OUR 2025-26 BUDGET SUBMISSION
Community legal centres provide a crucial safety net for people in our community who need it most.
The help that community legal centres provide is critical in many aspects of Victorians’ daily lives, including for those facing eviction and homelessness, incarceration, family breakdown and violence, crippling debts and fines, discrimination, exploitation at work and unfair dismissal. Community legal centres are uniquely placed to assist Victorians who are experiencing hardship with pressing legal issues, and play a unique role in doing this by providing tailored wrap-around support.
The high demand for legal assistance continues to significantly outstrip available resources. Each year, community legal centres will turn away thousands of people who need their support. This unmet demand will continue to escalate as the impacts of disasters, rising living costs and widening inequality continue to be felt.
Community legal centres support those most in need of assistance, who cannot afford private lawyers and do not have access to legal aid. On average, up to 70 per cent of people who access community legal centres have an income of less than $32,000 per year. Community legal centres assist people who face additional barriers accessing legal help and support due to their mental health, racial or cultural background, age, disability, LGBTIQ+ status, or geographical remoteness.
The impacts of unresolved, escalating legal problems on individuals, their communities and government are significant, but can be avoided through ensuring access to community legal assistance.
This year, we repeat our call for the Victorian Government to provide a significant investment in funding for community legal centres in Victoria to meet existing need for legal assistance and to address the continued rise in demand brought about by disasters, rising costs and widening inequality.
In addition to our call for broader uplift in community legal centre investment, we seek funding to address specific areas of need or response, including the critical need to maintain lapsing funding to a number of programs.
Our key asks:
Core funding
- An additional boost of funding over four years to strengthen the security of community legal sector funding in Victoria, and to enable the community legal sector to expand to meet high levels of unmet legal need.
Integrated legal services
- Investment in integrated legal services and partnerships with lapsing funding, including four existing Health Justice Partnerships and to support new integrated legal services, and funding to scale up proven integrated service models.
Housing and homelessness
- Additional resourcing for community legal centres to provide legal assistance to people facing eviction at all VCAT locations with a residential tenancy list, to prevent homelessness.
Disability
- Investment to enable specialist community legal centres to support people with disability, recognising current unmet legal need in response to findings from the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability.
- Additional resourcing for the community legal sector to elevate the voices of people with disability in policy and law reform and share relevant data to ensure strong, equal and fair laws and policies are developed in Victoria.
Mental health
- Investment to embed community legal assistance as part of the roll-out of the Local Adult and Older Adult Mental Health and Wellbeing Services.
Family violence
- Additional and ongoing funding to ensure community legal centres can maintain their capacity to deliver much-needed family violence services to the community. This includes ensuring the community legal centres that provide family violence duty lawyer services at Magistrates’ Courts can also continue this vital service.
- Funding to support the implementation of new Specialist Family Violence Courts (SFVCs) in Victoria, including funding for an additional lawyer at each SFVC location, and to cover shortfalls in the pre-court engagement service. Accompanying this is a call for an SFVC to be established in North-East Victoria.
- Additional and ongoing funding for the positively evaluated and high demand Pre-Court Engagement model, which provides earlier intervention support in family violence matters, and is at risk of being defunded.
Continuing programs proven to be effective
- Resumption and continuation of funding to Southside Justice’s Sex Worker Legal Program service so that it can retain specialist resources and continue to offer this unique service for sex workers.
- Maintaining WEstjustice’s Youth Crime Prevention and Early Intervention Project that works on prevention and early intervention approaches with children and young people who offend, and expanding the program to additional regions in response to demand.
- Funding to continue Women’s Legal Service Victoria’s pilot CLC Emerging Lawyers program, that builds capacity of the community legal centre sector to respond to the continued demand for family violence and family law legal services.
- Funding to sustain the Victims Legal Service, Victoria’s specialist legal service for victims of crime.
You can read our 2025–26 Victorian budget submission here.
Previous budget submissions
- Meeting High Legal Need in Victoria: 2024 Budget Submission
- Delivering Access to Justice for all Victorians: 2023 Budget Submission
- Strengthening Community Legal Services for a thriving Victoria: 2022 Budget Submission
- Nurturing Community Legal Support Systems for Victim Survivors of Family Violence: 2022 Budget Submission
- Equal Access to Justice: 2021 Budget Submission
- Next Steps for Equality: 2020 Budget Submission
- A Just and Fair Victoria: 2018-19 Budget Submission
