On Thursday, 4 June 2026 I spoke against the government's absurd Transport and Other Legislation (Managing E-mobility Use and Protecting Our Communities) Amendment Bill 2026, which introduced age and licence requirements for emobility devices.
I rise to speak against the Transport and Other Legislation (Managing E-mobility Use and Protecting Our Communities) Amendment Bill. I will say at the outset that this is perhaps one of the most absurd and poorly cobbled together bills I have seen during my time in this place. Frankly, I do not know how the minister managed to introduce it with a straight face. Honestly, opening the second reading debate on World Bicycle Day is an impressively tone-deaf manoeuvre. Where do we even start? How about with age limits.
First the government said it would completely ban legal e-bikes for under-16s. People rightly said that was ridiculous. Then they said they would tweak the bill, but what have they done? Now 12- to 17-year-olds in Queensland can ride an e-bike only when supervised by a very specific few people; that is, their parent, legal guardian or grandparent—no aunties, no uncles, no teachers or older siblings. It gets worse, though. You can supervise your 12-year-old riding a pedal-assist bicycle, but you’d better hope they have one already because it will not be legal to buy them anymore. The government has left a complete ban on selling e-bikes to under-16s in the bill, even with their amendment, so they are clearly hoping that e-bikes will be handed down from generation to generation like family heirlooms.
It is quite unbelievable how many holes like this there are and how sloppy this bill is. In Crisafulli’s Queensland, 12- to 17-year-olds can ride a pushbike whenever they like but not a legal pedal-assist e-bike. An unlicensed 17-year-old can ride an e-bike with their dad right up until their 18th birthday but then it is immediately illegal.
In Queensland, a 15-year-old can now fly an aircraft solo but they cannot ride an e-bike by themselves. They can leave school and work full-time but they cannot ride their legal pedal-assist e-bike to that same job unsupervised. They could be sentenced to life imprisonment and they can get a gun licence and go target shooting or hunting, but according to this government they are not cognitively capable of riding a pedal-assist bicycle unsupervised. It is absurd.
It is also completely unfair to disabled kids. Kids under 12 who have disabilities that prevent them from riding a pushbike will not be able to ride an e-bike even under supervision. Many disabled kids have been funded by NDIS for adaptive bikes. They will now be banned from simply riding a bike like any of their peers. It is cruel, it is heartless and it is discriminatory.
Turning to licensing, how about this for sloppy and absurd? For over-16s the bill requires a driver’s licence to ride an e-bike unsupervised. The amendments mean that an unlicensed adult can legally supervise their child riding an e-bike but they cannot ride one themselves. There are only two other jurisdictions in the world that mandate a driver’s licence for riding a bike—especially a standard pedal-assist e-bike—and one of those is North Korea. The LNP in Queensland is now taking its policy cues from Kim Jong Un. Nice work, Minister.
Let’s be clear that we are not talking about e-motorbikes, the ones that are in fact already illegal. We are talking about bicycles that have a pedal-assist system that cuts out at 25 kilometres an hour. Instead of just ditching this stupid licensing rule, the LNP has tried to carve out complicated bureaucratic exemptions, but the bill has zero detail on the exemption process. It will be left to the government to regulate. We have no assurance that they will consult with disability organisations or other stakeholders—the very same organisations and stakeholders they have flagrantly ignored during the inquiry.
The government cannot even keep its story straight about why an e-bike rider would need a driver’s licence. First it was to ensure they were medically fit to drive. Then it was to make sure they know the road rules, even though the learner’s licence test does not really have anything to do with road rules for bicycles. At one point it was so that police could enforce the age limit. Now they have relaxed the age limit and there are medical and disability exemptions, but there is still this absurd licence requirement. There is no word on what international tourists who do not have a licence should do. I am sure that is going to go down splendidly at the Olympics in 2032.
I move on to the proposed speed limits for e-bikes, which we have seen tweaked further and made almost incomprehensible by the amendments. I challenge anyone to understand and comprehend these on a first reading. There will be no additional speed limits on shared paths except for 12 kilometres an hour when passing a pedestrian and a blanket 12-kilometre-an-hour speed limit on footpaths, even where there are no pedestrians in sight, but there is no uniform definition of ‘shared path’ or ‘footpath’ in Queensland; nor is there any definition of what ‘passing a pedestrian’ means. Please make it make sense, Minister.
Even if we had clear definitions, think about this scenario for a second. You are on your e-bike and you are right up behind someone jogging at 12 kilometres an hour on a shared path. There is now no way that you can legally overtake them. The government is literally legislating a mandate for e-bike riders to just loiter behind joggers who are moving at 12 kilometres an hour. Now, that is cool and normal. That is not creepy at all. Of course there are busy areas where anyone on a wheeled device should be slowing down or dismounting around pedestrians. Councils have been managing this for years. If we need to manage speed limits in busy areas we can do it the same way we have always done: with location-specific speed limits that apply to all wheeled devices.
Busy inner-city footpaths are not the only place this speed limit will apply. There are huge chunks of Brisbane, and indeed the whole of Queensland, for those regional members, where there is no infrastructure for bike riders at all. When the only choice is the footpath or a dangerous road, it becomes completely impractical for them to cycle at all. Are you trying to ride with your kids to school? Well, I hope you like cycling on Ipswich Road. Watch out for the trucks, kids! Remember that these speed limits do not apply to pushbikes either, so it is completely okay for someone on a pushbike to ride at 20 kilometres an hour on a footpath, but a parent on a cargo bike has to ride on the road.
May I remind this government that in 2025 there was only one death on a legal pedal-assist e-bike. That is an enormous loss for everyone who loved that person, and I acknowledge that. How did they die? They were hit and killed by a car while cycling on the road. Of the 14 pedestrian deaths in Queensland already in 2026, every single one was caused by a motor vehicle. A pedestrian has never been killed by a legal pedal-assist e-bike in Queensland.
A crackdown on legal pedal-assist e-bikes makes zero sense because they simply are not the problem. The issue is that illegal e-bikes have become widely available. This bill does not change that. It remains completely legal to sell unregistered high-speed electric motorbikes. You just have to say the magic words ‘private property use only’ and you can be on your way with your new toy. Instead of banning retailers from selling those bikes, this bill gives police new powers to seize them after they have been sold.
If it were not for the fact that hundreds—possibly thousands—more of these devices are being sold every day, that might get us somewhere. It is like asking the police to empty a bathtub with a teaspoon while the tap is still running. As if that is not going to be an impossible enough task, the government is also asking police to go out and do breath tests and licence checks on grandmothers riding their electric tricycle to the shops. It is hard to think of a more absurd and greater waste of police resources than this.
I have not had time to mention the many other bad parts of this bill that have flown under the radar—like the fact that this bill bans people from riding any kind of bike, including a pushbike, if they have any cannabis in their system. We know that THC is a legally prescribed medicine that can show up in people’s systems days after impairment has subsided—
Mrs Frecklington: Then don’t take drugs.
Mr BERKMAN: It is medicine! If the Attorney-General had any concept of reality she would know that these days it is medicine. This bill is just not a targeted, measured response. It is a kneejerk reaction that not only fails to ameliorate safety concerns; it will have widespread adverse effects on the uptake of active transport. This is a transition that is desperately needed to reduce emissions, improve overall public health and reduce congestion on our roads. You cannot upgrade roads as a solution to traffic; it will always get worse. There was never any evidence that legal pedal-assist e-bikes were causing any safety issues. Legal electric bicycles are just bicycles and they do not need any extra restrictions. The minister needs to admit that the wheels have fallen off this entire process. He needs to ditch the bill and go back to the drawing board. He is—
(Time expired)