The service that catches what legal aid does not, and it is turning people away at scale.

Reported by the sector: community legal centres turn away more than 1,000 people a day, including about 400 victim-survivors of family violence. In Victoria, two-thirds of people seeking help are turned away. The sector estimates it needs 2,000 additional workers to meet demand, and the Law Council has put the national legal assistance funding shortfall at $500 million a year.

Up to 70 per cent of the people who do get through have an income under $32,000.

A turn-away is not a queue and this database should be precise about the difference. Most of what this project records is delay: a person waits and is eventually seen. Here a person asks and is told no, and there is no list they join. They do not appear in a waiting time statistic because there is no waiting time — there is a door and it is closed.

That makes the harm invisible to exactly the kind of measurement this site usually relies on, and it is the reason the process map for legal assistance shows a short critical path and a large problem. The elapsed time is small because the service is refused quickly.