Queensland is looking to establish a youth justice peak body as the issue threatens to become a major sore point for the Palaszczuk government ahead of next year’s election.
Guardian Australia understands the state government will launch a competitive tender process and seek expressions of interest from multiple organisations across the sector.
The Queensland Family and Child Commission recommended the establishment of a youth justice peak body in August.
“The youth justice sector in Queensland is fragmented, with no single point of coordination across the many organisations delivering youth services,” QFCC principal commissioner, Luke Twyford, told Guardian Australia.
It is not yet clear what the peak body would look like and when an organisation would be selected. Guardian Australia understands the government is set to announce the process before Christmas.
The government’s plan comes amid intense pressure from the LNP opposition and tabloid media to crack down on youth crime.
In March, the government passed a suite of controversial laws to strengthen its response to youth justice, including making breach of bail an offence for children.
The government overrode the state’s Human Rights Act to pass these laws before suspending the act a second time in August to allow children to be imprisoned in adult watch houses.
‘No unified voice around youth justice’
Experts, advocates and the state’s human rights commissioner have lambasted the government’s youth crime policies as punitive and reactive, and called for an evidence-based approach.
Genevieve Sinclair, the chief executive of Youth Empowered Towards Independence, believes a peak youth justice body would improve the collective lobbying power of the sector.
“The problem is at the moment, we’ve got no unified voice around youth justice issues at all,” Sinclair said.
“We would expect the government to listen to a peak body if they form one.”
The chief executive of the Youth Advocacy Centre (YAC), Katherine Hayes, said a peak body could help “promote evidence-based strategies to address the root causes of youth crime” and make organisations “more efficient” by assisting with training and mentoring.
The CEO of PeakCare Queensland, Tom Allsop, said the state “needs an independent and impartial voice” that can “hold government and the non-government sector to account”.
The Youth Affairs Network Queensland was the peak youth body before it was defunded in 2012 by the then-LNP government, with Queensland the only state in Australia currently without a peak body.
Deb Kilroy is on YANQ’s management committee and told Guardian Australia she would like to see the organisation’s funding reinstated.
“YANQ does hold the line and we don’t buckle just to get support from the government, and that’s what young people need,” she said.
Queensland Council of Social Service, PeakCare and YANQ are among the organisations that could express interest in becoming the state’s peak body.
