Executive Summary
Women’s Legal Services across Australia occupy a unique vantage point. Every day,
our members walk alongside women, including transwomen, and non-binary
people as they navigate the extraordinary legal complexity that so often stands
between a victim-survivor and safety — parenting orders, property orders, protection
orders, child protection, migration, child support and criminal processes, frequently
all at once. We see where systems work, where they fail and where they are being
turned against the very people they are meant to help protect.
This submission seeks to reflect that frontline experience and therefore offers
practical, implementable ideas, grounded in the day-to-day realities of victim-survivors
and the services that support them.
The Second Action Plan arrives at a critical moment. The First Action Plan delivered important
reforms, but women and children continue to be harmed and killed, and the services they turn
to for help – legal, housing, support, health, financial – are being forced to turn them
away because of a lack of resources. For example, based on 2023 data, we estimate
that around 1,000 women every week are turned away from our 13 Women’s Legal Services
members, while in 2024, Community Legal Centres Australia reported 1000 people being
turned away per day across 134 members. Funding through the National Access to Justice
Partnership (NAJP), while significant, does not come close to addressing demand.
The central challenge for the Second Action Plan is to hold two commitments at once:
sustained investment in preventing violence before it occurs, and, ensuring that the critical
services that protect women and children from violence, including specialist legal assistance,
are available where and when they are needed. These are not competing priorities. Legal
services are prevention. Every safe parenting order, every intervention order, every child kept
safe with family and culture, every woman on a temporary visa supported to escape
violence, is violence prevented from escalating and costs avoided across crisis, health and
justice systems downstream.
The Second Action Plan must recognise legal assistance services, including Women’s Legal
Services, as core and specialist frontline services, including through a reportable
commitment to ensure access to legal services. The integrated legal-social practice models
operated by Women’s Legal Services and other community legal services, are best practice
models – much can be done to support these, especially in regional and remote areas, for
example by reforming legal professional privilege rules and ensuring funding for financial
counselling, social workers and cultural support workers.
In addition to highlighting the essential role of specialist legal services, our submission focuses
on four themes across the Consultation Paper Priority Areas that reflect key areas of expertise
across Women’s Legal Services.