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19-09-2023
Bureau Report + Agencies
QUEENSLAND/ SYDNEY: The government of Australia’s northeastern state of Queensland has stunned rights experts by suspending its Human Rights Act for a second time this year to be able to lock up more children.
The ruling Labor Party last month pushed through a suite of legislation to allow under-18s including children as young as 10, to be detained indefinitely in police watch houses, because changes to youth justice laws including jail for young people who breach bail conditions mean there are no longer enough spaces in designated youth detention centres to house all those being put behind bars.
The amended bail laws, introduced earlier this year, also required the Human Rights Act to be suspended.
The moves have shocked Queensland Human Rights Commissioner Scott McDougall, who described human rights protections in Australia as “very fragile”, with no laws that apply nationwide.
“We don’t have a National Human Rights Act. Some of our states and territories have human rights protections in legislation. But they’re not constitutionally entrenched so they can be overridden by the parliament,” he told media.
The Queensland Human Rights Act introduced in 2019 protects children from being detained in adult prison so it had to be suspended for the government to be able to pass its legislation.
Earlier this year, Australia’s Productivity Commission reported that Queensland had the highest number of children in detention of any Australian state.
During 2021-2022, the so-called “Sunshine State” recorded a daily average of 287 people in youth detention, compared with 190 in Australia’s most populous state New South Wales, the second highest and despite a cost of more than 1,800 Australian dollars ($1,158) to hold each child for a day, more than half the jailed Queensland children are resentenced for new offences within 12 months of their release.
Another report released by the Justice Reform Initiative in November 2022 showed that Queensland’s youth detention numbers had increased by more than 27 percent in seven years.
The push to hold children in police watch houses is viewed by the Queensland government as a means to house these growing numbers. Attached to police stations and courts, a watch house contains small, concrete cells with no windows and is normally used only as a “last resort” for adults awaiting court appearances or required to be locked up by police overnight.
