The ACT is facing a triple-play of financial squeezes that could threaten the efficient operation of its criminal-justice system before the financial year is out.

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The first squeeze is well known. The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) has been unusually public in its pleadings for funds, with its annual report and various other statements receiving megaphonic treatment with the relatively recent engagement of a media director.

While loudest, most in the Canberra legal community see the DPP's position as easily the least worst of the public sector players; some believe it is not even disadvantaged.

The second squeeze is far less public, but, in the view of many, including the president of the ACT Bar Association, Prue Bindon, and the chair of its criminal law committee, Anthony Williamson, SC, far more important.

Legal Aid ACT is being starved by both its funders - the ACT and Commonwealth governments - who can of course, in the time-honoured political and bureaucratic tradition, say the responsibility is the other's.

While the DPP has been advertising for staff, Legal Aid (LA) is within months of having to shed the practitioners who look after the most vulnerable and damaged in our community, the true measure of the civilisation of a society. Indeed, the grants currently extended to those vulnerable people will be fewer, leaving some to fend for themselves.

I'm told that, each time LA has a vacancy, it is reviewing positions with the aim of reducing staff.

"This will become critical next financial year," says one well-placed source. "The major issue will be the necessary cutback of grants of legal assistance."

The Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS), which operates in the ACT and across the border in NSW as well, is in the same critical-care ward.

The problem appears to be that the "forever" ACT Labor government (which this year clocks up a quarter-century in power) views Legal Aid and the ALS not as the hard-working and committed band of litigators that they are but as an equal of Community Legal Centres (CLCs) and the Women's Legal Centre (WLC). I understand the WLC has of the order of 50 staff, who, like those at the CLCs, rarely see the inside of a courtroom.

Ms Bindon said fee scales for criminal-law Legal Aid briefs had remained........

© Canberra Times