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. <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/criminologists-debunk-youth-crime-crisis-claims/104445432">Speaking to ABC News</a> 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 <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-24/queensland-state-budget-2025-winners-and-losers/105427568">$4.7 billion to the Olympics</a>. 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. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/aug/17/first-nations-campaigner-accuses-queensland-government-of-hypocrisy-for-voting-down-raise-the-age-bill">In 2022, Labor MPs voted</a> 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.

Ella Gutteridge

Queensland government considers reintroducing public drunkenness laws

Just a week after the victory of the Liberal National Party in the Queensland state election, hundreds rallied in Brisbane city in defence of abortion rights. Homemade signs read “LNP = Anti-choice”, “This is not America” and “Hands off my body, hands off my rights!”. The 500-strong crowd heard speeches and then marched around the city. 
Abortion returned as an issue in Queensland after the far-right Katter Australia Party leader, Robbie Katter, pledged to move a private members’ bill to repeal abortion laws during the election campaign. Despite the Liberal National Party leader, David Crisafulli, insisting that there would be no change to the laws if his party were to be elected, he refused to provide details about how this would be achieved, despite being asked more than 132 times. 
There is good reason to be concerned. Abortion was only fully decriminalised in Queensland in 2018. At the time, all but three Liberal National MPs voted against decriminalisation, including Crisafulli himself. Crisafulli and sections of the LNP leadership may have wanted to pragmatically smother the issue for electoral reasons during the campaign, but their MPs and party cadre are highly motivated by religious bigotry. They may well decide to make a stand about the issue, regardless of electoral expediency. 
While Queensland Labor has attacked Crisafulli for refusing to guarantee abortion rights, at the same time the party capitulates to bigots within its own ranks with the provision of conscience voting, and in government has refused to invest the necessary funds in healthcare to make abortion accessible throughout the state. 
As it stands, there are only two clinics that provide surgical abortions in Brisbane. Most public hospitals do not offer abortion access, disproportionately disadvantaging women in regional or rural areas who are forced to travel hours to seek an abortion. Because of this, speakers at the rally emphasised that it is not enough for abortion to be legal, it must also be free and accessible. 
Protest also matters. When the only abortion clinic in Rockhampton was closed in 2021, community activists protested for over a year for access to be reinstated to the regional city. Under pressure, the Labor state government announced that the procedure would be provided from then on at the local public hospital. 
With abortion activists facing a hostile state government, this is an important lesson in resistance and how to defend hard-won rights.

Hundreds rally for abortion rights in Brisbane

Queensland Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has approved gas exploration in the fragile Lake Eyre basin, which is home to the last large free-flowing desert river system in the world. 
Scientists say that gas infrastructure would interrupt the flow of water during floods, starving the river channels and the landscape of the water that periodically turns the arid landscape into lush green valleys. Palaszczuk has granted exploration rights to more than 800,000 hectares of rivers and floodplains around the basin, <a href="https://www.lockthegate.org.au/10_000_australians_sign_petition_calling_on_premier_palaszczuk_to_ban_new_gas_in_lake_eyre_basin">according to an estimate by environmental campaign group Lock the Gate</a>.
Adding insult to injury, federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has approved the expansion of the Lake Vernon coal mine in the Bowen basin. On top of that, <a href="https://michaelwest.com.au/santos-wins-fracking-approval-for-towrie-gas-development-from-environment-minister-tanya-plibersek/">as reported by Callum Foote from Michael West Media</a>, Plibersek on 20 February announced that her department had granted Santos, an oil and gas exploration company, approval to develop a 116-well coal seam gas project in the Surat basin.
Lock the Gate, an alliance of farmers, traditional owners and conservationists, has been campaigning against fracking near Queensland’s outback rivers for years. In the last three state election campaigns, the Labor Party promised to protect the floodplains of the Channel Country within the Lake Eyre basin—contrasting itself to the Liberal National Party opposition, which tore up protections for the area when it was last in government. 
But instead of re-establishing protections contained in the initial Wild Rivers Act, which offered some defence for the wetlands in the Lake Eyre basin, the state government only founded a stakeholder advisory group. The concerns of stakeholders such as those involved in Lock the Gate have been promptly ignored.
Undeterred, activists held a protest to present their petition of more than 10,000 signatures to the Queensland parliament on 22 February. “While the Palaszczuk government dawdles, the Resources Department is waving through exploration applications from gas companies covering some of the most precious parts of the Lake Eyre Basin”, Lock the Gate Alliance Queensland coordinator Ellie Smith <a href="https://www.lockthegate.org.au/10_000_australians_sign_petition_calling_on_premier_palaszczuk_to_ban_new_gas_in_lake_eyre_basin">said in a media release</a>. 
“The further these applications progress, the harder it will be for the government to claw them back. Queenslanders need decisive action now. We can’t wait another election cycle for more hollow promises”, she continued.
Climate activists will have to keep up the fight against not only the behemoths of the coal industry, but also the powerful natural gas surveyors who market themselves as a green alternative, despite their destruction of the landscapes they occupy. 
And it’s clear that, despite their environmentalist rhetoric, the state and federal Labor governments are lining up to put the commercial interests of the oil, coal and gas companies ahead of the environment.

Queensland government considers reintroducing public drunkenness laws

Hundreds rally for abortion rights in Brisbane

Labor approves more coal and gas expansion in Queensland

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