Has the Queensland election campaign become a bizarre game of political chicken?
The economic debate has veered sharply to the left. The Liberal National party’s “small target” plan has involved adopting many of Labor’s policies, including cheap public transport fees and other cost-of-living handouts.
Desperate to create a point of difference, Steven Miles and Labor have started using language such as “people before profits” and announced plans to build government-owned petrol stations and establish a state-run power retailer. Both are radical ideas in a conservative state that famously dislikes radical reform.
On law and order, the opposite is playing out. Twice in the past two years, Labor has changed legislation in order to combat the LNP’s talking points. Laws allowing police to arrest children for breaching their bail conditions were justified within Labor as necessary to silence LNP attacks about the issue.
The next lurch to the right – removing the human rights principle of “detention as a last resort” from the Youth Justice Act – followed relentless campaigning by the opposition leader, David Crisafulli.
Labor’s cave-ins were meant to neutralise the LNP’s attacks, but appear to have merely emboldened the opposition to go further.
At the outset of the election campaign, the LNP announced an “adult time for adult crime” policy.
On Tuesday, the party announced a plan to establish “reset camps” for children who have never committed an offence but are deemed at risk of becoming entangled in the criminal justice system. In some cases, children could be referred to the $50m program simply for being related to a young offender.
The LNP announcement highlights an ongoing problem with youth justice in Queensland: that evidence and expert advice is not front and centre when it comes to policymaking.
The campaign press release says the focus of the program will be on “cognitive behaviour therapies to instil discipline, the notion of consequences for actions and engagement with education”.
Guardian Australia’s In the Box series this year revealed the large numbers of children in the youth justice system with neurological disabilities, including foetal alcohol spectrum disorder. These conditions can affect a child’s executive functioning – their ability to control impulses and link consequence and action.
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According to the experts, the sorts of interventions proposed by the LNP are fundamentally unsuitable for those most at risk, including those with learning difficulties who have become disengaged from school, or with mental health issues. It doesn’t the address underlying issues that marginalise kids in the first place.
There are similarities with Campbell Newman’s boot camps, which were found by a subsequent audit to be an expensive failure, unsupported by research. Steven Miles made that comparison on Tuesday.
But the kids sent to Newman’s bootcamps were already in the youth justice system and would otherwise have been in detention centres.
Now, the same approach could be applied to a new generation of children, before they’ve even committed an offence.