2025-26 Pre-budget statement

March 2025

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. People trust their local community legal centre to support them early, before legal problems snowball to crisis point. 

However, community legal centres in Australia have long been significantly under-funded. High and increasing legal need in the community hurts people, and it costs governments. 

In late 2024, governments signed the new National Access to Justice Partnership (NAJP) agreement 2025-30, which sets out funding arrangements for legal assistance providers, including community legal centres, for the coming 5 years. 

With the federal budget to be handed down next week, we reiterate what we told the Commonwealth in our pre-budget submission: the modest uplift in funding under the NAJP provides a brief reprieve from the depths of the community legal sector funding crisis, but it is not enough. 

Between the increase in complexity and volume of legal need in the community and the sharp increase in the cost of delivering services, community legal centres remain significantly under-funded to meet the needs of the people and communities they serve. 

The Commonwealth must invest an extra $230 million per year to address the community legal sector funding and workforce crisis and enable centres to begin to meet unmet legal need in the community. 

Beyond this, there are several critical matters that were not addressed when the Commonwealth made its funding commitment to the NAJP, in September 2024. 

The NAJP includes several additional priority groups for legal assistance, including LGBTIQ+ people, and vulnerable migrants, including asylum seekers and refugees. These are inclusions we have long advocated, and they are very welcome. However, the Commonwealth has not provided any additional funding to enable community legal centres to meet the needs of these groups.

The 2025-26 budget must ensure community legal centres can meet the needs of newly added priority groups for legal assistance, including: 

• $14.5 million in targeted funding for community legal centres assistance to the LGBTIQ+ community. 

• $14.5 million in targeted funding for community legal centre assistance to vulnerable migrants, including asylum seekers and refugees.

Community legal centres in regional, rural, remote and very remote areas experience additional challenges in meeting the needs of the communities they serve. Legal need is greater in these areas, as is the cost of delivering services.

The 2025-26 budget must improve access to justice for people in regional, rural, remote and very remote communities, by investing $20.8 million in offsetting some of the challenges faced by community legal centres in those communities. 

The Commonwealth’s work in response to the Robodebt Royal Commission and its recommendations is far from finished. The Royal Commission’s final report recognises the key public interest role played by specialist social security community legal centres and calls for this to be considered with respect to funding decisions. The Commonwealth has a responsibility to ensure fair access to social security, including through the ability to access specialist legal assistance. 

The 2025-26 budget must ensure people who receive social security payments can access legal help when they need it, by providing a targeted $5 million uplift to specialist social security legal services.