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More than 150 people across Western Australia's Midwest region have been turned away from free legal help, as unprecedented numbers of people seek assistance.
Not-for-profit organisation Regional Alliance West (RAW) has accepted 458 cases of people and families in need in the six months to July this year, but has been forced to turn away 146 others.
Operations manager Chris Gabelish said many of the cases turned away were families, so the actual number of people going without help was higher.
RAW is based in Geraldton, 400 kilometres north of Perth.
It is the only community legal service within the 1,500km stretch from Joondalup to Karratha, and provides advice on civil cases to clients from several regional and remote towns.
It also offers emergency relief such as help with food, power bills, car registrations and medical scripts, and Mr Gabelish said the number of new people needing these services had also spiked.
Chris Gabelish says it's extremely hard to turn people in need away. (ABC Midwest and Wheatbelt: Brianna Melville)
Of recent legal cases February to July, 234 involved people who had never accessed the service before.
Mr Gabelish, who has worked in community relief for 40 years, said those in need of help were increasingly coming from a growing class he described as the "the working poor", who had been hit hard by the rising cost of living.
"I've never seen this number of new people coming through," he said.
"That's a terrible indictment on the cost of living that people are actually suffering through at the moment."
'Nothing that we can do for you'
Mr Gabelish said the people RAW helped were often intertwined with family and domestic violence issues and many were facing homelessness.
"There's 40 people that we had to turn away [from homelessness advice]," Mr Gabelish said.
"Fancy being in a position where you have to tell someone who's homeless, 'Sorry, we can't help you'. That is wrong."
"I've got a pretty hard turtle shell … [but] it's still very, very difficult to tell someone who's got little kids that are hungry that … there's nothing that we can do for you."
The problems RAW is facing are mirrored in community legal centres across Australia, with more than 368,000 people turned away per year, according to Community Legal Centre Australia.
At least 40 people have needed legal advice for homelessness in Geraldton and other Midwest towns recently. (ABC Midwest and Wheatbelt: Chris Lewis)
Mr Gabelish said while the federal government dished a funding increase to centres in 2023, it was "nowhere" near what they required.
"It's not like Australia is the poorest country in the world, and yet we've got these hundreds of thousands of people that aren't getting the service simply because state and feds are looking at each other and wondering 'okay, how much [money] are we going to slip in'," he said.
United call for more funding
Community legal centres have made a united call for the Commonwealth to double its current funding for services to at least $270 million per year for the next five years.
They requested another $95 million for frontline domestic and family violence work, and $35 million to stabilise the sector's unsteady workforce.
A spokesperson for WA Attorney General John Quigley said the federal government recognised the pressures community legal centres were under, and pointed to the $44.1 million of "urgent funding" it committed for 2024–2025.
The spokesperson said the Commonwealth, state and territory governments were considering the recommendations of a recent review into the sector, to inform the next legal assistance agreement in July 2025.