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The current state of legal assistance funding is a challenge to the rule of law, writes Tania Wolff.
Law Week is a moment to reflect on something most Australians take for granted: that if your rights are threatened, you can enforce them. That if the state acts against you, you can fight back. That if a child’s safety or wellbeing is at risk in a family law dispute, someone independent will speak for them in court. These are not abstract ideals. They are the practical architecture of a democratic society – and they depend, more than we acknowledge, on the lawyer in the room.
Last week’s federal budget left most of the overstretched lawyers actually delivering grants of aid to vulnerable people without one additional dollar of support. Recent Access to Justice Partnership funding also left them dry. They are absorbing a gap that grows wider every year, doing work that costs them more than they are paid for it, because they have not yet been able to bring themselves to walk away.
Lawyers are not simply service providers. They are bound by rules that have developed over centuries – duties that are personal, that cannot be delegated. They are officers of the court. They must not mislead. They must act with competence and candour. They must bring genuine legal knowledge and judgement to every matter. They must put the interests of justice above their own, and sometimes above the immediate wishes of their client.
These obligations are not bureaucratic formalities. They are what make legal representation meaningful – and what gives people confidence in the rule of law itself.
The popular image of the lawyer – depicted in Hollywood drama and the butt of jokes as old as the profession itself – rarely captures the reality I encounter every day: lawyers who are principled professionals doing the best for their clients – work that is often long, demanding and emotionally taxing.
Beyond that work, thousands give so much more to pro bono work and to causes that will never make the news. And thousands across this country have quietly persisted, year after year, in subsidising a public legal assistance infrastructure that governments have never adequately funded – absorbing the gap between what legal aid pays and what the work actually costs, because they believe that access to justice should not depend on the size of your bank account. That ethic of service is one of the great unacknowledged contributions to Australian civic life.
Legal aid commissions, community legal centres, and specialist legal assistance services are the only avenues through which vulnerable Australians receive over a million legal services each year. That system is under serious and compounding strain. Contracting budgets mean restricting services in ways that will leave many vulnerable Australians without access to representation in matters that determine the shape of their lives.
The situation facing Independent Children’s Lawyers – appointed by family courts to represent children’s interests – has reached a crisis point. This vital work has never been adequately funded. A provision in the Family Law Act providing for this essential public service means nothing if there is no one to fill it.
Into this landscape comes the promise of artificial intelligence – and with it, the suggestion that technology can substitute for the proper funding of legal services. The legal profession is not dismissing AI. Significant innovation is already underway across the profession. Technology can help lawyers serve clients better. But the idea that AI can replace the funded, qualified, ethically accountable lawyer is not a serious policy position. It is a way of avoiding one.
We must be honest about what AI cannot do. It cannot owe a duty to the court. It cannot exercise the judgement to know when it is wrong – and it is sometimes dangerously wrong. It has no professional indemnity, no accountability, and no ethical obligations. It cannot sit with a traumatised child and build the trust needed to bring that child’s voice into a courtroom. It can produce an answer that sounds like legal advice and carries none of the protections that make legal advice safe to rely on.
AI can make a funded lawyer more effective. It cannot replace one. And it must not become the justification for governments to avoid the harder question of whether essential public legal services are properly resourced.
Law Week is a fitting moment to ask whether, for the most vulnerable Australians, there is actually a lawyer in the room – and to commit to ensuring there is.
Tania Wolff is the president of the Law Council of Australia.
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