Indigo Shire councillor Sophie Price attended the Wangaratta roundtable I co-hosted with Hume Riverina Community Legal Service and the Centre Against Violence on September 20 to discuss the need for a North East specialist family violence court and Legal Aid office.

Sophie reported to Indigo council’s September meeting about the roundtable goals:

I represented council (where) the Member for Northern Victoria, Tania Maxwell MP, organised a roundtable to discuss North East family violence and the Legal Aid need.

In particular, she’d gotten together all of the groups that needed to be around the table – the Hume Riverina Community Legal Service and Centre Against Violence as the lead agencies and then invitations made to Wodonga and Wangaratta and the broader region.

This meeting was about the fact that we have a really high incidence of family violence within our region, and yet we don’t have a specialist family (violence) law court. That was something that was started in 2019 and there’s since been a number of those courts rolled out across the state.

And even with our high incidence of family violence, we’re still not in the pipeline for one of the next courts that are going to be rolled out. There are lots of metropolitan (locations) listed for where the next five will be, but none for us.

What that means is that family violence victim-survivors within our region have to make their way through the magistrate’s court and they’re not they’re not nearly as supported as they could be.

And the magistrate doesn’t have some of the special powers that are special that a specialist family violence law court does. It’s an inferior service that we’re providing to our community. The need is well established. We have, unfortunately, very high rates of family violence compared to the state average and the next nearest court for our community to access is Shepparton which is not in any way appropriate.

So, it was a great meeting, and it was really well run. I thank Tania for her advocacy in this space. It’s really great to see people from within Indigo Shire who are really active members within this space. It’s going to continue. They’ve got some really great plans for how we’re going to advocate to ensure that Wodonga or Wangaratta is listed as one of the next locations for one of these courts and, once the advocacy has been worked out, I’ll be making a comment to you, CEO, to add it to (Indigo Shire Council’s) advocacy plan because it’s a really worthwhile cause and a really good space for us to play in as a local government.