How can we support people’s experience of justice, good health and wellbeing?
The new federal government may bring different opportunities to work towards this objective, but our health justice priorities remain the same. Over a series of posts, our founding CEO Dr Tessa Boyd-Caine shares the work we have been doing with the new government so far and invites colleagues to connect with us in this advocacy and the important work ahead.
We had an engaged conversation about the role of health justice partnership within the broader legal assistance strategy in our first meeting with the Attorney-General, the Hon. Mark Dreyfus MP, since the Government was elected. Supporting portfolios beyond the justice sector to understand the value of legal assistance is a core objective of Health Justice Australia’s advocacy and we were pleased to discuss this in detail with the Attorney-General. We see huge opportunity to improve the outcomes measurement across legal assistance to support this objective, particularly in aid of the Government’s wellbeing agenda, and building on the sector’s own leadership and progress in this work to date.
We delved into the contribution of health justice partnership to a range of priorities including women’s safety, child protection and elder abuse. The growth in our national network of services working in this way extends well beyond those funded by the Federal government and is an outstanding example of service-led innovation; as is the continuing commitment to understand the value of collaborating to meet the needs of people poorly served by other service approaches. The NLAP review, which is expected to commence at the end of 2022 and run for a year, will provide a key opportunity to explore some of these issues further. However we will continue to give advice directly to government about the role of legal assistance to achieve health, social and justice outcomes, with the Government already hard at work identifying areas for reform and ways to meet priority needs within its overarching priority to improve wellbeing across the nation.