Women’s Legal Services Launch of Publications

Emeritus Professor Rosalind Croucher AM

Good evening. My name is Rosalind Croucher and I am the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission. I would like to pay my respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation whose lands we are meeting on today and on whose lands our offices of the Australian Human Rights Commission reside as well. I’d like to acknowledge their elders past and present and all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who may be joining us here today—especially women.

I’d like to thank Helen Campbell and the Women’s Legal Service NSW for inviting me here tonight. It is a privilege to help launch the 2020 resources, including the new design of Ask LOIS—an incredible community legal education tool.

The Women’s Legal Service NSW has been operating for almost 40 years and is Australia’s oldest legal service specifically for women. Since its inception, its aim has been to promote access to justice for women and to help bring about a world where women live free from violence, injustice, inequality and discrimination.

We have come a long way since 1982 when a bold group of feminist legal activists started what was then known as the Women’s Legal Resources Centre. It was the very same year that women in NSW gained the right to prosecute their husbands for violence through amendments to the NSW Crimes Act, 1900. (It was also the first year of my academic career.)

In 1982, we had just ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the original Human Rights Commission was only an infant of one year old. (As was my daughter). (Incidentally, the Human Rights Commission was established under a Coalition government. So if you hear people saying that human rights is a ‘leftie’ issue, I will give you an appropriate answer. I wanted to answer the question: which governments supported human rights by adopting international human rights conventions? I did a simple exercise. I used a red pen for Labor and a blue pen for the Coalition and I set up a sheet on which I had all of the treaties to which Australia has committed over the last 50 years, when they’d been ratified and when they’d been signed. And apart from the second optional protocol of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which concerned the abolition of the death penalty about which I would say neither side of politics would have any objection, with my red pen and a blue pen it was a 10-all split. 10 reds and 10 blues. If anyone says human rights are a party-political issue, they are wrong.)

Going back to 1982: we were still a year away from Australia’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women and two years away from the Federal Sex Discrimination Act, which came into force in 1984, as a domestic implementation of CEDAW. It is a key part of the legislation that underpins the work of the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Since then, many more gains have been made for women’s rights and equality. Lots have been hard won. Only last year—2019—did NSW decriminalise abortion through the Abortion Law Reform Act after decades of relentless campaigning by women’s rights and health advocates. Women are no longer at risk of prosecution for procuring their own abortion and doctors are able to perform an abortion after obtaining informed consent. (Many women of my age have had to navigate the perils of unwanted pregnancy).

And we all know, there is still much work to be done.

Women continue to face shocking rates of harassment and violence in and outside of their homes. The national inquiry of my colleague, the Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins, into Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces, has revealed that harassment at work on the basis of sex remains rife. And women whose lives are shaped by intersecting experiences of racism, homophobia and ableism often face immense barriers to access support when they need it. And now let’s also add ageism to that list.

But it is thanks to the tireless effort of women around NSW and the country and organisations such as the Women’s Legal Service NSW that we have come as far as we have.

Tonight’s launch/rebirth/blessing is a testament to the work the service has done—and continues to do—to help make women’s lives safer and more equitable. The resources are invaluable tools for many different people throughout our communities—from legal practitioners and GPs, to community workers across the entire state of NSW. All were developed and continue to be revised in the hope that women are able to access informed assistance when they need it in the face of relationship breakdown, violence or any other circumstance they might find themselves in. Knowledge is power in assisting women to find ways out of such situations.

The resources produced by the Women’s Legal Service are informative and practical. They are designed to help deliver best practice responses and support when needed and provide guidance on where to go for further help.

The first of these resources is the second edition of the GP Toolkit. Originally launched in 2014, the booklet provides medical practitioners with vital information for identifying and appropriately responding to patients and their children who are or have been affected by domestic and family violence.

The kit is an accessible and easy-to-use resource for doctors on what kinds of things they should be looking out for and best practice responses to a range of different situations surrounding domestic and family violence.

This year’s updated version includes law reform information about domestic violence and renting and new information about strangulation, which is now widely recognised as a strong indicator of escalating, and potentially fatal, violence.

It is currently being distributed to GPs and medical services across the state with the invaluable assistance of several medical associations and women’s health centres.

This year, the WLS NSW is also releasing the 11th edition of their most widely used resources—the Women and Family Law Handbook. The Handbook provides a starting point for understanding the law as it applies for married and de facto couples after a relationship breakdown. It answers many common questions in easy to understand ways and provides guidance on where to go for more help.

The first iteration of the Handbook was released in 1991 as ‘Law and Relationships: A Woman’s A to Z Guide’. The Women’s Legal Resource Centre Annual Report for that year noted that the Guide had a seven-year gestation but was ‘well worth the effort’. The launch that accompanied its release celebrated the countless women who assisted in bringing the book to full term.

Since then, the Handbook has enjoyed considerable success. In 1998 the Centre’s Annual Report noted that it had been ‘overwhelmed by the demand’ for the Handbook from CLCs and all manner of community services going through two print runs in quick succession.

To this day, it continues to be an essential and practical resource for women and the services that support them across the state.

Copies are not only available in all libraries in NSW, but are also available in Women’s Health Centres and Relationship Centres across the state.

The eleventh edition includes a number of updates such as the latest law reform information about domestic violence and renting; the inclusion of same sex marriage; information that reflects the shift towards e-filing particularly in relation to divorce papers and some updates to the Apprehended Violence Order Act.

(In reading through the guide I noted the detailed consideration of the issue child abduction—a question of increasing relevance in societies with people of nationalities of origin of many kinds.)

This book is an excellent example of the hard work the solicitors at WLS NSW do to ensure published information is up-to-date, accurate and accessible to all.

Finally, the main resource we are here to re-launch tonight is the wonderful Ask LOIS website that has undergone a beautiful redesign.

Ask LOIS is a free legal online information service (hence the acronym: L—O—I—S), that has been running since 2011. It is one of WLS NSW’s most wide-reaching community legal education programs.

Ask LOIS provides regional and rural community workers with access to free legal training and up-to-date information via a monthly webinar as well as access to a range of resources and factsheets via a dedicated website. The Ask LOIS program has a network of over 1,600 community workers across NSW who regularly access the service.

All webinars produced through the Ask LOIS program are recorded and made available via the website for anyone who wants to go back and listen again or who may have missed it first time around. Factsheets are often produced to accompany the webinars and these too are available in the Ask LOIS resource library. There are also links to lots of other useful resources, including the Aboriginal Wills Handbook written by Professor Prue Vines (my co-author on the Succession text we did, now in its 5th edition). Additionally, the website offers community workers the opportunity to submit questions or referrals directly to a lawyer and get help quickly with specific issues via email.

Over the nine years that Ask LOIS has been running it has helped hundreds of community service providers in accessing accurate, plain language legal information for their clients in regional and rural NSW.

In 2019, WLS NSW successfully applied to the UTS Shopfront Community Program, which provides pro bono services to community organisations with the skills and expertise of students and academics at UTS. As a result, a team of expert design students undertook the exciting task of updating LOIS’s look.

Now, LOIS has a fresh new logo and wonderful graphics that tie in across the various online platforms. Having had a play with the new website myself already, I know that it not only looks fantastic, it is also incredibly easy to use and navigate. The UTS team have done a wonderful job.

The new website went live today and the first webinar took place at 11am this morning. I am sure that they were both a huge success.

Tonight we are celebrating the hard work that has been done by the Women’s Legal Service NSW to create and update these wonderful resources. All three resources have provided invaluable assistance to women across NSW and to the whole community and will continue to do so into the future.

The aim of the Women’s Legal Service NSW is to achieve access to justice and a just legal system for women in New South Wales. I am honoured to have been invited to help launch/re-launch/baptise the resources that are a significant advancement of this aim.

I look forward to enjoying Chloe’s demonstration of the new Ask LOIS website.

And so now I declare the resources officially re-launched, baptised and blessed!

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