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When Sarah* found herself floundering under a pile of mounting debt from unpaid myki fines she didn’t even know she’d accrued, the teenager found herself face-to-face with Australia’s complex legal system.
“She had heaps of unpaid myki fines but she didn’t realise she had them because she wasn’t living at the address, so she’d racked up quite a debt,” Headspace Bendigo senior mental health clinician Meg Bennett said.
Fortunately, Sarah was referred to a free legal service for young people run as an outreach program at Headspace via the Melbourne-based Young People’s Legal Rights Centre, which was able to help her navigate the tortuous legal path to clearing her debt.
“Those services really relieved so much stress for her because obviously debt can really impact young people and they just might not know their rights,” Ms Bennett said.
“It’s just been such a valuable resource for us to be able to connect young people to.”
But Ms Bennett said other young people in Bendigo who find themselves in similar situations in the future might not be so lucky, after federal government funding cuts come into effect from July 1 meaning the outreach program will no longer be available to local youths.
She said the cuts would mean young people in Bendigo would have to deal with sometimes arcane legal matters, which even confused trained adults at times, on their own.
“Young people often might not have great insight into legal issues, I know myself that it’s hard to get your head around sometimes, and if you’re 18 years old you might not really just have that knowledge behind you, so to have the [opportunity] to connect to a service which really is designed for young people is just so valuable,” she said.
“It’s just a real shame when services like this do stop because we really do feel it as a centre, and the young people would feel it as well, so it would be a great shame.”
A spokeswoman for federal Attorney-General George Brandis said funding for the Young People’s Legal Rights Centre had increased by over 100 per cent since 2010.
“The investment that the government has made far outweighs the forecast reductions,” she said.
*Name has been changed.