2025-26 Pre-budget submission

November 2024

Community legal centres help hundreds of thousands of people every year to resolve everyday legal problems in areas like housing, relationships, debts and money problems, and discrimination. However, community legal centres in Australia have long been significantly under-funded.

The September 2024 Commonwealth announcement of funding security beyond 30 June 2025 and of an uplift in funding has provided a brief reprieve, but it is not enough. This submission first sets out the additional community legal centre investment required under the National Access to Justice Partnership to enable community legal centres to begin to meet unmet legal need in the community. It then sets out several targeted funding proposals to address emergent pressure points in need of urgent attention.