Legal Needs and Responses in the Wake of COVID-19

Description

The legal, social and economic impacts of our government’s response to COVID-19 are wide ranging. Already, the average household is facing a loss of income, changes to work and family roles, mounting debts, housing stress and uncertainty over how long this will last. Beyond this, public health measures intended to slow the transmission of COVID-19 have the potential to detrimentally impact some groups who are already marginalised from social services. Legal services have quickly transitioned to remote service provision in order to maintain continuity of services for those most disadvantaged. Many legal services are also banding together to provide coordinated responses to address emerging needs, with legal assistance services like Community Legal Centres and Legal Aid working with social services on the ground to reach members of the community who are vulnerable and might not be able to ‘Zoom in’ or phone a lawyer. Larger commercial firms are also providing pro bono advice to various not-for-profit organisations, Indigenous corporations and charities on employment law, governance and business continuity plans. The legal profession is also calling on the state and federal governments to implement broader measures to prevent legal, social and economic impacts from escalating. This includes asking the federal government to make permanent the increases to Centrelink payments to address rising rates of poverty and inequality, calling on utilities companies to suspend debt collection, and for the release of non-violent prisoners to avert the pressure and exposure of risk to our already overcrowded prisons.