LAW REFORM COMMITTEE Inquiry into legal services in rural

Warrnambool – 21 June 2000

Members

Mr D. McL. Davis Mr A. J. McIntosh

Ms D. G. Hadden Mr R. E. Stensholt

Mr P. A. Katsambanis Mr M. H. Thompson

Mr T. Languiller

Chairman: Mr M. H. Thompson

Deputy Chairman: Ms D. G. Hadden

Staff

Executive Officer: Ms P. Raman

Research Officers: Ms S. Vohra and Ms M. Mason

Witnesses

Mr B. du Vergier, Director, Community Connections; and

Ms J. Williams, Coordinator, The Legal Centre.

The CHAIRMAN — Thank you for taking the time to come along to outline your work and respond to questions. We have an hour to run through your material. I would like you to have the chance to run through what you would like to say. My colleagues are at liberty to interpose questions along the way for the clarification of any issues. I would like to get through your submission and have questions at the end although there will be free rein for my colleagues to put questions if they feel it is important to do so during your commentary.

Hansard reporters are recording the comments today and I would like to you bear that in mind in terms of any comments you may make as they will probably end up being put on our web site as part of the transcript of the hearings. You will have the opportunity to proof your material. Should any issues arise during the course of our discussion that you feel are sensitive or best not outlined publicly then we can do that in camera or you can make a submission as to why it might not be appropriate to include those comments in the record and we will be happy to consider those factors.

The evidence is taken by the committee under the provisions of the Parliamentary Committees Act, which renders it immune from judicial review while discussion is taking place within the parameters of the hearing. I trust that that will not be a relevant consideration overall as we are supposed to be fact finding in our journey this morning.

I invite to you commence speaking to the issues that Padma has drawn to your attention, the matters we have interest in ascertaining.

Mr du VERGIER — We were requested to provide you with a profile of the agency. Our community legal centre is about seven years old. It was the first outer rural regional community legal centre in Victoria. We have been funded for almost eight years. We were the first multi-service agency to program a community legal centre. The community legal centre is one program component of Community Connections. Community Connections is a company limited by guarantee which provides a range of multi-services to the community throughout south-western Victoria. That pretty much takes in the shires of Glenelg, Southern Grampians, Corangamite and Moyne and the City of Warrnambool. That is what we, as a multi-service community agency provider, refer to as our territory. We are an independent, not-for-profit, non- denominational organisation. We are one of the few in Victoria, although there are similar organisations.

You are probably aware of Upper Murray Family Care and Mallee Family Care, which have come into the community legal centre service provision in recent years. We were the first to set up a community legal centre within a multi-service agency model. We were involved in mentoring the Mallee Family Care and the Upper Murray Family Care programs. The commonwealth government has just funded Anglicare to provide an outer rural regional community legal centre for Gippsland.

Our history is a reasonable one. The agency is a broad-based community service provider. The community legal program is one of about 20 programs. The agency is an independent and non-denominational provider of a range of services that take in child welfare, social justice in terms of tenancy and consumer matters for the new Office of Consumer and Business Affairs, and a range of residential, disability and community development services. We are broad based: we have an office in every town — Hamilton, Warrnambool, Camperdown and Portland. We have strong networks with the agencies in , Horsham and Mount Gambier in South , which is an issue in itself in how we provide services for outer regional people across the state boundary — we go down to Colac and on to Geelong. We have networks throughout rural Victoria.

I have mentioned our strong connections with Upper Murray Family Care and Mallee Family Care. They are also multi-service agencies doing similar things and running community legal centres.

The issue for the seven years has been that our organisation was originally funded at about $100 000 to provide a community legal centre practice for 24 000 square kilometres, which is frankly absurd. It makes it incredibly difficult for us to provide direct services for that sort of territory in the way you are familiar with. However, the commonwealth has been funding new community legal centres in outer rural regions such as the two I have mentioned and the latest one in Gippsland — which has been auspiced by Anglicare — at $210 000.

We down here in south-western Victoria feel somewhat aggrieved that we are $100 000 behind the mark yet we have been running the program for nearly eight years. There are some equity issues in relation to citizens of south-western Victoria having equal access as the citizens of Gippsland will have in the future and the people of the Upper Murray and Mallee regions have. Our experience is one of struggle in relation to providing the community legal centre practice to 24 000 square kilometres. Our model has been tested. It is based on flying out to Portland, Hamilton and Camperdown from Warrnambool. We rely heavily on a volunteer model — which Juliet will say more about — to make the services of the community legal centre accessible to towns in parts of south-western Victoria other than Warrnambool. That is our history and the model on which our organisation works its community legal centre.

Mr McINTOSH — I did not quite catch what you said about your funding. Is it commonwealth or state funding?

Mr du VERGIER — It is almost 90 per cent commonwealth and 10 per cent Victorian Legal Aid (VLA). The combination of funding for our program is 90 per cent commonwealth and 10 per cent or maybe a little more state.

Ms HADDEN — Did you say VLA?

Mr du VERGIER — Via the VLA. Also, that funding has remained exactly the same.

Mr McINTOSH — You mentioned that Gippsland was funded at twice the rate.

Mr du VERGIER — The model on which the commonwealth government is funding the new community legal centre in rural Victoria and Australia is about $210 000, which is $100 000 more than we were originally funded seven or eight years ago, and we have remained on that level. Mr STENSHOLT — They are the new centres established in the past two or three years. You were established seven years. Are they establishing similar models?

Mr du VERGIER — Yes.

Mr STENSHOLT — Do you have to reapply for your funding?

Mr du VERGIER — We negotiate a service agreement around a work plan every year, but there is no negotiation around the level of funding; it is locked into a model.

Mr STENSHOLT — When are they looking to re-tender it?

Mr du VERGIER — They do not re-tender; they only tender the new programs. The existing programs are subject to a service agreement negotiation process. Once you are on the ground you just renegotiate the ground rules each year.

Ms HADDEN — Whereabouts is the new model in Gippsland?

Ms WILLIAMS — It will apparently be based in Morwell.

Ms HADDEN — I note you are a legal advice information and referral service only.

Ms WILLIAMS — Could you repeat that?

Ms HADDEN — I note in my summary that you provide free legal advice, information and referral. I understand that to mean you do no case work.

Ms WILLIAMS — We do generally. The majority of our work would be referral and information but we do a limited amount of case work.

Ms HADDEN — Is that in family law matters?

Ms WILLIAMS — Probably about 60 to 65 per cent is family law matters.

Ms HADDEN — Is the new model proposed at Morwell different? I am trying to work out the disparity in funding. Are they requiring case work to be done?

Mr du VERGIER — The service agreement is the same. One has just been funded over the border in Mount Gambier, which is only an hour from Portland or 1 hour and 40 minutes from here. The new service in Mount Gambier has been funded by the federal government at $210 000, which is the model funding level for all new community legal centres (CLCs) in Australia.

Mr McINTOSH — In relation to that, we have been up to Albury-Wodonga recently and heard from people like Trish Devlin at the Albury-Wodonga legal centre. I do not know whether the issue of funding was discussed up there, but do you know whether that centre is funded at the rate of $210 000? Mr du VERGIER — Yes. We had something to do with the setting up of that centre. As I said earlier, we have been around for a while, and we did some mentoring with the one up in Albury.

Ms HADDEN — I think that was the figure they mentioned; it was either $210 000 or $240 000.

Mr McINTOSH — That is a very new service; it was set up in the past year or so. We went to a conference up there and at least one of the speakers at the conference made reference to the fact that it was a model that did not stem from the local profession auspicing the community legal centre. It was effectively a stand-alone centre and had to be started from the base up. Is that the sort of model they are looking at in Gippsland?

Mr du VERGIER — Anglicare is auspicing the community legal centre in Gippsland. I assume it will have a physical presence of its own, in terms of a stand- alone notion, but it is part of the wide Anglicare organisation.

Mr McINTOSH — The point that was being made there was that in Albury– Wodonga the legal centre did not grow out of a duty lawyer scheme or whatever that the profession had been running for a number of years.

Mr du VERGIER — It did not evolve that way?

Mr McINTOSH — Yes.

Mr du VERGIER — That is true.

Mr McINTOSH — It was just something that everybody wanted to have.

Mr STENSHOLT — It was tendered in Wodonga.

Mr du VERGIER — Indeed. A group of citizens got together and said, ‘We are interested’, and they went to the Upper Murray Family Care Agency and said, ‘Could you help us auspice it?’.

Mr McINTOSH — Did the service that you run here grow out of the profession?

Mr du VERGIER — Yes, it did. We had had since the early 1980s a volunteer community legal centre, if you could call it that, that was basically based on welfare practitioners and duty solicitors from the local legal firms coming together and providing an evening service free of cost.

Mr McINTOSH — Pro bono?

Mr du VERGIER — It was all pro bono.

Ms HADDEN — Like a legal bureau?

Mr du VERGIER — Yes, for at least 10 or 12 years. Ms HADDEN — They did that in Ballarat for many years. One of the local organisations for the intellectually disabled provided its premises for free, and the service was available every Tuesday night. But then the public said, ‘We do not want to come out at night and see you. Do it during the day’. That went for about 15 years.

Ms WILLIAMS — That evening service, from which this service was created, is still operational. We still have solicitors coming in every Tuesday evening and providing pro bono work to clients. That is very much just one-off advice and referral.

However, getting back to your earlier question about casework, perhaps if I can tell you a little about how our service is structured in terms of casework and information referral. We have two main intake sessions based in Warrnambool. The one held on Thursday mornings is our main intake session, and that is operated with the assistance of community volunteers. We have quite a large volunteer program. Those volunteers are recruited from the community, they do not have any legal training, they do a six- week training course of about 3 hours a week. They also travel with us — well, with me at the moment — to Hamilton once a fortnight. They have also been assisting us with a lot of the project work we do at the centre.

Something we have not mentioned at this point is that we have funding to provide a specialist women’s service. That funding resulted from the justice statement in 1996, and it was called the Rural Women’s Outreach program. It is now part of the legal centre as a specialist women’s service. That amounts to about $70 000 a year. The focus of that funding has always been project work and legal education. We see it as nonsense to say that part of that funding can go towards just women’s specific casework because the majority of our general service casework has always been providing that service to women anyway. About 65 per cent of our clients are female. That money, while it does bump up our funding significantly, has always been directed to project work and community education.

We also operate an outreach service once a month to Casterton, which is about a 3 1 /4 hour drive from here, closer to the South Australian border.

Ms HADDEN — What about Portland?

Ms WILLIAMS — Portland, once a fortnight on a Friday.

Mr STENSHOLT — We were in Portland yesterday and we received quite strong representations — I know what your answer will be, given what you said at the beginning — that the amount of time — —

Mr McINTOSH — You are learning the art of being a barrister.

Mr STENSHOLT — Yes. It was suggested that the amount of time you are providing in Portland should be about four times what it is at the moment. Does that correlate with your reckoning?

Ms WILLIAMS — Yes.

Mr du VERGIER — Yes. Ms WILLIAMS — Exactly the same comment could be made about the Hamilton area. However, we have resource restrictions. Basically there is me, and I divide my time technically between 20 hours casework as a lawyer and 20 hours coordination of the centre, and I am also picking up some of the project work because we have a vacancy at the moment for a project worker. Jackie Kilhams, our other lawyer, is on a nine-day fortnight, so she is there for 36 hours a week, and we have a 28-hour administration assistant. Our resources are very limited. Yes, we certainly acknowledge that the services in Portland — in all the outreach and other areas we cover — are underresourced and underserviced. However, that is about the maximum we can do at the moment.

Mr STENSHOLT — It is not quite the same in Springvale, where you do not have to travel too far.

Mr du VERGIER — It is the same with large central cities like Bendigo, Ballarat, Albury-Wodonga and Mildura, where most of the population gravitate for one reason or another every day of their lives. This region is unique: you have four competing subregions — Hamilton, Portland, Warrnambool, and the district of Camperdown, Timboon and Cobden — and they all think they are the centre of the earth. The parochial-centric style of four separate centres in one region makes it quite different from working in, say, Ballarat, Bendigo, Albury-Wodonga or Mildura — quite different.

Ms HADDEN — Although it would be true to say, surely, that Warrnambool is the epicentre of this district and that Warrnambool gets all the funding for court services.

Mr du VERGIER — Yes. Portland residents and Hamiltonians would not feel comfortable with that. However, that is the reality.

Ms HADDEN — I said as much. There has been considerable concern and anxiety about the fact that everything seems to gravitate to Warrnambool. The other comment we heard yesterday was that the appointments for your 3-hour visit to Portland once a fortnight are done by phone to Warrnambool, and they are booked out.

Mr du VERGIER — Yes. Our work agreement with the funding body says that we have to see so many clients; we do that easily, so we fulfil our contract with the funding body without even trying. However, you made the point that there are people in Hamilton, Portland and Camperdown — and I might add in Colac — who do not get access to a service in the way you have just said they need to. However, we have no way of responding to that need, unless there are more resources for face-to-face services. There are some telecommunications options, but we need some resources to be able to provide the face-to-face service that you are saying Portland residents and Hamiltonians are asking for. Colac does not have a service at all, I might add.

Ms HADDEN — That is not in your region, the south-west?

Ms WILLIAMS — We do different things in Colac in all parts of the program, but Colac sits there in the middle. The Geelong Community Legal Centre — I will speak for the centre — does not need to go to Colac. It fulfils its contract in terms of numbers of people without trying, so Colac misses out. Why does a solicitor need to drive to Colac once a week or once a fortnight when the centre is already meeting its targets? They are the issues about that.

Ms HADDEN — During the 3-hour session at Portland, do you give clients 1 hour each, 15 minutes, or what?

Ms WILLIAMS — Unless they are negotiated otherwise the appointments are generally half an hour apart.

Ms HADDEN — That would be six points once a fortnight?

Ms WILLIAMS — Yes. We offer a telephone advice service. There is no time set aside for that; it is basically if anyone rings in. We have one central free-call number that goes to the main office in Warrnambool. Those calls are then transferred through to the legal centre office, and if a staff member is not available to provide telephone advice at the time, we arrange to get back to the client. We provide phone advice, which covers a lot of the more isolated people, particularly women on farms. Through the women’s program we have run a couple of major projects that have focused on issues about women on farms, and particularly succession planning and state planning. As a result of that publicity the women’s program deals with a lot of calls from isolated women on farms, and also anybody else who cannot book in for that week in Portland. To a certain extent we can deal with those people over the phone.

Ms HADDEN — That was not mentioned yesterday at all by the community health centre, which suggests to me it does not know that service exists, or if it does that it has forgotten about it.

Ms WILLIAMS — The telephone advice service?

Ms HADDEN — Yes. It was not mentioned. I would have thought it would be crucial for the people from the centre to raise that as a top up of the limit of 3 hours.

Ms WILLIAMS — Yes.

Mr du VERGIER — All our public advertising, as Andrew has just picked up on the form, says ‘This is the 1300 number — ring it’.

Ms HADDEN — That was not raised yesterday.

Mr du VERGIER — We have one point of entry in this region for all our services — Community Connections is just one — which is a 1300 number. You can make an appointment for any service, or you can get direct access to the legal program, if someone is available.

Ms WILLIAMS — There is also a separate 1800 number, a free-call number, for women clients only.

Ms HADDEN — I noticed there were none of those pamphlets at the Portland courthouse, either. That pamphlet was given to us by the community health centre yesterday during submissions. Mr McINTOSH — How much does the telephone service cost you with people making those calls?

Ms WILLIAMS — On the 1300 number?

Mr McINTOSH — Yes.

Mr du VERGIER — It is a free call. We pay the rent. I cannot give you a figure. I do not know how I would differentiate the figures because the 1300 number works for about 25 programs, of which the community centre is one.

Mr McINTOSH — I see.

Mr du VERGIER — I could not break it down to show the community legal centre costs. However, as you know, it is a free call for 15 minutes, then local subscriber trunk dialling kicks in. The challenge for our contact centre — we do not call it a call centre, we call it a contact centre model — is to get that referral done in 15 minutes.

Mr STENSHOLT — When people ring in, I assume somebody answers it? It is not one of those telephone requests by buttons?

Ms WILLIAMS — No, there is a real person on the end of it.

Mr du VERGIER — That is the next step, they say.

Mr STENSHOLT — Excuse my asking.

Mr du VERGIER — I am not frightened of that, by the way. Aspects of that can work quite well, and we are looking at those.

Mr STENSHOLT — If it is badly organised, it can be a problem.

Mr du VERGIER — The software around it will have to shake that stuff up to make it worth while.

Ms WILLIAMS — I would like to address some of the issues and difficulties that we have around recruitment. As I mentioned before, we have had a vacancy for a project worker position for quite a number of months now. We are looking at converting that to a position for another solicitor to join us to try to meet some of the gaps we have already talked about. One of the problems we are experiencing at the moment is that the salary range we can offer under our funding is approximately $30 000 a year. The average wage for a first-year lawyer is $30 000 a year, so that is who we can hope to attract — a first-year or second-year lawyer.

Mr STENSHOLT — It is $46 000, is it not, for a first-year lawyer, according to the latest survey in the Age?

Ms HADDEN — That would be in . Ms WILLIAMS — That survey might have been Australia wide. We are on track with $30 000. We can offer a decent salary for a first-year or second-year lawyer. However, I see that as a problem in itself, because that is the limit of experience that those persons will come in with. They might be Leo Cussen Institute graduates, and that would be fantastic, but that would be the extent of it. In offering that wage, that will reflect in the service delivery.

The other problem that occurs is that people may be happy with that wage for a couple of years, but having gained the experience here, particularly in a general casework practice — and we think it is a good grounding for new lawyers — very often, and I speak from the experience of local firms, they go back to Melbourne. They move back to the metropolitan areas because they can get better wages there. We cannot keep up with that. We cannot compete with the salary range that those people can seek either in private practice or with the metropolitan-based legal centres.

Mr McINTOSH — Are they perceived as being attractive to local firms? Would it be attractive for local firms to give them two years in your service to get that very good grounding in general service and then snaffle them?

Ms WILLIAMS — There are three or four major firms in Warrnambool, but they are not major given the standard of the metropolitan majors. They have their own recruitment and retention difficulties. It is common knowledge that a lot of the new, younger solicitors come and work here for a year post-articles or post-Leo Cussen and then move back to Melbourne. They gain that experience and then move back. I guess that on the other side a lot of the local lawyers who establish themselves in private firms are not particularly interested in coming to work for us. I think that is related to salary, which relates back to the lack of resources and funding.

In the meantime, we have to struggle on and manage all the case and project work. We are one case worker short. It is also in the timing. Leo Cussen graduates do not graduate until October or November this year. Then there are advertising costs. There is the sheer difficulty of attracting people to come to a interview because of the cost. Relocation expenses are not touched on in our funding. The agency must compensate for those extras to try to attract people even with one or two years’ experience.

Ms HADDEN — Have you ever thought of having some arrangement with a big city firm whereby it sends a second or third-year solicitor to you for two years once he or she has had one year of good, supervised training?

Ms WILLIAMS — We have not addressed that specifically, but we are having to look at some more innovative ideas for attracting staff.

Ms HADDEN — The city firm could treat that as partially pro bono, or whatever.

Mr du VERGIER — It is a good idea.

Ms HADDEN — You will not ever get a solicitor to go from private practice to a community legal centre.

Ms WILLIAMS — It is very rare. Ms HADDEN — It is rare. It happens in Ballarat, but there are lots of personal reasons for that, and they do not last too long. Ballarat is in a similar situation with a huge turnover of solicitors in the community legal centre. You will not attract people because of the nature of the work you do. You are doing what used to be called poverty law. I volunteered at the Nunawading legal service from 1979 to 1983, where you were a poverty lawyer. You cannot call it that now, but that is what you were.

Ms WILLIAMS — The other point is most of the lawyers who work in legal centres are not obliged to but choose to do a lot of the community legal education work, including running seminars and the project work related to specific law reform issues. A range of different skills are involved there. Some people have them and some do not. You are trying to attract not only an efficient, competent solicitor but also people who can cope with the other duties that come with working in a legal centre.

Ms HADDEN — Do you often have those seminars in Warrnambool and around the region?

Ms WILLIAMS — Yes. On a demand basis we will respond to workshops and information sessions about particular legal issues, usually around family law or wills and power of attorney — those very general issues. We also have a major forum every year called the Annual Justice Forum. That concentrates on issues that people in the community would like to hear about, as well as current legal issues. Last week we ran a justice forum focusing on children in the legal system. We had a speaker from Ballarat, the children’s lawyer of the year, Patmalor Ambikapathy, and Professor Neville Turner addressed the forum. That is the main high-profile educational forum that we run every year, but we do many different workshops and information sessions during the year as required.

Ms HADDEN — Would the speakers have been pro bono?

Ms WILLIAMS — I will not answer that at this point.

Ms HADDEN — I could probably answer it for you.

The CHAIRMAN — I do not understand the nuance.

Ms HADDEN — It is important. If you want to attract speakers to a seminar, surely you ask them to do it on a pro bono basis, because you cannot afford to pay them.

The CHAIRMAN — Have you sometimes had to pay for your guest speakers?

Ms WILLIAMS — Yes.

Mr McINTOSH — Why is that? In my experience of the profession in Melbourne, if you went to Leo Cussen you were paid to do that service, but it was a minimal amount. You were never paid if you went to the bar readers course. On a number of occasions I lectured at the Law Institute of Victoria as part of the process of continuing legal education, and I was never paid. If you went to a university as part of a recognised course you were paid that salary, but if you were a guest lecturer you would never be paid. There seems to be culture of doing it for free. Ms WILLIAMS — In my experience it varies. Some speakers choose to have a fee paid, and others do not.

The CHAIRMAN — What is the order of the fee? Is it to cover travel expenses and accommodation and anything in addition to that?

Ms WILLIAMS — It is usually to cover travelling and accommodation.

Mr McINTOSH — You can probably understand that.

Ms HADDEN — That is not too bad.

Ms WILLIAMS — Sometimes there has been a speaker’s’ fee in addition to that. To be fair, often that is directed to a charity of that speaker’s choice.

Mr du VERGIER — It is a whole day, so I guess it is a bigger commitment than travelling across town in Melbourne. The justice forum is interesting because the members of local legal firms, particularly the younger solicitors, do not have access to debates about currency in legal issues. They come to our justice forum each year and welcome the opportunity to address some issues in an open manner. Being locked away in small rural legal practices, they do not get access to the wider, global debates nor get the opportunity to take part in those debates. We find that to be a good way of enlisting the local legal firms in debates on some of the current social and public policy issues around justice.

Ms WILLIAMS — I was also at the conference in Albury last week. I was not pleased and not surprised to hear that the conflict of interest issue is quite common in a lot of legal services in smaller towns Australia wide. It has come up again and again. You might have two private law firms in a small town. I have known of family law cases where, for instance, the male party goes to both those solicitors, sometimes with the intention, because they know the rules, of acting as a barrier to the other party — the woman, in most circumstances — seeking legal advice.

If we are visiting that town as an outreach service we can provide that woman with one other option; but often, particularly in contested family law matters, we can provide only one-off advice or appropriate referrals if legal aid is available. Private solicitors would have to be in another town, and that is assuming the woman can afford it and can travel to that other town. There is a range of issues that stem from the conflict of interest.

The CHAIRMAN — We have taken a bit of information on that.

Mr McINTOSH — We are aware of the issue, a number of people in Albury- Wodonga and elsewhere having raised it. However, nobody has put up a cogent solution to the problem. Have you thought about a solution? You mentioned going to another town or having Victoria Legal Aid fund it, but that is not really a systemic solution to a difficult problem that has been identified in a number of different regional centres. Ms WILLIAMS — On the one hand, part of the solution involves our service being able to go to that community. Even though it may be a limited resource, for that woman it is one resource. We have to reassess at each point how far we can assist that woman — or man, as the case may be. The reason for the lack of solutions is that it is very difficult to come up with any answer that will have a practical effect and help those people. Where there is a conflict of interest because he has accessed both firms in town, she might not have a vehicle or might have three children at home to look after. She might be on a farm where the other partner is keeping tabs on the odometer of the car. I have known cases where that happens. In those circumstance she is completely isolated. I do not know what the answer is. Perhaps it is more telephone access, but again there are issues if it involves any sort of violent relationship. If that sort of control is present, even ringing up a service can create difficulties for that woman. I think the lack of solutions is due to those sorts of situations being so hard.

Mr McINTOSH — Is this something we should be putting to the local law association? Perhaps there should be some rethinking of and a mechanism to relax the rules in relation to conflict of interest. Maybe the law society could come up with solutions to that. Being a lawyer myself, I am aware of the conflict of interest rules and adhere to them quite strictly. But there seems to be a practical problem as to whether it is done maliciously — mala fides — or because, as one lawyer identified, a person did not like the advice so went to a another firm of solicitors and got the same sort of advice. He went for a second opinion, but that immediately locked out an entire town.

It can be done for a bona fide reason, but perhaps we should be putting it to the law societies to come up with some solution to that conflict of interest problem. It is their rules that govern the behaviour of lawyers, and the conflict remains.

Ms HADDEN — You must find that your service is also cut out under the conflict of interest rules. It is not too hard to work out, and they do it in Ballarat with all the local firms. It is a very prevalent thing. The information is disseminated through very proactive men’s groups. They explain how to lock your partner out of the legal advice system in the town. It is very prevalent and needs to be addressed, but I do not know how we address it. I think the federal Attorney-General suggested that solicitors meet and talk, but you have problems there — you cannot disclose confidences and you cannot say you act for X, Y or Z. Perhaps there might need to be a central point, but then someone has to contact that central point and check whether that solicitor has seen that person or made that appointment. It is quite complex.

Ms WILLIAMS — It is.

Ms HADDEN — From my experience, it is getting worse.

Mr McINTOSH — We are aware of the problem; we do not need to rehash it. It is the solution that we should be grappling with. I might ask Mr Robinson about that when he comes in this afternoon.

Ms WILLIAMS — The other thing I saw in your list of suggested issues was pro bono schemes. In this area there is a lack of pro bono options for people. There are a lot of structured pro bono schemes available in metropolitan areas through the bar association and Voluntus, the Victorian Law Foundation and those sort of organisations. However, there is nothing structured in terms of a pro bono scheme in this area that I am aware of. As was pointed out before, the Tuesday night legal advice session is operated by volunteer solicitors. That is pro bono input from local firms. About ten local solicitors take part in that evening session.

The CHAIRMAN — Are you aware of how many local solicitors there are in town?

Ms WILLIAMS — No, not off the top of my head.

Mr McINTOSH — You were talking about the service provided by local lawyers; what was that again?

Ms WILLIAMS — The Tuesday night evening session we were talking about before still exists. That runs every Tuesday night.

Mr McINTOSH — Is that run through your organisation?

Ms WILLIAMS — It is. It takes place at our office, and we oversee the advice given and maintain the files. Many local lawyers — to their credit — offer a first consultation free. That assists our service a lot, because we can often say to clients when they are making appointments that if we cannot help them further they can see a solicitor for a free first consultation. I know — although I do not have any statistics to back this up — that quite a lot of free work is done even following that first free consultation. There might be a free letter or a couple of free phone calls; however, that can be done only to a certain point as well.

In terms of solutions for that problem, it is a difficult issue to address. However, to compensate for the lack of a structured pro bono scheme in this area and in all rural areas, Bruce and I have discussed the possibility of looking at some more innovative options. One is the creation of a trust, which could be supported by a combination of government funding and donations from local law firms. The trust could then be administered by a central body, whether it be a body like Community Connections or some other organisation, which could administer grants to people in need according to written guidelines. That might in some way address the lack of pro bono services in this area. That is just one option. We have not fleshed it out to a large extent, but we think it has potential.

Mr STENSHOLT — Does Portland have a duty solicitor scheme?

Ms WILLIAMS — There is a duty lawyer scheme in Warrnambool, Hamilton and Portland. To my knowledge it is available one day a week, on the police day, in each of those towns.

Mr STENSHOLT — On mention day.

Ms WILLIAMS — We do not take part in that. Our service does not do very much court representation, basically because of a lack of resources. We cannot justify spending all the time that can be spent sitting at court when the demand on the service just for information and referral is so high. Ms HADDEN — Do you represent applicants for intervention orders?

Ms WILLIAMS — No.

Ms HADDEN — If they come to you for advice it is advice only that they receive; where do they go then?

Ms WILLIAMS — We would usually refer women to the local women’s refuge, which is Emma House Domestic Violence Services. It has a scheme whereby a support worker can accompany women to court.

Ms HADDEN — That is not legal representation.

Ms WILLIAMS — No, it is not.

Ms HADDEN — My question was specific, because that support worker cannot represent.

Ms WILLIAMS — No, that is right.

Ms HADDEN — There seems to be a hole among community legal centres in that respect. Perhaps your specialist women’s service could or should pick up representation for intervention order applicants?

Ms WILLIAMS — Yes, it is a possibility. Again, we could not even consider doing that at the moment because of the lack of staff. However, we may consider doing that in the future. I know that similar systems operate in Ballarat and in a few of the other legal centres.

Ms HADDEN — No.

Ms WILLIAMS — No?

Ms HADDEN — No. We will not go into that.

The CHAIRMAN — We have 10 minutes left. I want to ensure that we can run through all the points that Padma has presented to you. Do you have any other comments you would like to make?

Mr du VERGIER — Community Connections as a multiservice provider also has some strong liaisons with the primary health care area. We are looking at the capacity of joining up with the telecommunications developments that the primary care area is offering; in other words, a microwave connection that the health people have established with Vicnet. That will give us capacity to develop voice, data and videoconferencing from Melbourne all the way to the South Australian border at a local-call cost structure. We will be part of that network. We think that those sorts of developments will give us opportunities to develop some online capacity for a legal program in south-western rural Victoria. However, the community legal centres as such do not have access to sufficient resources to fund the telecommunications option. Our community legal centre is therefore trading on the cross-subsidies that come via an agency of our size, because there are other programs, and our agency will take advantage of those telecommunications developments. We have done a few things: we have set up a contact call centre with a 1300 number; we have developed a web site, and we are looking at the email possibilities that our small community legal centre web site might be able to offer. How much advice and referral we can do through an email process we are not sure, but we are going to have a look at it. However, we want to push that further to take up some of the developments that have been referred already coming out of places like Portland, Hamilton, Warrnambool, Camperdown and Colac. If we can take advantage of the online developments that will give us cheap communication costs, then we might have an opportunity to provide an online service within a reasonable cost structure.

The CHAIRMAN — What sort of service online?

Mr du VERGIER — Essentially it would be advice. It could be advice and referral. Simple advice and referral is available only face -to -face at the moment; we believe there is a capacity for advice and referral online from places out of Warrnambool to cover the south-west.

The CHAIRMAN — Through video or email linkage?

Mr du VERGIER — Through email, initially. We would like to go the video way and we would look at that for the whole range of services, not just the legal program. However, that is the future.

Mr STENSHOLT — Have you had any discussions with the various tertiary organisations throughout the district about whether they have any capacity for videoconferencing or microwave connections, because you have the various TAFE institutes here?

Mr du VERGIER — We are aware of the TAFE connection, but we are throwing our lot in with the health service system, because we run a few primary care programs so we are going to trade on that connection. The spin-off will be that the legal program will be part of whatever evolves from that association. The point I make is that it is a cross-subsidy effort that the community centre is trading on.

The CHAIRMAN — Are you aware of any other online advice services operating?

Mr du VERGIER — In the community legal centre area?

The CHAIRMAN — Yes.

Mr du VERGIER — We are aware of what the Federation of Community Legal Centres is doing with Networking the Nation; it is hoping to get some funding to establish some practice there. We are also aware that the federal Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, is talking about a nationwide online referral service for rural and regional Australia. We are intrigued to know what that will mean for places like south-western Victoria and any other part of rural Victoria. Other agencies are looking at that: the two I mentioned earlier, Mallee Family Care and Upper Murray Family Care, are looking at what that might look like when that hits the ground and what impact that will have on our program. If there is a nationwide rural and regional online service, what impact is that going to have on our services?

Ms HADDEN — Can I ask what you the relationship is with the local law association? Do you have a good working relationship? Do you meet regularly?

Ms WILLIAMS — No, we do not meet regularly. We do our best to keep informed about issues we are working on — law reform issues, projects that are coming up, and the justice forum, that sort of thing — but, no, we do not have regular meetings with them.

Ms HADDEN — Are the solicitors in the legal centre members of the law association?

Ms WILLIAMS — No. The country law association?

Ms HADDEN — Yes.

Ms WILLIAMS — No.

Mr du VERGIER — The Western District Law Association?

Ms HADDEN — Yes.

Mr du VERGIER — No, we do not have membership of it.

Mr McINTOSH — You probably cannot afford it.

Ms RAMAN — Could you tell the committee about your Who Gets the Farm project?

Ms WILLIAMS — I have a copy of that for you. Just briefly, the Who Gets the Farm project is in its third year. It is funded by the Victorian Women’s Trust to investigate and explore issues around how women fare in terms of succession planning, what level of input they have into planning for the future of the family farm, and what sort of impact major family events have on women’s input. Say if there is a major debt and the farm is no longer viable, or if there is a marriage separation, it examines how those things affect a woman’s rights under the Family Law Act in terms of a property settlement.

The Victorian Women’s Trust initially funded us to produce an awareness-raising poster. We distributed that as far and wide as we could. It was reported at the conference last week that copies of it had been received in the Northern Territory. It is designed as a generic poster; it sets out the issues that women in focus groups have told us about, and it has our 1800 number for people to access our service. It also has room for people to include their local services. I do not want to take up too much time telling you more about that, but basically we are now working with the Department of Natural Resources and Environment and also the to develop a draft workbook that will be piloted with six farm families to work through succession planning issues. I see my main input into that workbook as the inclusion of those gender issues.

If the pilot is successful, the workbook will be called Who Gets The Dairy Farm Workbook, and it will then become the workbook of a mainstream government department. The project is now winding up. That is one example of the type of work we do with the women’s funding. It is very much directed to global issues, not just issues in south-western Victoria. We have discovered that those issues around women’s succession planning are universal issues.

Ms HADDEN — On that point, have you also addressed the proposed amendments going through the federal Parliament at the moment in relation to proposed prenuptial agreements?

Ms WILLIAMS — Not so much directly in relation to this project, no. It has come up, but I think that is something we can focus on as a separate issue.

Ms HADDEN — It is going to have a huge impact on this pilot.

Ms WILLIAMS — Yes.

The CHAIRMAN — What would you like to see as the outcomes of our review? What would you like us to recommend that might be of benefit to your organisation?

Ms WILLIAMS — One fairly obvious one, from what we have said about levels of funding and the discrepancies that exist between newly established and long- established centres, is to recognise and acknowledge that the discrepancies have occurred and they need to be redressed urgently in some shape or form.

Ms HADDEN — Has your funding body made those representations to federal government?

Ms WILLIAMS — We are working with the Federation of Community Legal Centres to address that. Indeed, we will be putting in our own representations to bring that issue forward.

Mr du VERGIER — An outcome that I hope will be reached from this process will be a view that planning for access to legal services should be approached holistically. A lot is happening with an apparent lack of planning. The federal government has announced the establishment of children’s contact services. We are not within cooee of one of those; Geelong and Ballarat and the 20 000 people in between will benefit from those. Last night I heard a story about children being dropped off at McDonalds and left there, and the police having to be called in to find the non-custodial and custodial parents of those children. That is happening in rural and regional Victoria, where we do not have access to children’s contact centres. A range of other federal and state government support services initiatives are being talked about, but they are not available in rural Victoria. The Family Law court issue is a fairly important one for us, particularly the counselling and support mediation services that are part of that court system. We do not have access to those services in this part of Victoria.

What I would like to see from the review is some notice being given in the next planning stage to bringing some of the service systems into what I call a social model of community legal services which would give us an understanding of what is an optimum level of service delivery and access to rural and regional parts of Victoria and which had some inclusiveness of all the services currently being provided. It seems to me that there is a fair degree of disjointedness in the way services hit the ground. They are around and about, but they hit the ground in quite different ways around Victoria and Australia. I find the lack of integration and collaboration between federal, state and local government on how you model a legal social service rather frustrating. We have a community legal centre and a children’s contact centre in Mount Gambier, an hour from Portland, but they will not come over the border. There are 200 000 people on this side of the border who do not have access to those resources. I find that bewildering when we are trying to do something about citizens’ needs in rural and regional settings. It may be an argument for regional, federal and state governments to examine their collective relationship. Saying that is a bit of an anathema to you, but I am trying to identify what I call the broad issue of planning in rural and regional Australia.

Mr McINTOSH — What about the structure of the organisation? I see that it is a public company: is there any reason why you have adopted that rather than just being an incorporated association?

Mr du VERGIER — We were an incorporated association, but we decided that we needed a greater level of accountability and reckoning. We needed a smoother governing structure to respond to the privatisation policies and principles of government, so we decided to move from an incorporated association to a company limited by guarantee and take on our accountability with the Australian Securities Commission.

Mr McINTOSH — How many directors do you have?

Mr du VERGIER — We have five directors and a company membership of about 20.

Mr McINTOSH — Who are the directors?

Mr du VERGIER — People are drawn from the communities of Hamilton, Portland and Warrnambool. We are a regional agency.

Mr McINTOSH — I understand that. Are they lawyers?

Mr du VERGIER — We have had one lawyer. There is a range of people from different professions and interest groups. We have about 400 volunteers who support our agency.

Mr McINTOSH — What about the members? Are there any lawyers? Mr du VERGIER — There is one lawyer in the membership, a longstanding member from Hamilton, and a range of people from different interest groups.

Ms WILLIAMS — We have recently developed a community reference group specific to the legal centre, and those people are made up of local practitioners, rural counsellors and volunteers.

Ms HADDEN — Is that only in Warrnambool?

Ms WILLIAMS — It is supposed to be regional, so we have agreed to travel. Some of those members are based in Hamilton, so we will probably alternate.

There are more issues that we would have liked to cover today, so we will try to include them in the more detailed submission.

Ms HADDEN — Are you covered by professional indemnity insurance?

Ms WILLIAMS — Yes.

Ms HADDEN — Individually?

Ms WILLIAMS — No. The way that is structured, and has been since I have worked in the legal centre, is that it is organised through the Federation of Community Legal Centres so each individual centre does not go through that process on its own. They work out the level of premium that each centre needs to pay, usually according to how much and the type of case work they do.

The CHAIRMAN — Time has proved to be elusive. Thank you for your comments, which have been most helpful. I am sure we will be in further contact.

Witnesses withdrew.