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Legal centre demands Legal Aid hand over confidential documents
Frustrated with Legal Aid NSW for an unsuccessful program involving community legal centres, the Marrickville Legal Centre has fought to access confidential information about it.
Naomi Neilson
From July 2019, Marrickville Legal Centre (MLC) participated as the lead agency in the Migrant Employee Legal Services (MELS) program in collaboration with community legal groups, Inner City Legal Centre, Redfern Legal Centre, and the Kingsford Legal Centre.
Despite it intending to be a three-year project, the Attorney-General – who provided funding and administration – canned it in mid-2021.
Aggrieved with the termination, its exclusion from a similar project on unspent funds, the refusal of certain grant applications, and a financial review of its operations, MLC applied to access information relating to MELS and funding of community legal centres.
When Legal Aid refused, in collaboration with the University of UNSW, MLC turned to the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
It submitted the public interest considerations against disclosure “do not outweigh public interest considerations in favour of disclosure”.
According to the tribunal, the withheld material contains information about the finances of the community legal centres that participated in MELS, advice from Legal Aid’s in-house counsel, and information shared with the Attorney-General about the project.
The tribunal’s principal member, Kate Robinson, was satisfied the withheld material would promote discussion of public affairs, enhance government accountability, contribute to “positive and informed debate” on legal funding, and would reasonably be expected to “provide oversight on the expenditure of public funds”.
However, Robinson was also satisfied Legal Aid NSW had established the public interest considerations against the disclosure of the withheld material “outweigh the public interest considerations in favour of disclosure for each document of the withheld information”.
“I am therefore satisfied that the first respondent has established that there is an overriding public interest against the disclosure of the withheld information,” Robinson said.
The case is Marrickville Legal Centre v Legal Aid NSW [2024] NSWCATAD 378.
Naomi Neilson
Naomi Neilson is a senior journalist with a focus on court reporting for Lawyers Weekly.
You can email Naomi at:
