Marie-noelle Cure is sitting on a haggard-looking couch in a cramped counselling room when she reminds me victims of crime don't care about the furniture.
We're at the Narrabundah headquarters of the ACT's Victims of Crime Assistance League; a run-down building with a makeshift office in the waiting room and a water leak issue around the side, which Cure says a volunteer plumber is fixing.
The 68-year-old pensioner announced her retirement from the service last year, but she still mans its 24/7 phone line and sees clients as its only counsellor.
Like others at VOCAL, Cure has gone unpaid since 2011.
Her longtime client Stephanie, who doesn't want to give her surname, says Cure was up the other night talking to a client until 3am. She also says, "without her, I'd be dead".
Cure doesn't much care that she hasn't been able to fix her broken car window - "I've put a piece of perspex there and I'm fine" - or that she can't afford what others might consider "necessary luxuries", like alcohol or going to the movies.
What she does care about, though, is what happens to her clients when she finally moves on.
"[Without] at least one wage, I don't know how another person would work," Cure says.
"Plus, they think that this is a sinking ship, and who wants to be associated with a sinking ship?"
'The set-up'
VOCAL's ACT branch was established in 1988 and at its height received about $200,000 in annual funding.
It split the cash between four modest wages, resources and efforts to recruit volunteers, and some 400 victims of crime would come knocking at its door each year.
Nowadays, Cure says it wouldn't even see 200 clients annually.
She says she needs more staff - another counsellor, at least - before more new clients can follow, but aside from a few grants and donations here and there, VOCAL's funding has essentially been scrapped.
The ACT government put the victim support service to open tender in 2011, and VOCAL lost out to Communities@Work - "Canberra's largest not-for-profit community organisation".
Communities@Work ran the service for three years before the government-funded Victim Support ACT subsumed the volunteer program.
An ACT Human Rights Commission spokeswoman saysthat, in 2019-20, Victim Support volunteers devoted 310 hours to giving victims of crime court support, and another 251 hours to "client support projects".
The spokeswoman says Victim Support helped 2159 victims of crime including 689 new clients in 2019-20, and more than $3.3 million in financial assistance was paid to victims of crime in the same timeframe.
Cure makes clear she has "no desire" to compete with the government-funded body, but she says she expected a partnership with them; one in which they might refer people to VOCAL when they had a lot of clients.
She concedes Victim Support may have referred one or two people to VOCAL since 2011, but she says the tender process was nonetheless a "set-up" by the government to phase VOCAL out of existence; a suggestion the government rejects.
A spokeswoman for the Justice and Community Safety directorate says the tender process "reflected the fact that, by 2011, a number of not-for-profit organisations had built a volunteer service capacity and were capable of providing the service".
When asked whether the government would consider reinstating annual funding for VOCAL, the spokeswoman points to annual community consultation as an opportunity for individuals and organisations to "give feedback on gaps in government funding".
"The next round of community consultation on the budget will be next February," the spokeswoman says.
Cure says VOCAL still fills a major gap in the territory, particularly given people are only eligible for Victim Support services when the relevant crime is committed in the ACT.
She says people come to visit VOCAL from the South Coast, Queanbeyan, Goulburn and beyond.
"You can't say to someone, 'Oh, but you were in England on holiday or ... in Sydney. Go and ask [their] government," she says.
"You can't say to a victim: 'Come next month. Hold onto your grief and your upset and your fears.'
"Some people have just moved to Canberra ... [and] Canberrans who are paying their taxes should be able to have a service when they need it."
'Where to from here?'
Stephanie is crying on the phone because Cure has been her main support for the last 10 years.
She's been able to call on her at all times without a cap on services, or costs until she got a plan with the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
"[Marie-noelle] has gone out beyond being a counsellor; she's helped me personally, mentally, [and] physically ... she's just helped me get a cupboard," Stephanie says.
"You're lucky if you get the same counsellor three times in a row and I've had her for 10 years."
Cure assures Stephanie she's doing the best she can to find someone suitable to replace her - she's hoping a retired counsellor might volunteer at VOCAL.
We are grateful to still have Marie-noelle servicing us and giving us a counselling service, but for how much longer? Where do we go from there?
Stephanie
But Stephanie has little faith in the service's future without intervention, and says she feels let down by the territory government.
"We are grateful to still [have] Marie-noelle servicing us and giving us a counselling service, but [for] how much longer?" she tells me.
"Where do we go from there?"
Cure says, repeatedly, that VOCAL has gotten by "with the grace of God" in recent years.
She says whenever they've needed help with IT, a volunteer with the know-how has appeared. Whenever the bills have been looming, an NDIS client has showed up.
"This is my personal belief that, at the right time, I have had enough to keep me going," Cure says.
She says she's never been "one for money", and doesn't anticipate a huge cash injection for VOCAL, but she lives in hope every day that "someone will turn up who has a good heart and will want to help".
Stephanie doesn't care much about the furniture at VOCAL either, but she says - in all honestly - it could probably use a few new pieces.
It could use a few new staff, too, and maybe a couple of public servant wages would do the trick.
