Evidence to action: informing direction for the Second Action Plan
Submission Date: 18 August 2026
The Second Action Plan is an important opportunity to translate the commitments of the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children into sustained, coordinated and measurable improvements in safety, justice and recovery.
The central premiss of this submission is that the ambitions of the National Plan cannot be realised without properly funded legal assistance. Timely, safe and continuing access to legal assistance is not incidental to a victim-survivor’s safety and recovery—it is fundamental to it, underpinning a person’s capacity to make informed choices, hold perpetrators to account, and participate meaningfully in the justice system.
Access to legal assistance, particularly representation, is currently uneven and, in critical respects, deteriorating. In particular, Independent Children’s Lawyers (ICL), whose role in safeguarding children’s safety and voice in family law proceedings is well established, are operating in a program at crisis point: demand continues to outstrip funded supply, private practitioners are declining grants of aid that have never covered the cost of the work, and Legal Aid Commissions are being forced to further restrict eligibility leading to children going unrepresented and matters being delayed.
Comparable pressures affect other existing programs to support victim-survivors such as the Family Violence and Cross-examination of Parties Scheme, the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia’s Lighthouse risk-screening program, and the legal assistance sector more broadly, where funding under the National Access to Justice Partnership falls well short of legal need and demand—and short of the levels identified as necessary by the Independent Review of the National Legal Assistance Partnership.
This submission further recognises that these challenges are magnified for people in regional, rural and remote (RRR) communities, and for First Nations women and children, for whom access to safe, culturally appropriate legal assistance too often depends on where a person lives rather than what they need: a “postcode lottery” that the Second Action Plan has the opportunity to address.
This submission emphasises that existing and new initiatives can only deliver their full benefit if they are properly funded on an ongoing basis, implemented consistently across jurisdictions and locations, and evaluated against clear measures of safety, access to justice and system performance. It primarily calls for:
- sustainable legal-assistance funding, including representation, across the sector;
- urgent stabilisation of the ICL and Cross-Examination of Parties Schemes;
- ongoing funding and broader access to established effective family law safety measures; and
- equitable access to safety measures for RRR, and disproportionately affected communities.
Last Updated on 18/08/2026
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