increase in government funding for both CLCs and LAQ. There has also been conversation about law firms offering discrete task services which would provide alternative fee structures or an expansion of online resources and file management systems that could reduce client costs.
Queenslanders need to work together to solve this issue, and ensure that the voice of both the legal profession and the community are being heard in our state and federal parliaments. Queensland Law Society’s 2017 Access to Justice Scorecard looks at some of these issues and proposes solutions from the point of view of solicitors. You can view it here.
[i] Australian Council of Social Service, https://www.acoss.org.au/poverty/
[ii] Legal Aid Queensland Means Test, http://www.legalaid.qld.gov.au/About-us/Policies-and-procedures/Grants-Policy-Manual/The-Means-Test. Figure based on a double income couple with two children earning more than $43,160.
[iii] National census of community legal centres (CLCs) 2016: Clients, services and work, http://www.naclc.org.au/resources/NACLC%20Census%202016%20National%20Report%20-%20FINAL.pdf
