Early legal intervention helps avoid crisis

'We understand that it's an issue they're facing that might also have social, economic, financial and personal consequences as well,' said Louisa Gibbs, CEO of the Federation of Community Legal Centres, Victoria.   
  
A number of the centres, including Tenants Victoria, Job Watch, Eastern Community Legal Centre, Environmental Justice Australia, Gippsland Community Legal Service, Djirra and many others presented their work at an exhibition held at Parliament House this week.   
  
Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes recognised the impact of the CLCs in her remarks.   
  
'What you do is you collaborate with health professionals, social workers and other service providers to ensure that clients receive comprehensive help that addresses not just their legal concerns, but the underlying causes of their issues,' she said.   
  
‘This work eases pressure on the justice system and prevents issues from worsening. Early intervention benefits not just your clients, but the broader community by helping families avoid crisis.’   
  
There are 50 Community Legal Centres across Victoria. While some are place-based, such as local Community Legal Centres supporting their geographical community, others are specialist Community Legal Centres assisting a particular cohort of people like women or young people or refugees, or a particular area of law such as environmental justice or human rights.  

‘Together we make up the Federation of Community Legal Centres and what we do is provide free, quality, place-based, trauma informed, culturally safe services for people who are facing legal problems, and we do it in an integrated fashion,' said Louisa Gibbs.   
  
Combined the centres provide more than 100,000 services to 40,000 clients a year.  
  
‘We have 4000 staff and volunteers in Community Legal Centres and about half of them are staff and half of them are volunteers. So there's a very strong commitment from our communities to the work that we do,’ she said.

Shadow Attorney-General Michael O’Brien recognised the significant input the centres have into legislation before Parliament.  
  
'I'd like to thank the Community Legal Centres for wrangling all these requests to get your input into the legislative process because not only does it make a lot of sense, but you've also made a difference. There's been legislation that's been amended directly as a result of the input of Community Legal Centres,' he said.

Louisa Gibbs said the centres were uniquely placed to see the law in action and provide feedback to the law making process.
  
‘We see how the laws that the MPs make in Parliament impact the people in our communities and so we're able to provide a really strong evidence base and information, case studies and data on how laws are operating. And we can make suggestions for how laws can be reformed to make Victoria a fairer place,’ she said.