The Federal Budget in May provided a range of commitments to support health and legal assistance services to work better together around the multiple, intersecting health and legal problems in people’s lives.
Since then, Health Justice Australia has been working to influence how these funding commitments are directed. Here Tessa Boyd-Caine shares our advocacy so far and invites input from our network on where we go next.
Health Justice Australia’s policy objective is to support health, legal and other services to collaborate in addressing the impact of unmet legal need, particularly in service settings beyond the justice system. We consistently raise relevant issues in our membership of the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department Advisory Group, as well as in our direct advocacy to state and territory Justice Departments in their decisions about legal assistance, family safety and outcomes measurement. We also advance the value and relevance of legal assistance to health and social services portfolios in their policy and funding processes. For instance in health, we have advocated for the inclusion of legal help within integrated service models led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled services and in emerging models responding to mental health. Meanwhile emergence of the women’s safety agenda as a cross-Government priority has provided us with the opportunity to advocate to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, as well as to line agencies in justice, health and social policy.
Since the 2021 Federal Budget we have argued for Commonwealth funding to move away from single-year funding towards more sustainable and continued programs. We were delighted to see Community Legal Centres Australia also support this proposition in their initial response to the Federal Budget. Several measures within the legal assistance budget create the possibility to achieve this, including the specific funding directed at Domestic Violence Units and Health Justice Partnerships, mental health, and at specialist women’s legal services.
Health Justice Australia has called for the funding dedicated to building capability in services to respond to the intersecting needs of people experiencing domestic and family violence or mental ill-health, to be allocated without prescribing exactly how this should be done. This call was informed by our network, many of whom identified that specific measures (such as access to mental health training or mental health workers) were not priorities for the communities and services they work with.
We are delighted that the Attorney-General’s Department has agreed that the principle of funding being used to build capability in relation to improved responsiveness to mental health might mean different approaches from different services. This creates significant opportunities for services to continue shaping their programs around priority needs, with the potential for approaches to vary across different services and settings.
Ensuring that funding is available to build service capability for improved effectiveness will likely require advocacy at the jurisdictional level also. Recognising that, Health Justice Australia has written to National Legal Aid requesting they support this approach, given the role many legal aid organisations play in the decisions within states and territories.
We are also pursuing the inclusion of legal assistance in the evolving mental health landscape, at both the Commonwealth level and in states that have identified priority here (such as NSW and Victoria). While there is much possibility, there is also much that remains unclear. We have been actively advocating for opportunities to include legal assistance in mental health reforms. We are also pleased to be supporting the National Mental Health Commission’s forthcoming work on stigma, given the harmful effects of institutional discrimination on people’s health and wellbeing.
As Health Justice Australia continues to advocate on these issues, we invite input from the health justice partnership network on how we can best engage directly with key decision-makers at the jurisdictional level, including on priorities where health justice partnership has a demonstrable contribution such as in responding to family violence and mental health.
