Pre-budget submission 2025-26
Community Legal Centres Australia has made a submission to Treasury ahead of the 2025-26 Federal Budget.
Read the Community Legal Centres Australia 2025-26 pre-budget submission here, or read on for a summary.
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. Over the past decade, many national inquiries, surveys and reports have found high and increasing levels of unmet legal need across the country. This hurts people and communities, and it costs governments.
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 address the funding and workforce crisis and enable community legal centres to begin to meet unmet legal need in the community.
There are several critical matters not fully contemplated by the September 2024 announcement. Some of these matters were not clear at the time the announcement was made, and others have evolved significantly since that date. This submission sets out several targeted funding proposals to address emergent pressure points in need of urgent attention.
The Community Legal Centres Australia submission recommends that the 2025-26 federal budget should deliver:
- An additional $230 million per year for community legal centres, comprising $135 million for workforce needs and general services and $95 million for domestic and family violence services, less what is allocated to the sector from the Commonwealth’s September 2024 announcement.
- $14.5 million in targeted funding for community legal centres to provide legal assistance to the LGBTIQ+ community.
- $14.5 million in targeted funding for community legal centres to provide legal assistance to recent migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.
- A $20.8 million investment to offset some of the challenges facing community legal centres in rural, regional, remote, and very remote areas.
- A targeted $5 million uplift for specialist social security legal services.
- A commitment of $3 million over six years for the community legal sector to move to modern, efficient data and technology systems.
- $3 million for Community Legal Centres Australia, to ensure an adequately funded national community legal sector peak to support the 165 community legal services in our membership.
- An increase to Commonwealth community legal centre funding streams outside of the partnership agreement, at least in line with increases to community legal centre funding under the NAJP, including for workforce and indexation components as well as general uplift to assist in meeting unmet legal need.
