Attorney General Marie Claire Boothby announced $3.9m in one-off boost to Legal Aid NT
A $3.9m lifeline to Legal Aid NT will allow trials and hearings to continue into the new year, but the embattled and critical legal service has been told to keep cutting the fat with more ‘efficiencies’.
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A $3.9m injection into Legal Aid NT is hoped to stabilise the Territory’s legal system which was teetering at a “crisis point”.
On Thursday, Attorney General Marie Claire Boothby announced an additional $3.9m to the embattled legal service, allowing the bush courts, local and supreme court matters to continue next year.
These services were in danger as of October, when Legal Aid announced it would stop accepting new adult clients, cut all remote court services, and withdraw from all adult trials and hearings from January 1.
The $3.9m boost is on top of the $1.3m announced in November — which was seen as “insufficient” after a decade of ignored warnings about the service’s collapsing funding model.
Since coming into government the CLP has increased Legal Aid NT funding by $5.235m.
However, Ms Boothby’s new one-year funding pledge will come at a cost to the wider Attorney-General’s Department, with cash to be “reprioritised” from other “buckets of money”.
Before the funding announcement, multiple lawyers told the NT News the sector was facing a “crisis point”, with the looming axe to clients’ funding applications likely to “decimate” the private legal profession.
On Thursday, chair Duncan McConnel said the funding was “a great start” and would avert the devastating proposed cuts to court services into 2025.
In the latest Legal Aid NT annual report Mr McConnel flagged the “ongoing failure to achieve funding certainty” due to the lack of a five-year funding agreement.
“It is disappointing that these calls go unheeded,” he wrote.
But following the funding announcement, Mr McConnel said a five-year deal remained “on the table”.
For the past decade Legal Aid NT has warned about its financial stress amid increased demand and limited resources.
Even with the $5.2m boost, Mr McConnel said the service would still need to find “efficiencies” including a review of the merit process.
“There’s not an unlimited bucket of money,” he said.
“We certainly will be reviewing ... the standards or our interpretation of merit thresholds to make sure we are funding cases in an appropriate way.”
Given major increases to the Police and Corrections budgets, Ms Boothby was asked why the Legal Aid funding had to come at the expense of other parts of the Attorney-General’s office.
“If we have a strong economy, which what we’re seeking to rebuild, that does mean there will be more revenue for things like our courts and our justice system,” she said.
The former government put a $250,000 cap on bush court reimbursements and denied Legal Aid access to the Treasurer’s Advance payments — a pool of money available for “one off and unexpected expenses” — which it had relied on for expensive Supreme Court trials since 2011.
Ms Boothby was unable to confirm if her government would reverse these budget constraints.
“Everything is on the table and all of those matters will be looked at to ensure that taxpayer money — which is the funding we give to Legal Aid — is best utilised to ensure that they have full service delivery,” she said.
However, in the annual report Mr McConnel said unless these “retrospective changes” to the funding model were reversed, criminal law services would remain at risk.
“Unless funding is increased, Legal Aid NT will not be able to continue to service the needs of our criminal law clients and it will once again become necessary to cut services that rely on NT funding,” he said.
Opposition leader Selena Uibo welcomed the fresh funding, but denied the previous Labor Government “neglected” Legal Aid.
An October Auditor General’s report into Legal Aid determined it ended the financial year in a $200,000 deficit, from a $1.6m surplus in the previous year.
Auditor General Jara Dean said the total expenses jumped by $4.1m that year.
In the annual report, former Legal Aid NT director Annmarie Lumsden highlighted the service faced “unprecedented demand” following the destabilisation and “internal staffing crisis” at the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency.
Ms Lumsden said new duty lawyer referrals from NAAJA increased by 226 per cent in from 2020-21 to 2022-23, and continued to rise into the last financial year.
“The impact of the transfer of workload to Legal Aid NT without additional resources was untenable and raising work health and safety concerns for Legal Aid NT staff,” she said.
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Originally published as Attorney General Marie Claire Boothby announced $3.9m in one-off boost to Legal Aid NT
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