Inadequate time is available to deal with civil matters and legal education. A study in the early 1980s examined the way in which summary courts in Western Australia dealt with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal defendants comparing seven towns from different regions of the state. The study by Martin and Newby was concerned to assess the access of Aboriginal people to legal advice, to establish whether the presiding judicial officers were lay Justices of the Peace or Stipendiary Magistrates and whether the courts were administered independently of the police. The study examined courts located at Midland, Broome, Kununurra, Wyndham, Halls Creek, Narrogin and Gnowangerup. This Commission has no reason to conclude that the situation has improved to any great extent since that study was carried out.
Legal representation is often the key to improving the outcome of charges heard against defendants.
This is of particular importance in the case of Aboriginals who, as the statistics before this Commission compellingly demonstrate, are far more likely than their non-Aboriginal fellow Australians to be sentenced to a term of imprisonment when convicted. The Executive Committee of the ALS has produced a three year plan to seek funding to significantly increase staff to better cover the regions throughout the state. If both the State and Commonwealth Governments are serious in their commitment to provide the most disadvantaged sections of our community with the legal services which they so obviously desperately need, they must provide the organisations charged with supplying them with the funds they require to recruit and keep qualified staff willing to work in the demanding conditions outside metropolitan Perth. If the poor living in the remote parts of the state are to be subject to the sanctions of the criminal law, including wholesale deprivation of liberty, they are entitled at least to the protection which a modem developed democracy owes to the weaker members of the community. Both the Federal and State Governments have a political and moral responsibility to provide funds for legal representation in Western Australia which will go some way to correct the appalling inequities which are obvious in the evidence before this Commission.