Government Funding Cut For Aboriginal Legal Service Hotline, But Notification Still Legally Required
Thursday 11 June 2015 @ 12.18 p.m. | Legal Research
The 24-hour Custody Notification Service phone hotline will no longer be funded by the Federal Government from 1 July 2015, leaving the NSW Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS) scrambling to raise funds from the public. The Custody Notification Service (CNS) allows Indigenous prisoners in police custody to receive legal advice and assistance at any time. According to ABC News, there have been no Aboriginal deaths in police custody since the CNS was introduced in 2000. The cutting of funding may also raise legal problems, as under NSW law, custody managers of police agencies are required to notify the ALS when they have an Indigenous person in custody.
The ALS’s Acting Chief Legal Officer, Jeremy Styles, told SBS News:
“If there’s any argument about contemporary or current need, I think it’s fairly simple but horrific to say that other states, without this service, have had deaths in custody in the last couple of years. That horrific fact speaks volumes about the need for our service.”
The ongoing issue of deaths in custody has again been in the spotlight, following the death of an Indigenous man in the Northern Territory last month. The Larrakia elder was arrested under the Northern Territory’s controversial paperless arrest laws, which are currently under challenge in the High Court.
Michael Burns, a recent user of the CNS, told ABC News he believed without the service, he would still be in prison:
“By her picking up the phone in the middle of the night, that's a massive thing for me and a lot of other people, because you know that someone's going to be there all the time.”
Current Costs and Funding
The CNS fields about 300 calls per week, and its annual cost is around $500,000. The ALS’ Chief Executive, Kane Ellis, told ABC News that if all government funding was cut, the organisation would have to make difficult decisions about whether to keep the CNS at the expense of other services it currently runs. The CNS has been funded since 2007 by the Commonwealth, although the service was originally created and funded under NSW law by the Carr Government. The ABC News reported that although the Attorney-General’s Department has refused to commit to funding the service, Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion supports the scheme, and wants it to expand to other jurisdictions, including Western Australia.
NSW Police Still Under Legal Obligation to Contact ALS
Crucially, regulation 33 of the Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Regulation 2005 (NSW) requires NSW police to notify the ALS whenever they take an Indigenous person into custody. In an article on The Conversation, Eugene Schofield-Georgeson from Macquarie University highlights that there has been at least one case where convictions were set aside due to failure to meet this requirement (Campbell and 4 Ors v Director of Public Prosecutions (NSW) [2008] NSWSC 1284). He notes that this means:
“if the service is abolished in practice by funding cuts but remains on the statute books – as it almost certainly will – the NSW government will be faced with the absurd but very real proposition that most confessional evidence from Indigenous people in custody will be rendered inadmissible because police cannot contact an Aboriginal Legal Service representative.”
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