Queensland government considers reintroducing public drunkenness laws
The Queensland Liberal National state government is considering reintroducing public drunkenness laws that disproportionately target Indigenous people.
The move comes only a year after public drunkenness laws were abolished, and after a 2022 parliamentary report found that 47 percent of people charged with public intoxication were Indigenous, despite the Indigenous population being just 4.6 of the state’s residents.
The abolition of drunkenness laws was one of the recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody—the rationale being that intoxicated people should be presented to non-custodial facilities to divert Aboriginal people from police custody.
Townsville Liberal MP Peter Baillie criticised the decriminalisation, carried out by the previous Labor government, saying that the decision made it hard for the police to do their jobs and was “significantly impacting liveability in our beautiful part of the world”.
Speaking at a protest against the laws, Mununjali man and Indigenous activist William Sim said: “These laws make our people less safe but make it easier for the police to racially profile us, lock us up and brutalise us”.
The laws certainly aren’t applied with the same enthusiasm on the Gold Coast or in Brisbane’s nightclubbing precinct, Fortitude Valley.
The LNP’s campaigning would have you think that crime rates are skyrocketing. In fact, they’re trending downwards. Speaking to ABC News last year, University of Queensland criminologist Renee Zahnow said there is an “absolutely unanimous” academic consensus that Queensland is not in the grips of a crime crisis, and that the myths are being driven by political opportunism and sensationalist media reporting. The Australian Bureau of Statistics found that youth crime hit its lowest point ever in 2022 and has remained steady ever since.
Despite this, the government passed “Adult Time, Adult Crime” laws (formally the Making Queensland Safer (Adult Crime, Adult Time) Amendment Bill 2025), which will introduce mandatory jail sentences for children as young as ten years old.
The government conceded that the laws would disproportionately affect Indigenous children. Yet, shamefully, all 35 Labor MPs in the Queensland parliament supported the legislation.
Inconvenient truths have never stopped the Liberals from running a campaign to scapegoat Indigenous people. Whipping up racism and law-and-order panics are part of the party’s DNA.
The government just handed down a budget allocating $2.7 billion to new prisons and $4.7 billion to the Olympics. But for workers, there is little. The Liberal plan to allocate funding for 2,000 new community homes falls short of providing for the record 53,000 people on the social housing waitlist.
No wonder that the government wants to scapegoat Indigenous people—it takes the attention off its failure to deal with the cost-of-living crisis.
The attacks on Indigenous rights haven’t just come from conservative governments, though. The previous Palaszczuk Labor government overrode the Human Rights Act twice in eighteen months to lock up kids who violated bail conditions, and to keep children detained in adult watchhouses. In 2022, Labor MPs voted to keep the age of criminal responsibility at ten.
Labor’s attacks on Indigenous rights have opened the door to further racist cruelty from the Liberals. Neither party wants to invest the billions of dollars in housing, healthcare and education that it would require to begin to address the serious levels of poverty and disadvantage in the Indigenous community and among increasing numbers of non-Indigenous workers.
Fighting against these latest attacks from the Liberals will be an important part of the continuing fight for Indigenous rights and for a more equal state.
