Regional Divisional Leader / Partner at WithersKhattarWong LLP | International Commercial Disputes | Financial Crime & Fraud | Trust Estate and Inheritance Disputes
Access to justice is an important part of upholding the rule of law. Access must be meaningful and every part of the justice process must be reasonably fair to allow the real issues to be ventilated properly. Funding is a real issue as cases and the associated preparation get more complex. I would argue that the answer remains in properly funded and resourced legal aid, together with proper means testing. People must have reasonable access to counsel of their choice. It is a burden that states must bear to preserve legitimacy.
Almost half a billion dollars in extra funding is needed each year to meet demand for legal assistance in Australia, a new report commissioned by National Legal Aid has found. The Justice on the Brink report found $484m in funding was needed to prevent the threat of “supply failure”, expand the availability of family and civil law services, provide greater access under the means test and increase fees for private lawyers. “On the supply side, we find that chronic underfunding and underpayment is eroding the supply of practitioners willing to undertake Legal Aid work, threatening the viability of services across the country,” the Impact Economics and Policy report found. “As one lawyer working in Indigenous family law put it to us: ‘Societies talk about how important this ‘access to justice’ is, and our justice net is completely overwhelmed.’ This erodes the number, quality and experience of private practitioners delivering legal assistance.” There was also an increasing cohort of people who were not eligible for legal aid, but were in need of support. “Between the very poor and the rich, a large cohort does not have functional access to the legal system they rely on and pay for through their taxes. https://lnkd.in/gcahNzRC
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10moI totally agree that access to justice must not be impeded by the expense.