Meeting the needs of diverse clients

Across our criminal, family and civil law practice areas, we have a number of specialised services for clients experiencing acute disadvantage. Many of our other specialist services also target diverse clients but do not support them exclusively.

Refugee Service

The Legal Aid NSW Refugee Service provides legal advice, assistance and representation, and community legal education and outreach to refugees in NSW.

Immigration Service

The Immigration Service provides legal advice, assistance and representation for people seeking asylum in Australia, victims of family violence, and people who have had their visa cancelled or experienced a legal error in an earlier migration decision. We support clients affected by trauma, including those affected by family violence from their sponsoring former partner and refugees with a reasonable fear of persecution in their home countries, to attain a permanent visa.

Mental Health Advocacy Service

The Mental Health Advocacy Service assists people appearing before the Mental Health Review Tribunal, the Guardianship Division of the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal, or who have been kept in a hospital under the Mental Health Act 2007 (NSW). Staff also offer advice on related matters such as financial management orders and community treatment orders.

Pathway to Community Project

The Pathway to Community Project provides targeted early intervention services to people with disabilities in closed environments (including hospitals, forensic facilities and in custody) where National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) issues are affecting their transition to the least restrictive possible environment.

Transitioning clients back to their communities

An Aboriginal man from western NSW had been a forensic patient in a high-security unit (HSU) for 10 years. While in the HSU, social workers made an NDIS access request for him, which was unsuccessful. 

The project team assisted him in making a new access request and to seek a review of the request, helping him to get the reports he needed to show he met the access criteria. He was accepted onto the NDIS and then transitioned to a medium security unit (MSU), where he accessed the community and visited his family with support. The team will keep working with our client to advocate for the support he needs to eventually transition fully into the community.

Our Refugee Service provides statewide legal advice and assistance to newly arrived refugees in all civil and family law matters, and procedural advice in some criminal matters such as domestic violence.

Noting that existing publications were not meeting community needs, the Refugee Service launched a bilingual children’s storybook called The Ribbon this year to broaden awareness of their service among women and children. The book is about a refugee child migrating to Australia and interweaves simple legal problems with an age-appropriate storyline. It directs the reader to the Refugee Service for legal help and is available in four languages.

The Ribbon and the Refugee Service were featured in an interview on Radio National’s Law Report and in the Law Society Journal in June 2023.

In 2022–23, we continued our longstanding cooperation with other justice stakeholders to support the work of the Justice Advocacy Service (JAS). The Intellectual Disability Rights Service delivers JAS, a service available across NSW to support young people and adults with cognitive impairment who are in contact with the NSW criminal justice system. Victims, witnesses, suspects and defendants can all access help from JAS to exercise their rights and fully participate in the process.

In July 2022, JAS expanded its functions to include a court-based diversion service in six NSW local courts: Downing Centre, Parramatta, Blacktown, Penrith, Gosford and Lismore. The primary goal was to promote diversion of eligible defendants under the Mental Health and Cognitive Impairment Forensic Provisions Act 2020 (NSW) and assist with access to the NDIS and other community support services.

We continued our role as a member of the JAS Working Group, working with JAS and the Department of Communities and Justice to oversee the implementation and delivery of the diversion service. We also partnered with the Aboriginal Legal Service (NSW/ACT) to contribute content to JAS court support volunteer training days and participated in an independent evaluation of the service.

Coronial inquest into 11-year-old’s death recommends legal changes

The Legal Aid NSW Children’s Civil Law Service represented the mother of an 11-year-old who died while in respite care. Her child had been diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay.

After a two-week hearing, the Deputy State Corner, Harriet Grahame, found that the young person’s death occurred because he was able to abscond through an unlocked window and climb over an inadequate fence. He was struck and killed by a train around 30 minutes after running from the property. The Coroner made recommendations about changes to the law, including bringing respite care into line with substitute residential care. She also recommended limiting the care that the provider in question can offer people under 16 and the delivery of training for staff about how to raise the alarm when risks are identified.

In January 2023, our National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) Team made four broad recommendations to the NDIS review for improving the experience of participants and prospective participants navigating the NDIS. As well as making recommendations about access to the scheme and fairer decision-making, we recommended a purpose-built consumer dispute resolution body. This body would have powers to involve participants, providers and the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) to make decisions binding on providers and to stay court enforcement of debts against participants.

NDIS win for 12-year-old client

Our NDIS Appeals service represented a client born with a rare genetic disorder affecting his height, behaviour, learning, handwriting and fine motor skills before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal . The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) claimed he did not meet the requirements to access the NDIS because his problems with behaviour, learning, handwriting and fine motor skills were not permanent. Our NDIS Team drafted a statement with his mother and obtained evidence from a geneticist about the cause of his learning and behavioural difficulties and a psychologist about his behaviour. The NDIA conceded that he met the early intervention requirements to access the NDIS. This client now has therapy and social support as he goes through his first year of high school.

Over the last year, our Social Security Team worked with National Legal Aid to contribute to a review of the Disability Support Pension Impairment Tables in response to a Department of Social Services consultation.

The team made recommendations about prescriptive requirements regarding the diagnosis of mental health conditions, the definition of ‘treated’ and ‘stabilised’, and the operation of multiple impairment tables, including lower limb function. New tables were introduced in April 2023, incorporating several of our suggestions.

Following a hiatus over the COVID-19 period, the Early Intervention Unit was very pleased to return to providing in-person outreach services at Muslim Women Australia (MWA) in Lakemba in May 2023.

At the request of our colleagues at MWA, our in-person services resumed at the first available opportunity after the conclusion of Ramadan, and we were pleased to have a full day of client bookings for our first day of appointments.

Assisting a woman trapped in coercive control and spiritual abuse

We assisted a woman who has experienced significant family violence during her relationship with her husband. She was taken to her country of origin with her three young children for what she believed was a holiday to see family. While in this country, her husband, his childhood religious leader and the paternal family met with her and told her that she was “mentally unstable”. Her husband returned to Australia with her passport, the children’s passports and the children. She was unaware that her husband had secretly married two other women and had another child with one of them. Her husband alleged that she had borderline personality disorder, insisted she obtain a psychological assessment overseas and told his friends and community that she had abandoned him and the children.

We provided advice and assisted our client to return to Australia secretly. We prepared urgent court documents and had interim orders made to have her children returned to her primary care and allow her exclusive occupancy of the family home in Australia. We are also assisting her in obtaining a religious divorce so that she can spiritually heal from the relationship.