The Monash-Warwick Access to Justice Workshops, funded by Monash-Warwick Alliance Seed Fund, brought together academics, practitioners and civil society activists from both jurisdictions to compare the impact of government cuts to funding for civil and criminal legal aid. Some useful resources on these topics can be found here.
It was organised by Natalie Byrom, Asher Flynn, James Harrison and Jacqueline Hodgson
University of Warwick, 19 March 2014
An expert workshop on the cuts to civil and criminal legal aid was held at the University of Warwick on 19 March 2014. The workshop was attended by academics, legal practitioners, funders and civil society actors, all of whom had extensive knowledge of the legal aid changes and their impact in practice.
The report is available here.
Monash University, 21 July 2014
In the Australian context, since the early 2000s there have been significant changes to the eligibility and accessibility of legal assistance as a result of increases in demand and government cuts to funding, underpinned by a rhetoric of austerity. This has resulted in a major increase in self-represented litigants and defendants. The 2013 cuts made to Australian legal aid budgets have effectively removed assistance to some of the most vulnerable individuals coming before the law and forced the closure of Community Legal Centres and some Legal Aid offices, leading to redundancies, and more centralised centres required to handle more clients, with less funds (Chadwick, 2013).
The report is available here.
