Our region has lots going for it at the moment with booming demand for our farming, mining and tourism industries. One storm cloud, however, is rising crime that is tormenting many local families and businesses.
I have spoken to many Central Queenslanders over the holidays who have had their Christmases ruined by break-ins and property damage. The stories are almost always the same. Young juveniles unafraid of the Labor Government’s weak crime laws act with abandon. Sometimes it is even the same group of criminals but the police can do nothing about it.
The advice often comes back to people that they need to invest more in home security. But we should not have to turn our own houses into jails to keep criminals out, when the Government does almost nothing to lock the criminals away.
In August 2019, the Queensland Government changed the *Youth Justice Act*. In the words of the Government’s Explanatory Note about these changes, they had the “objective of removing legislative barriers to enable young people to be granted bail.” The changes told judges that the principle should be “detention as a last resort”, and that “the bail decision-making framework” incorporated an “explicit presumption in favour of release.”
The data shows the clear impact of these laws. In the 12 months before the bail changes in 2019, there were a reported 6184 “unlawful entries” by juveniles across Queensland. In the 12 months before November last year (the last month data is available for) there were 10,108 reported “unlawful entries” by juveniles.
Following Labor’s changes to bail there has been a staggering 63 per cent increase in juveniles breaking in to people’s homes and businesses. There has not been an increase in unlawful entries by non-juveniles, in fact they have slightly fallen since 2019. This provides strong evidence that Labor’s youth bail changes are to blame.
Here in Central Queensland Unlawful Entry with Violence and Common Assault has more than doubled in Gladstone since 2019. In Yeppoon, robberies and assault have increased by more than 50 per cent.
In response to the clear failure of their laws, the Labor government has tried a couple of times to put a band aid on this open wound. In 2021, the Government announced that courts could require juveniles to wear GPS tracking devices when on bail. Since then just 8 juveniles have been fitted with such devices. With 27 juvenile break-ins occurring every day in Queensland over the past year this will hardly make a difference.
The Government’s latest thought bubbles include trialling engine immobilisers and the appointment of a new Police Assistant Commissioner.
It is time for the Queensland Government to admit they were wrong. Their botched 2019 reforms have clearly led to a youth crime epidemic and it is time to roll back to the laws we had pre-2019 before the unleashing of this crime epidemic.
Labor’s new laws provide those charged with crimes the “presumption in favour of release”. This is the wrong approach. Innocent Queenslanders deserve to have the presumption that they won’t have their house broken into.
