Case Explained: The cruelty of Northern Territory’s Legal Aid cuts – Legal Perspective

More than four months after Legal Aid NT savagely cut its criminal law representation services, citing a budgetary shortfall, the Northern Territory’s attorney-general refuses to acknowledge that the service cuts are occurring at all, or that the Country Liberal Party has effectively cut overall funding to its legal aid agency.

Since November 17, legal aid has been denied to people in the Northern Territory who are not in custody, including children. Aid has also been denied to people in custody if their application is considered after Legal Aid NT has spent a monthly dollar cap, which was reached by February 10 and March 12 in those months. It is unknown how many people are now representing themselves in court.

When she announced those service cuts, the CLP’s hand-picked Legal Aid NT director, Catherine Voumard, who was appointed despite not being a recommended candidate following two recruitment rounds, and despite having no prior executive or managerial experience, cited a projected “end of financial year deficit” for 2025/26. That came as a surprise. Just six months earlier, the Territory’s attorney-general, Marie-Clare Boothby, had announced an additional $5.5 million annually for the agency as part of its first-ever multi-year agreement. The money was promised to deliver “certainty and a stronger future for Legal Aid NT”.

Since then, neither Voumard, Boothby nor Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro has provided any explanation for why Legal Aid NT introduced deep cuts to its services so soon after what Boothby continues to claim was an 87 per cent increase in its “baseline” funding.

The cuts apply to all non-Indigenous people charged with criminal offences and who cannot afford a lawyer, as well as First Nations people whose legal interests conflict with those of existing clients of the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA).

On March 11 in parliament’s Question Time, the independent member for Johnston, Justine Davis, asked Boothby to acknowledge the service cuts and to table “year-by-year funding provided by the Northern Territory government to Legal Aid NT over the past five years, including baseline funding and top-up funding”.

In response, Boothby declared: “Legal Aid has new leadership and new increased funding. Now my expectation is that it will deliver those services for Territorians. That is simple. It is my expectation, and it is what is happening.”

That is not the case.

Davis again asked Boothby to table the dollar amounts that the NT government has provided each year to Legal Aid NT. “I do not have it on me to table,” she replied. “But if we go back and look online, at the budget papers, at the Estimates papers – you ask me every time. It is everywhere.”

Again, it is not.

Government budget papers report only aggregate dollar amounts allocated for a range of agencies and services, including Legal Aid NT. They also include federal funding via the National Access to Justice Partnership (NAJP). Legal Aid NT reports only total grant income from both governments. Neither the agency nor the Territory government publishes the dollar amounts provided to it each year by that government. Requests for this information have gone unanswered.

It is not only criminal defendants and lawyers who are being kept in the dark. The Territory’s taxpayers are not privy to what extent their government funds Legal Aid NT. While Canberra supplies just over a third of its annual revenue through the NAJP, Legal Aid NT can only use its Territory government funding to pay for the legal representation of defendants who are charged with offences under Territory legislation – which is most defendants.

The Saturday Paper has requested a range of data from Boothby’s office, Voumard, the department of the attorney-general and Legal Aid NT. None of those requests has been answered, despite repeated follow-ups. Labor’s shadow attorney-general, Chansey Paech, has put written questions on notice but says he is yet to receive a response.

The Saturday Paper understands that Legal Aid NT’s baseline funding from the Territory government is in the order of between $6 million and $7 million a year.

Former Legal Aid NT commissioner Ali Nur – who resigned from the agency’s board last year, after nine years, in protest following Boothby’s appointment of Voumard as director – told The Saturday Paper that the additional funding the CLP announced last May merely covered the agency’s debts.

Nur said chronic underfunding by all previous governments, including Labor between 2016 and 2024, had seen the agency approach “funding cliffs” every year, forcing it to continually request top-up payments.

“Everyone acknowledges that base funding is inadequate,” Nur told The Saturday Paper. “Sometimes we would secure an agreement from Treasury, via the attorney-general’s department, to bail us out. Sometimes we couldn’t, and then we were forced to cut services.”

There have been multiple short-term cuts to legal aid services during the past decade, mainly to remote or “bush” courts.

Until recently, Legal Aid NT was able to be reimbursed with Treasury “advances” for the cost of what are known as “expensive criminal cases”: single cases that run up very high bills, such as multi-week jury trials involving senior or interstate counsel. Reimbursing the agency for the cost of these very expensive outlier cases doesn’t require it to pay for them out of its baseline funding.

When he was attorney-general in the Labor government that lost power in August 2024, Paech increased the dollar threshold for what was considered an “expensive case” from $30,000 to $100,000, effectively forcing the agency to pay for many more expensive cases out of its baseline funding.

“This was done in response to the growing number of complex, high-demand and high-profile cases,” Paech told The Saturday Paper in response to questions. “It’s also important to note that the threshold had not been increased for some time, and I felt it needed to better reflect the current environment and case complexity.”

The Saturday Paper has been told by multiple sources that there is currently no agreement between the Territory government and Legal Aid NT to reimburse any of its expensive cases. A former Legal Aid NT employee told The Saturday Paper that the CLP’s additional baseline funding last May was delivered with a caution that no further top-up or reimbursement funding would be provided, including for expensive criminal cases.

If this is the case, it would likely mean the CLP has effectively lowered Legal Aid NT’s overall funding and that would explain the current service cuts. The Saturday Paper understands the absence of an agreement to reimburse expensive cases is what led to an earlier cut to services in October 2024. Services were then restored in December following a one-off top-up payment by the CLP. Neither Voumard or her agency, nor Boothby and her office or her department, has responded to The Saturday Paper’s requests to confirm or deny this.

“Allowing NT Legal Aid to seek reimbursement was the most practical and responsible operational approach,” Paech told The Saturday Paper. “The number, complexity and profile of cases cannot be accurately predicted year to year.”

When services were cut in November, Chief Minister Finocchiaro cited the “huge additional burden” caused by conflict referrals flowing to Legal Aid NT from NAAJA. “What we want,” she told ABC Radio, “is money from NAAJA to Legal Aid to pay for their customers at Legal Aid.”

NAAJA is almost entirely Commonwealth-funded. In short, Finocchiaro wants Canberra, not Darwin, to pay for the representation of Aboriginal defendants. The Saturday Paper understands there is no prospect of this.

Neither Finocchiaro, Boothby nor Voumard have provided any data to substantiate the claim that the agency’s budget is straining under the weight of referrals from NAAJA. It is a claim NAAJA’s chief executive, Ben Grimes, has rejected.

The Northern Territory’s population is by far the most disadvantaged in Australia. Before the current service cuts, the NT approved the most applications for legal aid per capita, yet also had the most stringent financial means test of all legal aid agencies. Essentially, the Territory offers legal support only to the poorest of people – and there are still more such cases per capita than anywhere else.

Since forming government in August 2024, the CLP has pursued a law-and-order agenda and has increased funding for police, prosecutors, courts and prisons. The CLP’s first budget last May allocated $126 million in new funding to the Department of Corrections, which runs the NT’s prisons and youth detention centres, for 2025/26 alone. The total Corrections budget for 2025/26 was almost $494.7 million, or more than 4 per cent of the Territory’s entire operating budget. These figures dwarf what would be required for Legal Aid NT to resume its core services.

“They want to be tough on crime but they don’t want to pay the bill,” a former Legal Aid NT commissioner told The Saturday Paper.

Incongruously, Boothby wrote to lawyers in February to “acknowledge the contribution of the entire legal profession … to keep the system moving”. She said her government was “continuing work to streamline criminal procedure in the Local Court” and reduce delays.

“When people do not have lawyers, matters take longer, not less time,” barrister Beth Wild, who is president of the Criminal Lawyers Association of the Northern Territory, told The Saturday Paper. “Delays worsen for everyone – including victims.”

The service cuts may lead to other consequences for victims. In 1992, the High Court held that criminal courts are obliged to stay, or pause, the prosecution of defendants charged with serious offences who are not legally represented through no fault of their own. The Saturday Paper understands that a number of stay applications have been made on behalf of unrepresented defendants this year. The Court of Criminal Appeal is scheduled to consider to what extent that High Court decision applies to the present situation in the NT.

If stays are approved, unrepresented defendants may be discharged from bail and from all obligations to courts until such time as legal aid services are restored. It is unlikely that Boothby or the CLP will relish that prospect.

Russell Marks is employed by a law firm that accepts referrals from both Legal Aid NT and NAAJA, and from NT government departments. Any views expressed in the article are the author’s and not necessarily the firm’s.