Over the border, the Queensland Labor government is behaving so erratically in the sphere of law reform and criminal justice that it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
So, I did both.
I once read a theory that the closer you get to the equator, the more right-wing and extremist the government becomes. I call it the ‘gone troppo’ hypothesis.
This model has only been half-proved this month.
In Queensland, detention centres are full. Dozens of children are being held in police cells for days or weeks at a time. Well over 70 per cent of the detainees are First Nations, 80 per cent have not been convicted of any crime, and on more than 2,800 occasions in the last 12 months solitary confinement was used on children under 14 years.
Children are being monitored and targeted by police in North Queensland, and it is no surprise that 95 per cent are First Nations.
And the reaction of the Queensland ALP government? Tougher bail laws inevitably leading to even more young Aboriginal people behind bars.
With nowhere safe to put them, the children will be held in ‘watch houses’, which essentially means no segregation from adult defendants, no education or rehabilitation, no visitation facilities and no oversight by independent agencies.
That will make the world a safer place, for sure!
The new Queensland laws required an overriding of the Human Rights Act for the first time – proudly proclaimed by the police minister.
So, young people can now be locked up with a new offence of breaching bail – on no more than suspicion that they may breach bail in the future. And the initial gatekeepers of this provision are not the courts – but the police themselves.
Previously for most offences, police were required to (or ‘must’) consider alternatives to detention. Now it is only ‘may’.
For more offences, there will be a presumption against bail, and ever longer sentences.
This is a symptom of a system that has run out of alternatives, and those calling for more jail time will never be satisfied. I visited a ‘do-drugs-do-five-years-jail’ jurisdiction in the USA in the 1980s, and the media was calling for even tougher sentences, because this did not solve the drug problem. Such is the unquenchable thirst of shock-jock tabloid reactionaries.
This tragedy is a knee-jerk reaction to red-neck racist sentiment from the deep north.
Bob Katter country.
If governments are judged by how they treat the most oppressed, disadvantaged and disempowered, then the Queensland ALP fails the test. And of course, they say they are being ‘held to ransom by rogue courts and rogue justices’.
And yet, in the ultimate pea and thimble trick, on the very same day, under the cover of locking up more First Nations kids, the Queensland government announced the most radical and unexpected changes to drug laws in Australian history.
Under the new legislation, a person found carrying a small amount of any illicit drug for the first time will only be given a warning, while on the second and third occasions, they will be offered a place in a drug diversionary program.
Only on the fourth apprehension will they need to go to court. And even then, there are other behavioural change and non-conviction alternatives.
I nearly fell off my decanal chair when I heard the Qld police minister say that the laws have been introduced at the request of the Queensland police. The commissioner apparently proposed the changes, so that her troops could spend more time on serious crime. Gosh!
Not only that, but Murdoch’s Courier Mail – the real power in Queensland – waived the changes through without blushing. Probably because they were too busy trumpeting the oppressive youth bail amendments they had been promoting for months.
And the joy just kept on coming – Queensland, on the same day, also introduced stationary and mobile pill testing, doing what no other state has had the guts to do, despite judicial and medical support. Inner-city Brisbane and music festivals around the state will be serviced by life-saving teams, who can test drugs for strength and toxicity. Again, despite the expected spluttering of the LNP, and some ‘don’t do drugs’ ignoramuses, the Courier Mail declined to condemn.
If safety is truly the number one issue for festival organisers in Northern NSW, maybe they will just have to move over the border?
Or at least threaten to.
The comeuppance is that, in Queensland, fewer people will be locked up for possession of drugs, and more people will be saved from drug overdose, only to be replaced by more traumatised Indigenous young people in paddy-wagons, watch houses, detention centres and eventually adult prisons and early graves.
So, I am laughing at the concept of Queensland leading the way on drug law reform, against all the odds. I am crying at the thought of abandoning so many younger vulnerable people to the whims of police discretion and racist rhetoric.
Is the trade-off worth it?
Well, you be the judge.
♦ David Heilpern is SCU Dean of Law, and a former magistrate.
Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
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