Legal Aid Cuts cause Family Law Court System Failures
Friday 21 March 2014 @ 2.24 p.m. | Legal Research
In a recent interview with the ABC, Family Court Chief Justice Diana Bryant has said that the cuts to Legal Aid (reported by TimeBase previously), have led to problems with unrepresented litigants, family violence and child protection.
Following on from the comments made by former Chief Justice Alistair Nicholson, Chief Justice Bryant has stated that "the friction [in Family Court Cases] is being exacerbated by the growing number of litigants representing themselves."
Chief Justice Bryant has stated that there is often situations where a woman who has accused her partner of rape can be then cross-examined by that very same person within the Family Court. This has only been exacerbated by the declaration by Victorian Legal Aid that if one party is representing themselves, they will not fund the other party's legal representation.
She uses the example of Luke Batty, an 11 year old child who was killed by his mentally unstable father earlier this month, as a result of the system being compromised. Although Luke Batty's mother knew about the father's mental problems, she didn't think that they were as bad as they were.
"And if you imagine that playing out in a courtroom, where there are mental health issues and the court needs to know about those issues and to know the extent of them, and you don't have parties with the capacity to bring the right evidence, then you are certainly putting children at risk."
Dr Rae Kaspiew from the Australian Institute of Family Studies says Legal Aid is still filling a crucial gap, even though they are currently only prioritising Independent Children's Lawyers over any legal aid representation in family violence or other family court matters.
Nicole Rich, from Victoria Legal Aid has stated in response:
"In the last 12 months we at Victoria Legal Aid, we have changed our guidelines again. I don't think we'd pretend that they are ideal. They do mean that there are more people probably without representation going to trial. But that problem's existed for a long time and if we changed our guidelines back tomorrow we'd still have that problem...Longer-term, everyone agrees that the solution is we do need to look at how the system as a whole, the court system, can actually deal with unrepresented litigants and also deal appropriately with issues of family violence because actually legal aid is not going to fix all of those problems."
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