LAUSR

In recent times, modern governments in England and Wales and Australia have sought to curtail a legal aid budget, which they believe to be spiralling out of control. This has led to large-scale cuts in publicly funded legal assistance – with the aim of making significant financial savings. This excellent book is principally concerned with whether these savings objectives have been met and at what price. Editors Flynn and Hodgson have brought together an impressive and varied range of contributing authors made up of academics, practitioners and advocates (across both jurisdictions) to provide a comparative analysis of these issues based on their own experiences and new empirical and theoretical work. In providing these unique perspectives on various aspects of changes to access to justice and legal aid, Flynn and Hodgson argue in chapter 1 that assuming cutting funds will equate with savings is a ‘false assumption’ and that instead we need a ‘new narrative’ against a ‘dominant view’. That allegedly false dominant view is that publicly funded legal advice and representation is unnecessary and that cuts are essential. The chapters from the contributing authors that follow illuminate particular adverse consequences flowing from policy and funding changes in England and Wales and Australia. Together, these seek to show the economic, legal and personal price with which cuts in this area are bought, and construct an argument that savings objectives are not met. While in many ways a depressing story, the authors also provide numerous recommendations for improvements, some large scale and some smaller scale, but all broadly sensible and of use to policy makers and practitioners in these areas. For example, for Noone (chapter 2), part of the reason for increased legal aid demand in Australia can be found in government policies, such as increases in the numbers of police and child protection officers. This leads her to suggest compulsory legal aid impact statements in government announcements to allow the ‘downstream’ consequences of superficially unrelated policy changes on the legal aid system (and hence, their actual costs) to be more easily recognised. Another example (dealing with a separate issue), this time at the practitioner level, is coping with the removal of federal funding for systemic advocacy work traditionally carried out by community law centres. After outlining the problem and its adverse consequences, Buchanan (chapter 8) points to the example of the Victorian Environment Defenders Office’s response as a