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Despite the Queensland LNP winning government based on a campaign against the ‘youth crime crisis’, statistics from QLD Police reveal a different story. Dr John Jiggens writes.
THE RESULTS of the 2024 Queensland Election left both Labor and the LNP with reasons to feel pleased. Labor has governed Queensland for 22 of the past 25 years so the “It’s Time” factor was operating powerfully in favour of the LNP.
Between 1998 and 2012, Labor won five elections in a row and then was annihilated in the Cambell Newman landslide of 2012 when they were reduced to seven seats while the LNP won 78 seats. Labor, who was going for its fourth win in a row in 2024, was fearing a similar devastation, which did not eventuate, with the party holding an unexpected 30-plus seats.
The minor parties, apart from the Greens, had pleasing results. The Katter Party won three seats and may pick up another. Both One Nation and Legalise Cannabis performed at a level that gives them a chance of contending with the Katter Party for the sixth senate seat in the 2025 Federal Election.
The Greens look likely to lose their two seats, South Brisbane and Maiwar. They had hoped to hold these two and pick up several more, and they will be disappointed. They won South Brisbane previously because the LNP strategically preferenced the Greens to remove the Labor Member, Jackie Trad, who was Queensland’s Deputy Premier and was a potential future Premier.
But in 2024, with Trad gone, the LNP preferenced Labor. The Greens hold three seats in the Federal Parliament and will struggle to hold all three in 2025.
Repeating the successful strategy adopted by the Country Liberal Party (CLP) in the recent Northern Territory Election, youth crime was the defining issue in the Queensland Election with the LNP relentlessly campaigning on the four-word slogan, ‘Adult Time, Adult Crime’.
Queenslanders weren’t safe in their homes because of the youth crime crisis, the LNP said, though Queensland Police Service statistics contradict this claim.
In the 25 years between 1998 and 2023, when Labor was in power for all but three years, police figures show offences trended downwards from a range of 160-200 offences per 100,000 population between 1998 and 2002 to a range of 50-90 offences per 100,000 population between 2015 and 2023.
Foundation Professor in Criminology at Griffith University Ross Homel says the percentage of crimes in Queensland committed by young people under the age of 18 has declined to 15% in the last ten years compared with a previous level of 20%:
“The basic facts about youth crime in Australia, including Queensland, is that the number of young people getting into trouble with police has been going down every year.”
But statistics are boring and do not propel media narratives. In the Murdoch tabloids, traumatic tales prevail. Besides new Premier David Crisafulli, the face of the LNP campaign was Russell Field, an LNP candidate whose son and pregnant fiancée were run down and killed by a drunken young car hijacker. He campaigned as a victim of crime for ‘Adult Crime, Adult Time’ as a legacy for his son and won the bayside seat of Capalaba for the LNP with a 10% swing.
Another statistic: The 2019 Queensland Productivity Commission Inquiry into Imprisonment and Recidivism found that First Nations people made up 4.6% of Queensland’s population but they made up 31.3% of Queensland’s prison population. They were one-third of the prison population and their rate of imprisonment was seven times higher than average.
As shocking as this statistic is, Queensland has only the third highest rate for First Nations imprisonment in Australia. In West Australia, First Nations people make up 43% of the prison population. In the Northern Territory, they make up 84% of prisoners. But will the party that opposed the Voice Referendum address this problem?
Professor Homel says that putting youth into detention and keeping them in detention for longer and longer will not reduce their chances of re-offending and won’t make the community safer. He calls this a “Big Lie” popularised by politicians.
In a recent article he co-wrote in The Conversation called ‘We tried a different preschool curriculum to prevent youth crime. Checking in 20 years later, it worked’, he details an early community-based crime prevention program he was involved in in a disadvantaged community in Brisbane in the early years of this century.
Working with people in the local community, with elders, academics, teachers in schools and preschools, and with parents, they discussed the needs of children in the area and how to keep them out of trouble off the streets and away from the youth justice system.
One of the priorities that emerged was the need to boost the children’s oral language development and their expressive and receptive language skills. They introduced an enriched component to the standard preschool curriculum for four-year-olds in two of the seven preschools in the area and worked with specialists in this area of children’s communication skills and those specialists worked with the classroom teachers and the parents.
Teachers reported a marked improvement in classroom behaviour and an improvement in their language skills. By the end of the first year of primary school, the children had improved academic achievement and improved behaviour that lasted throughout the whole of primary school.
The long-term impact of this work was a 56% reduction in the number of children going to youth justice court for serious offences. If children received both family support and the enriched educational program, then the number getting into serious trouble was absolutely zero.
But early intervention in disadvantaged communities is rarely championed for the “youth crime crisis”.
Dr John Jiggens is a writer and journalist currently working in the community newsroom at Bay-FM in Byron Bay.
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