ALECOMM

"What client type receives more Legal Aid assistance? The criminal or families?"

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Category: Uncategorised

Created: Tuesday, 21 May 2013 08:02

Written by Alecomm2

Legal aid in 2009 received 20,078 Family Law applications.  Only 14,121 were accepted. This means that nearly 20% of all persons requesting Legal Aid for matters regarding the welfare of their children are without representation, whilst the other party is not.

On the other hand, in 2007-2008 almost three times as many criminal law matters were granted Legal Aid, with a rejection rate of only 16%. Whilst the figures have drawn a little closer with respect to ‘approved applications’ in the past three years, there are still twice as many parents in courts who are up against child protection authorities without representation. This is hardly fair, when almost 100% of the time, it is the government who initiates the legal action in the first place, and a lot of the time without doing their due diligence first.

So if you're wondering why so many parents do not have custody of their children, don't automatically start thinking they are bad parents, consider these statistics and wonder why they weren't afforded the same legal representation as their opposition.  And then picture yourself walking into a courtroom against court reporters, caseworkers and a government paid barrister and wonder if you would be successful in keeping your children under the same circumstances.

Not only that, only 26% of all funding for legal aid is given to women.  I believe this reflects a very strong attitude in the government's complicity to continue to remove children from fit and loving mothers.  After all, how can one be expected to keep custody of your child against a state when you are self-representing.

Another thing we dont' quite understand with the display of funding figures, is why Legal Aid has classified all child protection and family law matters into the same basket.  Because they are completely different matters. Apart from the fact that one is [generally] parent vs parent and the other is government vs parent, one is commonwealth law and the other is state.  It would be interesting to see these figures broken down to display the actual numbes for these different legal issues.

What Legal Aid has also failed to show is the figures for applications received from child protection, and the amount of rejections. This is clearly needed, particularly when it can be shown that child protection workers have clearly used the resources of legal aid for frivolous matters – and had these passed through the more scrutinising hands in the first place, should have been rejected also.

 (Source : NSW Legal Aid Report 2009-2010 – Appendix 6)