The Report of the Qld Inspector of Detention Services on the Wacol Youth Remand Centre tabled in the Qld Parliament this morning highlights inevitable overcrowding problems that will occur with Qld Juvenile jails arising from the Breach Bail Go to Jail law currently being examined by a Parliamentary Committee.
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This new scheme should be rejected because it renders the Sentencing role of the Supreme Court effectively meaningless.
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Mr.O’Gorman said that in view of the current situation where Qld jails are buckling under overcrowding conditions the Corrections Minister must be forced to reveal what the Breach Bail Go to Jail laws will cost and what the further overcrowding consequences will be before the law is debated in Parliament
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There are numerous examples from the NT , WA and the federal jurisdiction highlighting how mandatory minimum sentencing particularly without an exceptional circumstances safety valve produces sentencing injustice .
The material provided under the heading ‘ Consultation’ in the Breach Bail law is woefully inadequate and represents another Crisafulli government snub of the Fitzgerald good governance model,” Mr. O’Gorman said.
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hat said from the Civil Liberties perspective there should be no discrimination at all against the users of medicinal cannabis. They should be subject to the same test used for other prescription medicines that are known to affect driving, including benzodiazepines (Xanax, Valium), antidepressants, opiates, anticonvulsants, antihistamines, antipsychotics, muscle relaxants and hypnotics. Drivers are not tested for these by police,
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Mr O’Gorman said that Minister Gerber needs to front the media to indicate what steps are going to be taken to address the highly critical QAO Report especially in relation to the crying need for an injection of funding to ensure prisoners can do rehabilitation programs in a timely manner so as to reduce the high rate of return to jail by prisoners and the ever increasing load on the taxpayer of a ballooning Qld jail population.
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It is clear that the rules violate a fundamental protection for the right to a fair hearing: the legislation in question gives the product of this system a privileged status as evidence before the Court.
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Flag burning is not an issue at large in our country. Instead, the context it is currently documented in is a very narrow one – by First Nations people at Australia Day protests. Viewed in this context, the act of flag burning takes on immediate meaning. When an Indigenous person burns the flag, they say they do not believe that Britain should have colonised their land, that the nation of Australia exists as a colonial construct validated only by the invalid doctrine of terra nullius and the systematic oppression it effected. That is a specific political viewpoint that cannot be suppressed validly
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The assumption innate in the Bill is that allowing people to use deadly force to protect themselves and their dwelling will improve community safety and deter crime. However, outcomes of similar legislation in the USA show across the board that increasing legislative permissiveness of deadly force correlates with increased violent crime, unnecessary death, institutional racism, and no crime deterrence.
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“Children, especially the teenagers that are the Bill’s primary subject, are to the relevant level capable of making their own decisions, and where a parent has not been proven to have incited or condoned a child’s misbehaviour, the child should be held responsible for it alone.”
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The Council has, at all times, been opposed to the disenfranchisement of prisoners. The concept of the civil dead no longer has any place in our law. Prisoners are human beings and ought to be treated with dignity. They are in prison as punishment not for punishment.
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The Bill will fundamentally rework and expand hugely hate speech laws as well as having the 2026 equivalent of the 1950s ban of the Communist party which was struck down by the High Court. It is simply performative politics.
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"It is unjust to treat equals unequally; it is equally unjust to treat unequals equally." – Aristotle The “Adult Crime, Adult Time” legislation is unjust as it treats children equally to adults with whom children are unequal.
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Our central submission is that the current definition should not be expanded. Terrorism should not be seen as a ‘catch-all’ term for serious crimes. The criminal law, with its established principles of criminal justice and procedure, already accommodate crimes which may constitute terrorism. Any further extension of the definition of terrorism would intervene in this system. It would enlarge the application of a wide set of powers that are both repugnant to civil liberties and inconsistent with these established principles of criminal justice
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In democratic polities, intelligence organisations have been permitted to operate in secret and without the public accountability mechanisms that apply to police because they neither produce evidence, nor exercise coercive powers. Division 3 departs from this principle. It empowers ASIO, at the request of a cabinet minister, to force a legally innocent person to answer questions
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The Council accepts that it is a fundamental human right of all persons particularly children to be protected from sexual assault. However, proposals such as Daniel’s law are most likely to have the opposite effect and do harm to innocent people such as victims”, says QCCL President Michael Cope
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In our submission no changes should be made to the rights of victims which undermine the rehabilitation of the prisoners. The only consequence of that would be to create more victims, which surely is not the intention of the review let alone the government.
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“Inconvenience or offence, as opposed to violence, experienced by some people cannot justify a law which needlessly exposes some of the most disadvantaged people in our community to the loss of liberty and the heightened risk of serious injury or death” said Mr Cope
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