An Aboriginal-led coalition of legal and health experts has accused the Queensland government and opposition of “kicking the can down the road” while children are locked behind bars, after both refused to back calls to raise the age of criminal responsibility.
In Queensland, as in all other Australian states and territories, children as young as 10 can be held in watchhouses and hauled before courts to face criminal charges.
On Tuesday, the Raise the Age coalition published an open letter to premier Annastacia Palaszczuk expressing deep concern that their expertise “appears to have been ignored” by a parliamentary committee that rejected calls to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility to 14 in the state.
The letter was signed by more than 20 health, legal, youth and child developmental organisations whose experts made submissions to that inquiry.
“We unanimously advised the Committee to raise the age of criminal responsibility to at least 14 years old,” the letter read.
“This is consistent with the overwhelming medical evidence, unanimous support from more than 300 written submissions to the inquiry, and the views of the majority of witnesses who provided evidence at the inquiry’s public hearing.”
The premier’s office responded to questions from Guardian Australia with a statement saying that Queensland was “taking part in the national process agreed to at the national meeting of attorneys-general which is already on the public record”.
In November, that meeting agreed to “develop a proposal” to increase the age of criminal responsibility to 12.
Cheryl Axleby, co-chair of Change the Record, said talk about “waiting for a national consensus” was “just another excuse for kicking the can down the road”.
“Three years ago attorneys general committed to explore options to raise the age and they have done nothing since then,” Axleby said.
“It is unforgivable that in 2022, after the Closing the Gap Agreement and countless inquiries and reports, we still have governments like Queensland’s umming and ahhing about whether or not to raise the age of criminal responsibility and keep our kids out of prison.”
The premier’s office directed questions about the parliamentary committee to its chair, Labor’s Corrine McMillan. The member for Mansfield’s office advised she was on leave.
Its deputy chair, the Liberal National party’s Stephen Bennett, agreed the evidence “clearly says that we should go to 14”, but said doing so now amounted to “a utopia of desires”.
“Overwhelming the committee heard strong medical and social reasons why we should raise the age to 14,” Bennett said.
“But we should do a lot of things in a perfect world and, unfortunately, it is not perfect.”
The member for Burnett, which centres on Bundaberg, said the issue of youth crime was emotive and “super complex”, admitting that youth detention was not working.
“But we’re on a treadmill here and it’s going around and around and we can’t just jump off and raise the age and think it’s gonna fix everything,” Bennett said.
“Kids as young as 10 or even younger are committing horrendous crimes in our communities.
“So until we can get to the background and the other issues of law and order, particularly with youth, we [the LNP] weren’t going to support it.
“It’s cart before the horse.”
The Greens MP Michael Berkman, who introduced the bill and wrote the dissenting report on the committee, described Bennett’s reasoning as “rubbish”.
“The argument that we can’t raise the age until we’ve got all those supports in place is rubbish and is completely disingenuous,” Berkman said.
“We know what works. The services exist to provide these supports, they are just not adequately funded.”
The member for Maiwar said the evidence was clear that a targeted, therapeutic response would help troubled lead “rewarding and constructive lives”, not let them off the hook.
“No one is suggesting that we just go easy on kids who are behaving poorly,” Berkman said.
“The point is that we need to shift away from criminal responses that we know just make these kids’ lives harder and make their behaviour worse.”
Berkman called on the premier to show leadership, saying the Queensland government was using the committee as a “fig leaf” while it pushed the issue “into the never never”.
“The committee’s report is a symptom of a completely busted and dysfunctional committee system,” he said.
“On an issue like this, there is no justification for the government to persist with its policy position.
“But what the government will do is hold up this committee report as though it provides some veneer of justification, when there is none.”
