Riverland Community Legal Service

Mr WHETSTONE (Chaffey) (14:53): Supplementary, sir: Attorney, the South Australian Legal Services Commission has deemed the Riverland the most disadvantaged region in South Australia. You have installed one visit per week to the Riverland for 40 face-to-face consultations. Do you think that's appropriate?

The Hon. J.M. Rankine interjecting:

The SPEAKER: I call the member for Wright to order.

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Justice Reform, Minister for Planning, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for Child Protection Reform, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for Consumer and Business Services, Minister for the City of Adelaide) (14:53): The interesting part of that question was 'I have initiated or installed one visit per week'. Wrong: Senator Brandis has initiated one visit per week.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. J.R. RAU: No, Senator Brandis is the one who decided to disrupt the arrangements for the delivery of legal services, not me. As far as I was concerned, I was perfectly happy to leave things as they were. I did not disturb them: Senator Brandis did.

In a very common stunt that we see—and this is regarded in some commonwealth circles as being mildly humorous—what you do is you take money away from a service that you, the commonwealth, have been funding in the states, and then to make it really interesting you then say to the state, 'You see that mess over there. Here's 20¢ for you to go and sort it out.' That's exactly what they have done to us. What they have done is that they have gone up to the big bouncy castle with 'legal services' written on it, they have pulled the plug out and they have handed us a bike pump and said, 'Off you go, try to pump the damn thing back up again.'

Well, we are doing our best, But, notwithstanding the fact that legal services have been rudely and unnecessarily disrupted by commonwealth meanness, notwithstanding that, I come back to the point I made before: the services, the face-to-face services in the Riverland and the face-to-face services in the South-East will be demand driven. And if there is anything that I can do to assist those service providers in cooperation with local government in the South-East or in the Riverland, I have made it clear to the mayors and the CEOs from those areas that all they need to do is to discuss it with me.

In fact, after our last meeting, we have agreed to reconvene before the end of the year to do a bit of a catch-up on how things are going, and they are going to say to me what they think we can do to help them, and they are going to tell me what they think they can do to help us. I actually take my hat off to the local government authorities in the Riverland and the South-East because they have been trying to work in a cooperative fashion with the state government to get the best value out of a very, very meagre deal that was imposed on both of us by the commonwealth in their budget: not this one just gone, the one before.