The Coalition’s planned cuts to indigenous legal services will lead to increased prison costs and a shift in demand to already stretched legal aid bodies, critics have argued.
The Coalition plans to cut $42 million from the Indigenous Policy Reform Program, which funds legal services for indigenous people across Australia, over the next four years.
It represents almost a 20 per cent drop in funding. “It’s not a huge amount of money in the overall scheme of things [but] it will have huge impacts on a highly specialised service,” said the president of the Australian Lawyers Alliance (ALA), Geraldine Collins.
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