The Maryborough crash that killed three people last Sunday has laid bare how incoherent politicians, some media outlets and community members have become in attempting to respond to youth crime.
Queensland is no longer having a policy debate. It has become a giant outpouring of emotion – mostly anger – as political opportunists assure grieving community members that a deeply complex social situation can be solved by a harder swing of the hammer.
The crash – allegedly caused by a 13-year-old boy driving a stolen car – came just weeks after sustained political and media pressure led the government to override its own Human Rights Act to adopt harsh youth crime laws.
The Courier-Mail this week revealed the boy had a limited criminal history, and that Queensland’s “toughest laws in the country” would not have done a thing in this situation. (Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that experts say those laws won’t be effective in any situation.)
Yet it has still fuelled another law-and-order auction: the police union calling for children to be treated like adults, and the LNP calling for the state to remove the international law principle of “detention as a last resort” from the youth justice act.
And if all else fails to deflect from years of bad policy, reach for the oldest political trick in the book: blame the parents.
Annastacia Palaszczuk’s comment this week that “no one is going to stop youth crime” seemed to be a plea to voters not to lay blame at the feet of government.
But why shouldn’t they? The government has repeatedly claimed it can fix things through its tough-on-crime approach.
It wasn’t always this way. Four years ago, the government sent out a press release celebrating that there were no young people being held in the Brisbane police watch house.
The achievement, the statement said, showed “the critical importance of continuing to implement measures to reduce youth offending and keep children out of custody.
“This is a problem that is being solved.
“The best way to keep kids out of remand is to reduce offending and reoffending rates, and that’s a solution which will take time.”
But in the time since, Labor has implemented policies that have resulted in record numbers of children in custody. Watch houses are again being used to keep hundreds of children in custody. Youth detention centres have become places where kids are kept in effective solitary confinement for weeks.
I’ve been speaking to people involved in the youth justice sector during the past few months. What they say is alarming.
It is clear to detention workers, youth workers and incarcerated children that the race to lock more children up is turbo-charging whatever increase in serious crime is occurring out on the streets. They say children arrested for nonviolent crimes are only likely to become increasingly angry and violent when caged for long periods.
“If you treat a child like an animal, it is unsurprising that they may behave like an animal,” the children’s court judge Tracy Fantin said in a recent judgment.
The tragedy in Maryborough makes clear the limits of the government’s blunt law and order response. We cannot lock up every disadvantaged kid with “minimal criminal history”. Surely, even in the depths of grief and anger, most reasonable people realise this to be true?
Palaszczuk was right to say there’s no easy fix. But what her comments really showed is that there’s no longer an easy political response to the latest tragedy.
The last suite of policies on youth justice were little more than an exercise in damage control, devised on the fly and sold internally as an attempt to neutralise the LNP. That sort of strategy is no longer tenable.
The only remaining option is what the government should have done from the start – listen to experts about what works to reduce crime, and stop taking political cues from those carrying pitchforks.
