School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemLaw and the new left: a history of the Fitzroy Legal Service, 1972-1994( 1995)When Fitzroy Legal Service (FLS) opened in December 1972 as the first non-Aboriginal community legal centre in Australia, Its volunteer workers posed a radical critique of the legal system and of the legal profession. They depicted both to be intricately involved in the oppression of Australians on low incomes. In a bid to combat this oppression, FLS developed two broad objectives: to provide free and accessible legal assistance, and to operate as a medium of social change. The adoption and pursuit of these at times contradictory aims amounted to an attempt by FLS volunteers to marry the politics of the New Left to the workings of the law. The adoption of these aims also meant that FLS would be involved, at a very practical level, in the debate concerning the relationship between the law and social change in Australia. In the years after its formation, the radical critique once posed by FLS dissipated. This occurred primarily because the State, n the form of the Whitlam Government moved to accommodate the most persuasive criticisms that FLS workers had of the legal system. The Whitlam Government’s creation of a new legal aid system in 1973, the high profile taken by FLS workers in debates about legal aid and the fact that FLS received government funding were all crucial to FLS’s increasingly accepted status as a part albeit an unusual one of the legal profession. Notwithstanding this acceptance, FLS workers have continued to pursue the organisation's two original aims. As a result of this FLS has continued to draw clients and workers to the Service, while at the same time it has continued to operate as an effective social critic.