Women’s legal services in the Northern Territory, which has the highest rates of family and sexual violence in the country, are calling for certainty and support in the federal budget as they battle to keep their doors open in the face of a looming “funding cliff”.
Caitlin Weatherby-Fell, chief executive of the Top End Women’s Legal Service, said it was already facing an increasing workload, with family violence and domestic violence making up 75% of its open cases.
“Last week we received 19 referrals just from police and it’s just growing,” she said. “Normally we get about five or six referrals and over a third of those were from remote communities.”
The service provides services to some of the most at-risk women in the country, with lawyers embedded in four women’s shelters each fortnight across their service, which serves a vast Top End region “four-and-a-half times the size of Victoria”.
But Weatherby-Fell said the need was far greater. “It should be at least weekly, but we’ve only got the funding to facilitate it fortnightly, so women accessing shelter assistance can have access to on-site legal services providing trauma-informed, wraparound support.”
Weatherby-Fell said its funding through the National Indigenous Australians Agency had not been guaranteed beyond 30 June and that was creating uncertainty for the frontline service.
She said First Nations Women’s Legal Services in Queensland and Women’s Legal Services in New South Wales and South Australia were also facing funding uncertainty.
She said the Top End service had already been operating at a loss for years and had been calling for more funding for nearly a decade, and that it had been forced to turn away women in need.
“What do you tell the seventh person who calls up your service in a day, when you haven’t been able to provide appointments for the first six? You have to tell that you’re at capacity and that there’s no one else to refer [them] to?”
“This funding cliff, it’s all feeling a bit dire and we’re very much limbo at the moment.
Weatherby-Fell said the service’s current funding was $180k, which was small change “in the grand scheme of things in terms of ensuring the bare minimum of services are available to some of the most vulnerable women in the country”.
The opposition is urging the federal government to provide certainty to women’s legal services in the Northern Territory, with deputy leader Sussan Ley recently meeting with the Katherine Women’s Legal Service, Top End Women’s Legal Service and Central Australian Women’s Legal Service.
Ley wrote to the minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, urging the federal government to provide the funding needed to keep the services open and provide vital services to women and children.
“This funding is not only essential to ensuring vulnerable Indigenous women can access legal representation, but it is also an investment in the safety of some of the most vulnerable members of the Northern Territory community,” the letter reads.
“I urge you to ensure that these services are urgently provided with clarity on this critical funding.”
A spokesperson for Burney said the government recognised the vital support legal services in the territory provided vulnerable women and that further announcements would be made next week.
“More information about the continued funding of these services will be made available during budget week.”
Aboriginal legal services across the country are also currently calling for an urgent $250m funding lifeline.
