The Queensland government has cut funding to the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO), with the Crisafulli government cutting off $500,000-a-year funding to the legal aid body from July 1, 2025.
“As per our commitment before the election, we honoured Labor’s funding agreement in its entirety, which expired at the end of June 2025,” a Queensland government spokesperson told the ABC today. “There is no additional money budgeted beyond that period of time.”
EDO chief executive David Morris said the funding had been used to employ two solicitors to provide free legal advice in Brisbane and Cairns. He said these lawyers had provided legal services to around 1,500 Queenslanders who would not have otherwise been able to afford it.
“It’s devastating for Queenslanders who will turned away when they’re trying to seek legal advice on these matters that have a day-to-day impact on so many people’s lives,” Morris told the ABC.
In October, Wood Central reported that the EDO had been ordered to pay Santos more than nine million dollars for a failed attempt to stop a major project off the Northern Territory coast – a decision that had major ramifications for forestry. The EDO, which has been involved in challenging several logging approvals in Australian native forests, ran a legal challenge on behalf of three Aboriginal people from the Tiwi Islands, north of Darwin, attempting to stop the construction of a gas pipeline.
Last year, the federal branch of Crisafulli’s LNP coalition joined Australian Energy Producers and the Australian Forest Products Association – the peak body for the Australian forest products supply chain – in calling for action against the EDO: “They have obviously been discredited in a recent federal court case, but the federal government has had nothing to say about it,” Peter Dutton, then-Opposition leader, told resources groups in West Australia at the time.
‘The EDO would have to convince the government’
Whilst government did not provide specific reasons for not renewing the funding, but indicated the past behaviour of EDO lawyers — which resulted in the organisation being ordered to pay gas producer Santos millions — would make it difficult to restore.
“As part of future assessments for programs, the EDO would have to convince the government that proper processes had been put in place to qualify for further funding, after being ordered to pay $9 million in costs after a judge criticised EDO lawyers for coaching a witness,” a government spokesperson said Mr Morris said in recent years the EDO helped prevent a major development at Toondah Harbour in Moreton Bay, which lawyers successfully argued would destroy important wetlands.
He also pointed to efforts to have greater restrictions placed on a bottled water extraction project in the Springbrook National Park as high-profile cases the office has worked on. However, he said there were countless examples of free legal advice the EDO had provided to individuals, landholders, First Nations groups and community groups to help them combat the interests of developers, mining companies and governments.
“The service that we provide is sometimes inconvenient for powerful vested interests,” Mr Morris said.
“I don’t know whether that’s influenced this decision.”
The Environmental Defenders Office continues to receive federal funding and money from other states, but Mr Morris said it would need to turn to the public for donations to maintain the level of service it provides in Queensland: “What it ultimately means is dependent on the amount of support we’re able to garner from the community,” he said.
