The Coalition has flagged about $1.5 billion in cuts to funding to health, Aboriginal groups and community legal centres, stifling their ability to lobby government on behalf of their members, the Australian Council of Social Service says.
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The Human Rights Law Centre released a report titled 'Safeguarding Democracy' on Monday, which argued governments were eroding Australia's democracy.
"Governments are using a range of funding levers to make it harder for community organisations to speak out, to advocate on behalf of the groups they represent (and) the natural environment and that's bad for the health of our democracy," Human Rights Law Centre executive director Hugh de Kretser said.
Among these, were funding contracts with community legal centres and other non-government organisations that specified money could only be spent on service delivery, not on advocacy which "send them a clear message 'if you speak out then you are at risk,'" the centre's executive director Hugh de Kretser said.
ACOSS chief executive officer Cassandra Goldie estimated about $1.5 billion in cuts had been flagged in the past two budgets. This included $800 million from health flexible funds last year, $500 million from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander programs and $270 million from social services in 2014.
"The combined effect of the savage cuts . . . requiring organisations to compete against each other to survive and the constraints in the contract against the ability to advocate has had a really serious, chilling effect," she said.
A government spokesman said that these funding agreements "do not restrict organisations from advocacy".
He said the national partnership agreement on legal assistance services did not prevent organisations making submissions to government, royal commissions or parliamentary bodies regarding advice on systemic issues: "The government believes that the limited funding available should be used in frontline services to directly assist vulnerable people most in need rather than financing lobbying and advocacy activities."
The spokesman said that half of the $534 million in savings from Prime Minister and Cabinet and Health portfolios were reinvested into indigenous affairs policy priorities.
Ms Goldie said corporate stakeholders were increasingly better able to lobby government.
"Democracy doesn't just happen," she said. "The government has a core responsibility to ensure that there is (balance) in the dynamics of the democracy and we clearly haven't got that balance right."
Rod Little, co-chair of the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples' said funding cuts had hampered the group's efforts to campaign for equal health and education for indigenous people, allowing the government to be "selective" in the advice it received.
"We need to be involved in the decision-making and policy development and the program designs . . . We feel as though the cuts to the congress' advocacy voice and frontline services are a backward step for our people to be able to participate in the resolution of matters that affect us."
The report called for the government to enshrine the importance of advocacy into legislation and to restore funding to peak sector bodies including the Refugee Council of Australia and the Congress.
