Submission to inform the development of the Second Action Plan (National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022–2032)
August 2026
The Federal Government has a responsibility to act to ensure all people can live free from the threat or experience of domestic, family, and sexual violence, and other forms of abuse.
About the submission
This submission draws on Community Legal Centres Australia’s Vision for Justice and Actions for the 48th Parliament of Australia, as well as targeted consultations with member centres on specific topics. It also draws on a report due for release in the second half of 2026 about our sector’s prevention and early intervention work and its work with people who use violence. It focuses on the integral role all community legal centres play in preventing and responding to domestic and family violence.
We endorse submissions made by specialist peaks representing our sector including Women’s Legal Services Australia, First Nations Advocates against violence, and Economic Justice Australia. To avoid covering the same ground, this submission largely focusses on the contributions and needs of generalist or place-based community legal centres.
The first time I was ever validated in my experience as a victim of domestic violence was when Caxton Legal Centre believed me. That was the first time I heard someone say “Sam, this is real, and it is wrong. This should not have happened to you. This is serious, and it is important”.
When people come to be involved with the legal system, it’s because their needs haven’t been addressed. Community legal centres help with the immediate legal problem, but they look beyond people’s legal matters and into the future, too, and provide holistic support which improves outcomes for people who are vulnerable, like domestic violence victims.
I was a shell of a person when I made it to Caxton. They believed and validated me, and they gave me all the support I needed over five years.
I never in a million years would have thought this would happen to me. I didn’t think of myself as someone who’d need a community legal centre. But now I don’t think I’m the exception. I know there are thousands and thousands of other people in similar circumstances.
Sam, a former community legal centre client
Executive summary and recommendations
Legal assistance is critical to domestic and family violence prevention and response. Community legal centres’ work in this space is integrated into the broader domestic and family violence service system and exemplifies best practice. Centres are embedded in the communities they serve and develop innovative, tailored, locally appropriate programs that effectively combat the drivers of violence, respond where harm has already occurred, and reduce the risks of future harm.
Community legal centres are experts at supporting victim-survivors to untangle the intersecting legal, financial, health and social problems in their lives that have been caused or made worse by domestic and family violence. Almost half of our sector’s frontline work is supporting victim-survivors. This jumps to 75% in rural, remote and very remote communities, where rates of domestic and family violence can be higher, and access to services more limited.
Our integrated service model ensures access for victim-survivors and their families to a range of allied professional supports. In 2023-24, 82% of centres employed allied professionals including social workers, educators, community development and Aboriginal community engagement workers; 41% partnered with a domestic and family violence service, and 26% with a hospital or health service to reach victim-survivors of domestic and family violence early.
Like much of our sector’s work, community legal centres work to prevent and respond to domestic and family violence is under-funded. Chronic under-funding and high and growing unmet legal need, force the sector to turn away hundreds of thousands of people a year. In 2023-24, community legal centres turned away almost 400,000 people. This figure included 3,000 victim-survivors of domestic and family violence each week.
At the same time, the sector’s community education and prevention programs rely on piecemeal, short-term funding centres cobbled together from a range of sources. Sometimes funding contracts don’t include sufficient funding for independent evaluation. Even where they do, programs are often defunded after an initial pilot phase despite excellent evaluation outcomes.
The government’s modest increase in legal assistance funding delivered through the National Access to Justice Partnership Agreement 2025-30 (NAJP) was a welcome first step in improving access to justice for victim-survivors of domestic and family violence and addressing its root causes. However, the uplift has not benefitted the different parts of the community legal sector equally. Our sector’s ability to do effective domestic and family violence work relies on the entire sector – place-based, generalist centres, specialist Women’s Legal Services and other specialist centres – working together. Government decisions that pit different centres against one another, or require them to compete for funding, undermine our ability to provide the best possible supports to our communities.
Recommendation 1
Urgently reduce the number of victims-survivors turned away from community legal centres by investing an extra $95 million per year, from 2026-27. Funding should flow to all community legal centres that support victim-survivors of domestic and family violence.
Community Legal Centres Australia also endorses targeted funding recommendations made by specialist Women’s Legal Services, First Nations Advocates Against Family Violence and National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services.
Recommendation 2
Start work towards a whole-of-government approach to resourcing for legal assistance, including assessing the benefits and cost savings that legal assistance delivers across all portfolio areas.
Begin by requiring the Departments of Health and Social Services to participate in the mid-point review of the National Access to Justice Partnership agreement. Assess department priorities and desired outcomes to identify opportunities where modest targeted investments in community-based legal assistance would deliver significant benefits. Starting with the Department of Social Services, deliver these investments.
Recommendation 3
Use findings from the 2023-24 mid-point review of the National Legal Assistance Partnership agreement to drive supplementary research into the true cost of delivering services in regional and remote communities. Ensure models for funding community legal centres under the next national partnership agreement (to begin in 2030) are informed by this research and are targeted to reduce geographic gaps in access to justice.
Community legal centres’ service model and values are grounded in the principle that prevention is better than cure. Community legal education (CLE) has been integral to our services since the first centres emerged over 50 years ago. Our CLE programs aim to empower people and communities to understand their legal rights and remedies, identify and resolve problems early, and prevent them from escalating. They reach over 160,000 people a year. Many focus on laws and legal problems related to domestic and family violence, including family law (parenting and property matters), civil domestic and family violence orders, financial and elder abuse, consent laws and coercive control, and child protection.
Increasingly, community legal centres are delivering community education (CE) programs that go beyond providing legal information and advice and instead aim to challenge the ingrained societal attitudes that enable and excuse violence. Too often, however, the long-term efficacy of these programs is limited by short-term funding contracts, which are not renewed despite promising evaluation findings and the long timeframes required to change deeply ingrained societal attitudes and norms.
Recommendation 4
Increase resourcing for community legal centres to deliver community-based preventative approaches including community legal education on identifying violence and unsafe relationships.
Trauma-informed services for victim survivors have long been – and will remain – business as usual for community legal centres. However, effectively addressing the crisis in domestic and family violence requires a multi-pronged approach. This includes holistic, trauma-informed legal and allied supports for victim-survivors, and community wide prevention and education programs to shift deep-seated attitudes and behaviours that enable and excuse domestic and family violence. It also includes work to support rehabilitation, accountability and behaviour change for people who have caused harm.
Some community legal centres provide legal or allied professional services to people who have used violence. This includes centres that specialise in working with criminalised women, older people, people with disability, children and young people, and First Nations people, all of whom experience domestic and family violence in unique ways, and require tailored, trauma-informed, culturally appropriate responses.
For some centres, working with people who have used violence looks like providing legal support to respondents to civil domestic and family violence orders to reduce the risk of breaches and systems abuse. For others, it encompasses the development of specialised, targeted programs to reduce people’s risk of causing future harm.
Community legal centres who work with people who have used violence are acutely aware of the risks of systems abuse (across legal and other systems) faced by victim-survivors. They do this work with an explicit aim of improving safety for victim-survivors during legal proceedings, and to support accountability and behaviour change for people who have used violence, to reduce the risk of future harm.
Community Legal Centres Australia is currently working on a comprehensive report to document the best practice work community legal centres are doing with people who use violence. The report and recommendations will be available in the second half of 2026.
Recommendation 5
Increase resourcing for community legal centres to deliver case management programs for people who use violence, to support rehabilitation and accountability, and to reduce domestic, sexual and family violence.
Recommendation 6
Consider and implement the detailed recommendations included in Community Legal Centres Australia’s comprehensive report on community legal centres work to prevent domestic and family violence and with people who use violence, due for publication in the second half of 2026.
Within the community legal centres movement there are several national and state-based specialist youth legal services. In addition, several place-based, ‘generalist’ services run specialist youth practices, including duty lawyer services, and school lawyer programs. These services and programs work with young victim-survivors, as well as young people who have used violence.
These centres report that children and young people face unique barriers to accessing support, particularly legal support. These barriers often relate to compounding complexities associated with mandatory reporting, parental involvement and family relationships, and limits placed by schools on the kinds of information and services that centres can provide to different age groups. Such barriers contribute to people aged under 18 being an underserved group.
To address these barriers, some community legal centres are partnering with schools, to establish school lawyer programs, and to deliver education programs to young people, particularly relating to healthy relationships and consent. Centres report that young people feel safer disclosing experiences with violence when other supports, like safety planning or ongoing casework, are also available.
Community legal centres, particularly those located in regional and remote communities, are facing an acute workforce crisis. Community Legal Centres Australia’s recent National Workforce Demographic Snapshot revealed that our legal workforce is most at risk, with lawyers in our sector most likely to be young, and to leave the sector after a few years due to poor pay and limited career pathways. Centres in regional and remote communities report particular challenges recruiting senior family lawyers capable of taking on complex matters, including those involving domestic family violence, and supervising junior lawyers.
Governments must ensure that funding for community-based legal assistance providers supports equitable wages and conditions across the legal assistance sector. It must also ensure that the national legal assistance strategy currently being drafted under the National Access to Justice Partnership adequately addresses the specific challenges faced by providers operating in regional and remote communities.
Recommendation 7
Invest an extra $72 million a year from 2027-28 (indexed at 4.6% per year over the forward estimates) to increase the wages of workers at community-based legal assistance providers towards parity with workers in equivalent roles at Legal Aid Commissions.
Recommendation 8
Ensure the workforce strategy developed under the National Access to Justice Partnership responds fully to the needs, experiences and challenges of regional and remote communities and the services that support them.
Despite recent, positive law reform, the family law system continues to be too easily weaponised by people who perpetrate domestic and family violence, and to enable ongoing systems abuse of victim-survivors. Chronic under-resourcing of the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia continues to cause significant delays and backlogs, and under-investment in training for family law practitioners related to domestic and family violence and trauma-informed practice. These shortcomings enable victims-survivors to become trapped in harmful legal proceedings for years. Community Legal Centres Australia endorses submissions and recommendations for family law reforms to improve safety for victim-survivors made by Women’s Legal Services Australia and First Nations Advocates Against Family Violence.
Beyond the family law system, Community Legal Centres Australia’s Vision for Justice and Actions for the 48th Parliament advocate for wider policy reforms, many of which will help to address the root causes and impacts of violence against women and children. Recommendations include several in relation to access to restorative justice for victim-survivors of sexual violence, Closing the Gap targets, supports for women in and leaving prison, and safety for migrant women experiencing violence. We encourage the Federal Government to consider these recommendations as it develops the second national action plan.
Recommendation 9
Increase investment in the family law system to improve outcomes for people experiencing domestic family and sexual violence. This should include:
- Increased resourcing for the Family Court of Australia to address backlogs, implement trauma-informed processes, and improve cultural safety for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
- Providing regular training to ensure all family law professionals are family violence and trauma-informed, culturally safe, child-rights focussed, and disability and LGBTIQ+ aware. Training should be delivered, developed, and regularly evaluated by subject-matter and lived experience experts.
Recommendation 10
Provide a targeted investment of $15.8 million per year through the NAJP to enable community legal centres in regional and remote communities to increase advice and representation services to women involved in Family Court proceedings.
Recommendation 11
Take a leadership role in developing key principles to support the development (or amendment) of legislation in every jurisdiction to provide a strong framework for restorative justice and ensure that people who have experienced sexual violence are not disadvantaged in their experience of accessing justice based on where they live.
Recommendation 12
Ensure all victim-survivors of sexual violence have access to legal assistance to navigate the criminal legal system and other processes such as restorative justice and seeking redress.
Recommendation 13
Provide resourcing to support:
- Independent expert organisations that are already successfully delivering community-based restorative justice processes to consult and develop national guidelines for restorative justice
- Community-based restorative justice providers to deliver restorative justice
- Wrap-around support to ensure equitable, safe access to restorative justice for people who have experienced harm, regardless of income.
- Mental health, legal, behaviour change and other therapeutic programs for people who have caused harm.
Recommendation 14
Work with state and territory governments and the Aboriginal community-controlled sector to assess and reform all jurisdictions’ Working With Children Check, Blue Card or equivalent systems to improve cultural appropriateness and ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aren’t unjustly prevented from becoming kinship carers. Develop culturally appropriate frameworks for assessing actual risk to children, which consider the context of any existing or historical criminal records. Incorporate First Nations-determined protective measures to keep children safe from all forms of harm.
Recommendation 15
Set a nationally consistent minimum age of criminal responsibility that is at least 14 years of age.
Recommendation 16
Work with state and territory governments and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled sector to develop a national framework to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in and leaving prison, which includes:
- Supporting women to maintain contact with their children while in custody
- Ensuring support for women ahead of release from prison to access ID, and to arrange income, a safe place to live, and access to health services.
- Implementing clear and consistent rules of access to prisons for organisations delivering critical services, including legal assistance. This includes facilitating continuity of casework support for people leading up to, and following, release.
Recommendation 17
Increase the base rate of JobSeeker, Youth Allowance, Austudy, Abstudy, Special Benefit and Parenting Payment to at least $82 per day ($574 per week).
Recommendation 18
Implement the Robodebt Royal Commission’s call for increased resourcing for free legal services by investing an additional $5 million per year in Department of Social Services funding for specialist social security legal services, starting from 2026-27.
Case studies and quotes
Our submission incorporates many quotes and case studies from centres. Here are a small number of them.
Johanna* ran into a community lawyer on outreach and received immediate assistance to apply for a family violence intervention
Johanna is a primary carer of three children under ten. She runs a small business but with no financial support from the children’s father, she struggles financially. Johanna’s ex-partner perpetrated violence many times, including in front of the children. Police were called to her home several times. Family violence, the pressures of running her business, and isolation from her family, severely impacted Johanna’s mental health.
Johanna first contacted her local community legal centre for advice with parenting matters. A month after her initial appointment, she ran into the same lawyer while they were on outreach in the community. Johanna was visibly upset and disclosed a recent family violence incident.
The community lawyer immediately assisted Johanna to apply for a family violence intervention order and represented her in her court application for an urgent interim order, to protect Johanna and her kids through the family court proceedings.
Through the community legal centre’s Health Justice Partnership, Johanna was referred to further supports for ongoing help. The centre is continuing to assist Johanna with her family violence matter and with parenting arrangement negotiations.
*Not her real name.
Peninsula Community Legal Centre’s interactive youth theatre approach to harm prevention
Half of Peninsula Community Legal Centre’s work is in family law and family violence. Its focus on engaging young people emerged over recent years when it observed some teenagers in the culturally and linguistically diverse communities it works with were already using or experiencing controlling behaviours and family violence.
In response, the centre worked with experts to develop “This Is Not Who I Want To Be,” a pilot youth theatre project for culturally and linguistically diverse high school students.
Through interactive theatre, the project delivered information about their legal rights and responsibilities and how to access legal and other supports. More broadly, it challenged attitudes that downplay or excuse violence by inviting students to connect with the characters in the story, and in doing so create longer-term attitudinal change.
Since the successful pilot of “This Is Not Who I Want to Be”, Peninsula has received new funding to develop “On The Ropes” in partnership with a professional theatre company. “On The Ropes” is a 1-hour performance about two 16-year-old best friends whose journey lands them in a lawyer’s office. The performance explores family violence, coercive control, sharing of intimate photos and examples of different ways of listening and providing support.
Lawyers attend each performance and return to each school a week later. One of the outcomes of the project is that young people are informed about the ways a lawyer might be able to help them and to provide opportunities for young people to speak to a lawyer about issues they may be experiencing straight away.
The centre consulted with a trauma-informed counsellor throughout the process, and with young people about the content. A magistrate came to watch the premiere and provided useful feedback about how to simplify coercive control to better fit the material into a one-hour play.
Peninsula is now delivering “On The Ropes” to 5,000 students across its catchment and evaluating opportunities to develop school lawyer programs with participating schools.
Our model of primary prevention uses theatre as our tool to highlight coercive control and also the role that lawyers play: we are a safe space; we have privilege. It’s been a great journey with some amazing feedback from young people. They provide commentary to us and what we’re getting is that it’s really relevant. They resonate with the performers.
Jackie Galloway, CEO, Peninsula Community Legal Centre
Our [family and domestic violence primary prevention] program is for ages 12 to 13, because that’s the youngest age that the schools would accept it. It was consistent across consultations when we developed our program that people need to learn and engage with this younger – there are kids engaging in sexual activities nowadays that are younger than 12 – so consent needs to be taught at such a younger age.
But the schools just won’t allow you to talk about it at ages younger than that yet. Anything older than that and the kids are already just doing it all. We thought this would be the sweet spot where you can still talk about these issues early and really make a difference. But we do want to bring it to younger ages, too. Seeing the kids, 10-year-olds are so little, but they all have phones and they have access to so much material. They’re being exposed to all of this stuff now, already, so it’s important to speak with them early.
At one of the schools where we delivered the program, it was a very small remote community school with a mix of ages of kids in the one classroom, so there were some younger kids there, too. And the examples were still relevant, because you can talk about healthy relationships in a friendship context, too. Consent as in, “oh, if your friend doesn’t want to play with you, how do you respond when they say no?”.
Solicitor at a remote community legal centre
Youth Law Australia’s specialist harm practice
Youth Law Australia (YLA) receives Federal Government funding through the First Action Plan under the National Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Child Sexual Abuse to provide a dedicated, nationwide legal service to children and young people through digital means.
The harm practice is funded to address a broad range of issues, including family violence, sexual violence, peer-to-peer harm, bullying, harassment, online abuse, harmful behaviours, and more. It has been running for five years, with its funding concluding in mid-2027.
In designing the practice, YLA considered questions like, “how do children and young people engage with services?”, “what are their legal help-seeking behaviours?”, and “how do you build trust with kids who might have difficult relationships with adults as part of their histories?”.
In response, engagement with young people through the practice is carefully linked to being their person, and not an adult’s person, and staff have established clear pathways and approaches that make sure kids feel heard, believed, and safe.
YLA does not require young people seeking assistance to identify if they were experiencing violence or using violence. Some choose to identify, others don’t. Instead, the practice focuses on creating a safe space to discuss behaviours and their impacts. YLA has found that the anonymity that tech-enabled service provision can provide, and the absolute confidentiality that is unique to the legal profession combine to engender trusted relationships with young help-seekers and to help them to disclose.
Some young people first approach the service because they have been accused of sexual violence, and then upon further conversation with the young person, the service finds many things in their journey that may have led to this outcome.
For example, a third of the boys and young men who contacted the service in 2024-25 disclosed that they were accused of sexual violence. Most often this related to peer rape or online harm, for example, sharing nude photographs. The service then works with the young person to address their behaviours that may have caused harm, and to get out of legal and other situations that may be harmful to them.
We receive emails saying, “we want to tell you things, but first you need to confirm you’re not a mandatory reporter”. We reply that we’re not, and that the young people do not need parental permission to receive assistance from us. Then, we’ll immediately receive back, for example, five pages of notes.
Some kids reach out to us telling us that their parents have found out in past that they’re trying to seek help. For example, a 12-year-old who had gone to another, non-legal, service, who had then made a mandatory report. That experience made it difficult for the child to trust our service. We’ve had to make sure the whole service can create that trusted space.
Principal Solicitor at Youth Law Australia
South Coast and Country Community Legal Centre working with young people to prevent harm
South Coast and Country Community Legal Centre is small place-based centre, that provides general legal assistance service to communities on the south coast of NSW, from the Shoalhaven down to the Victorian border. The centre has delivered Love Bites (NAPCAN developed training) at local high schools for many years, including in Bomaderry, Nowra, Shoalhaven, and Ulladulla.
However, this work is not funded by government. One team member is trained in the program and works with the Shoalhaven Coordinator of Love Bites to deliver the program to school groups in and around Nowra. Sessions are delivered during work hours, however without dedicated funding to run the program, most of the preparation and coordination work is not adequately accounted for.
South Coast and Country Community Legal Centre also auspices the local domestic and family violence committee, which used to receive a small grant each year for awareness and prevention activities. That funding contributed to some of the training of personnel for Love Bites in the local area. However, now all the work is done unfunded.
Recently, NAPCAN updated the content for Love Bites and all currently trained facilitators needed to complete updated course (by June 2026) to remain qualified. The course cost is over $750 per person. As a result, Love Bites programs have not been able to run in 2026 in Shoalhaven schools despite demand from the schools, as there are not currently sufficient numbers to staff this great program. South Coast and Country Community Legal Centre is in the process of seeking grants for further training but has not been able to secure these so far this year.
For those working in this space it is very clear that the purpose is accountability, safety for women and children and families, and reducing risk.
For those who aren’t working in this space (providing services to men who use harm, legal or otherwise), there isn’t a strong understanding for why we would be supporting men – what the purpose comes back to.
Punitive measures alone won’t solve things. Accountability will lead to family safety. By providing legal supports we’re not only reducing downstream costs, like to child protection, health and policing, we’re also keeping people safe.
Principal Solicitor, Caxton Legal Centre