In times of national hardship, we can’t leave women and children in the regions behind.

The 2026-27 Federal Budget does not do enough to address the urgent need for investment in safety and justice for victim-survivors of domestic violence in regional Australia. 

We welcome the additional investment in Aboriginal community-controlled organisations to improve safety for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children experiencing violence. We look forward to seeing the details of this package, including the communities and specific services it will benefit. 

Community legal centres’ largest area of work is supporting victim-survivors of domestic and family violence. In rural and remote areas, this makes up 75% of our work. Chronic under-funding and high levels of need are forcing community legal centres to turn away over 400 victim-survivors a day. 

Over 80% of Family Court matters involve family violence, but too many victim-survivors face the family law system without the community legal help they need, especially in regional and remote areas.  

We have been calling for urgent targeted investment of $15.8 million in regional and remote community legal centre family violence and family law services.  

The Government’s failure to deliver this will mean more family law matters escalating into an already over-stretched Family Court system, and more women and children forced to stay in violent relationships without help. 

In regional and remote areas, many of our clients don’t have reliable access to transport, internet, or mobile phones. Often, the only way people can access support is by community lawyers and social workers driving long distances to meet them in person.  

Now, the fuel crisis is forcing community legal centres to make impossible decisions about how often and how far they can drive to reach people who need help to stay safe.  

Before the budget, we told the Federal Government our sector urgently needed an $11.9m investment in 2025-26 to offset the rising cost of fuel and limit the impact of the fuel crisis on people’s access to justice and safety. It did not deliver. 

Economic hard times drive higher rates of family violence and other legal problems. Community legal centres have begun seeing spikes in domestic violence, in acute financial stress, and in other flow-on legal problems. This is likely to increase further in coming months. More people will need our support, right when we have less capacity to help. 

We acknowledge the important steps the Federal Government has taken to address intergenerational inequality through tax and trust reform, but these kinds of measures must be supported by investment in a strong, stable safety net of community supports. 

In uncertain and difficult times, it’s more important than ever that people doing it toughest can access the frontline services they rely on to access safety and justice. Difficult economic times mean hard choices for governments, but victim-survivors of violence should never be held responsible for balancing government budgets.