On Tuesday 27 October 2026 I gave a speech to Parliament on the Government's Breach Bail, Go to Jail and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. You can read my full speech below, or in the official transcript of Parliamentary proceedings (Hansard).
This bill, like pretty much everything we have seen from the LNP on youth justice, will not achieve its objectives. In fact, like everything we have seen from them, it is a counter-productive piece of legislation. The LNP’s latest rhyming policy, again supported by Labor, will cost Queenslanders billions to keep people in custody where they will face extreme overcrowding with limited or no access to rehabilitative programs and from which they will come out even more traumatised and even more likely to reoffend.
In a very brief potted summary of this bill, it will introduce mandatory minimum sentencing, remove the requirement for police to consider diversionary options for children and override the Human Rights Act for the treatment of children and adults in prison. The LNP says they want us to believe that this bill will deter offending while on bail. The evidence says otherwise, not that that has ever mattered to them although it is clear. The theory that they posit goes something like this: increasing penalties will deter would-be offenders from committing offences. However, that assumes that people are acting rationally when they commit offences and we know that, more often than not, that simply is not the case. While the threat of imprisonment does generate a small deterrent effect generally, the research indicates that increasing the severity of penalties does not result in an equivalent increase in deterrence. Conversely, when it comes to specific deterrence—that is, preventing reoffending—the research shows that imprisonment has either no effect on the rate of reoffending or results in a greater risk of reoffending. This is such simple black-and-white stuff.
Unsurprisingly, the harsher the conditions in prison the more likely that imprisonment will lead to an increase in reoffending and more violent offending. We have a clear-cut example right here in Queensland with the Cleveland Youth Detention Centre where conditions are notoriously poor. Young people who left Cleveland between June 2024 and June 2025 increased their level of serious offending by 12 per cent compared to before their time in youth detention. It is there. It is exactly what is happening in our existing youth detention systems.
The LNP says that this bill will ensure offenders who commit serious offences while on bail will be held accountable. Again, the direct and predictable consequence of this bill will be extreme overcrowding in prisons and detention centres that are already at breaking point. That is not a system that is capable of real rehabilitation or encouraging people to take responsibility for their actions. Prisons in Queensland are already little more than warehouses. The Queensland Corrective Services annual report shows us that prisoner numbers increased by 54 per cent between June 2015 and June 2025— that is, they increased by more than half in a decade. That leads to increasing pressure on infrastructure, on staffing and on the programs that we might hope would offer incarcerated people a way out, a new avenue and a way to change their behaviour in the future.
As a consequence of this bill, advocates say we can expect to see triple bunking—that is, three people in a single-occupancy cell with a mattress on the floor. ‘Cry me a river’, they might say. In fact, we have heard quite explicitly from the Premier and other government members that basically they do not care and that criminals do not deserve comfort. Surely anyone who can rub a couple of brain cells together can agree that we want people leaving prison rehabilitated? The government may be increasing bed numbers in some respects but they are not improving rehabilitative programs. The 2026-27 budget says that the government will deliver services that reduce reoffending, rehabilitate offenders and prevent crimes, but it lists nothing that will actually do that. Instead, it cites the delivery of more beds, new razor wire, new tech for officer safety and electronic monitoring programs. Where is the rehabilitation?
All of this is not cheap. As at April of this year, 11,900 prisoners in jails across the state cost $3.8 million a day, which compounds to $1.3 billion each year. More money spent on keeping people in prison means less money to get victims the resources they need to feel safe and to heal as well as to actually rehabilitate offenders. It is obviously the case that victims suffer and they face retraumatisation through the criminal legal system as well. However, again, this bill is counterproductive. When a defendant is facing a mandatory minimum sentence of 12 months, they have a far greater incentive to defend their charges rather than to seek the benefit of an early guilty plea. That means more victims, more often, will be dragged through retraumatising court processes.
The LNP say that this bill will strengthen community safety and improve public confidence in the bail system. It will not strengthen community safety. Instead, it will make Queenslanders less safe by releasing more hardened institutionalised prisoners at the end of their sentence. Let’s be real: sentences will end. The way they carry on you could almost assume that they are convinced that they will be able to lock people up and throw away the key; that if people are incarcerated forever then they cannot commit offences. That is an absolute nonsense. It is delusional. As for public confidence, the government is torching centuries of legal doctrine overnight, just in a flash. That does not exactly instil confidence.
This bill offends the presumption of innocence: a conviction will survive even where the charge for which someone was on bail has been withdrawn or they have been acquitted. It offends the rule of double jeopardy: it will expressly punish people twice for the same conduct. It offends the separation of powers, removing judicial discretion, and it limits human rights in ways the government admits are not reasonable and cannot be justified. How anyone can have confidence in a government that has so little regard for the courts or the fundamental tenets of criminal law and blithely ignores the clear evidence on what works is completely beyond me, but obviously evidence-based solutions do not always rhyme—they rarely rhyme. They do not necessarily look great on a billboard. Instead, the only answer we are getting from this government in all its ignorance is just to lock people up.
Labor is going to support this one. This bill will increase the risk of reoffending. It offends basic fundamental legal principles. It will be expensive. It will worsen prison overcrowding. It will endanger workers. I am going to vote against this bill because I do not believe any person is disposable, and we have a responsibility to build the kind of society in which people can live meaningful lives. As a Greens representative in this place, I have always voiced my position in this House honestly and fearlessly, and I have said what I mean and I have stuck by it, even when I get attacked for it.
To the members of the Labor Party who, it seems, are going to vote to support this bill, I ask: where is their courage? Where is their integrity? Where do they draw the line? Supporting this bill, which is clearly completely contrary to their party platform, shows an incredible disrespect for grassroots members and for the broader community who look to that platform as their basis for what they might expect Labor to do. It is, frankly, no wonder that people are turning away from the major parties with broken promises like this and nothing but baseless spin and rhetoric as the basis for governing. All of that to just then stand on the same side when it comes to a vote like this.
This government knows—it must know—deep down that to reduce reoffending you need to look at each offender as an individual, understand what is driving their offending and respond appropriately to help them turn around, to help them change that behaviour, but to examine and resolve the underlying drivers of offending this government would have to admit all of its failures in social policy, so maybe we shan’t hold our breath.
In the moments I have left I want to turn very quickly to the defunding of YAC. I want to table this report that I referred to in my question during question time this morning that the youth justice minister so readily dismissed. This is the department’s own report, which lays bare that kids in bail programs had a lower reoffending rate and a lower average number of offences—findings which are consistent with previous evaluations. This is poor policy.