Child Protection

This Greens private member's bill sought to implement key recommendations from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It would have created a legal duty for institutions — such as schools, churches, and care facilities — to prevent child abuse and made it easier for survivors to sue by reversing the burden of proof. This bill was discharged and did not become law.

This bill strengthens Queensland's response to child sex offending, cybercrime, organised crime, and hooning. It doubles reporting periods for child sex offenders, gives police new covert investigation tools for online fraud and identity theft, allows civilians to assist in undercover operations, and creates offences targeting hooning spectators, organisers, and promoters.

This bill clarifies that adoption is an option for achieving permanent homes for children in out-of-home care, responding to coronial recommendations following the death of toddler Mason Jet Lee. It requires mandatory case plan reviews after two years for children under the chief executive's long-term guardianship, to ensure better permanency options are actively considered.

This bill updates Queensland's disability services laws for the full rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme from 1 July 2019. It ensures state-level protections for people with disability continue under the new national framework, strengthens criminal screening of disability workers, and maintains coronial oversight and community visitor programs for NDIS participants receiving high-level supports.

This bill creates a public child sex offender register in Queensland, named Daniel's Law in honour of Daniel Morcombe. It establishes a three-tiered system allowing police to publish details of missing non-compliant offenders, residents to view photos of offenders in their area, and parents to check whether someone in contact with their child is a registered offender. The government committed $10 million to establish the register.

This bill reforms Queensland's criminal justice system to better protect children from sexual abuse and improve access to justice for survivors. It implements key recommendations from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, strengthens sentencing for child exploitation material offences, and criminalises child abuse objects such as life-like child replicas.

This bill updates Queensland's child protection offender registry scheme to address technology-based offending that has become more prevalent since the COVID-19 pandemic. It strengthens police monitoring powers over convicted child sex offenders, particularly their use of digital devices, anonymising software, and online platforms.

This bill implements the third wave of reforms from the Women's Safety and Justice Taskforce, focusing on sexual violence and improving how women and girls experience the criminal justice system. It creates new offences to protect young people from sexual exploitation by people in authority, strengthens protections for vulnerable witnesses, allows expert evidence to help juries understand victim behaviour, and modernises rules about how past behaviour evidence can be used in criminal trials.

This bill makes four sets of changes: it strengthens sentencing for sexual offences based on recommendations from the Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council, creates a new offence for impersonating government agencies, updates crimes at sea laws to match the national scheme, and fixes technical issues in the blue card system for working with children.

This bill reforms Queensland's system for reviewing child deaths connected to the child protection system. It requires multiple government agencies — not just Child Safety — to conduct internal reviews when a child known to the system dies, and establishes an independent Child Death Review Board to identify systemic failures and recommend improvements.

This bill proposed giving Indigenous Community Justice Groups the power to approve Blue Cards (working with children checks) for community members who would otherwise be denied due to certain non-sexual criminal offences such as stealing, burglary, and drug offences. It was a private member's bill introduced by Mr R Katter MP. The bill's second reading failed and it did not become law.

This bill creates Australia's first legal framework to recognise Torres Strait Islander traditional child rearing practice (Ailan Kastom), where children are permanently placed with cultural parents within the extended family network. It establishes a Commissioner to decide applications for cultural recognition orders that legally transfer parentage, resulting in new birth certificates that reflect a person's cultural identity.

This bill reforms Queensland's child protection system to give children in care stronger rights and a genuine voice in decisions about their lives. It also strengthens the blue card screening system by connecting Queensland to a national database and allowing domestic violence information to be considered in working with children checks.

This bill makes broad changes across policing, corrective services, and child protection law. It tackles knife crime in entertainment precincts, overhauls parole rules for the most serious murderers, strengthens 'No Body, No Parole' laws, creates tougher penalties for harming police and corrective services animals, and updates child sexual abuse offence lists to include modern Commonwealth offences.

This bill implements key recommendations from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It shifts the burden of proof so institutions must show they took reasonable steps to prevent child sexual abuse, and creates a legal framework so survivors can identify and sue the right defendant even when the responsible institution is unincorporated or has changed over time.

This bill sought to introduce mandatory minimum prison sentences for the murder of children and create a new criminal offence of 'child homicide'. Named after Mason Jett Lee, a toddler who was killed, it aimed to ensure sentencing for child deaths reflects community expectations and aligns with other Australian jurisdictions. The bill was defeated at the second reading and did not become law.

This bill introduces a 'No Card, No Start' policy for Queensland's blue card system, meaning no one can begin paid work with children without first holding a working with children clearance. It also modernises the blue card application process with online options, expands the criminal offences that automatically disqualify a person from working with children, closes loopholes that allowed high-risk people to rely on exemptions, and creates a centralised register of home-based care services.

This bill overhauls Queensland's blue card (Working with Children Check) system. It introduces a new risk-based decision-making framework replacing the current 'best interests' test, expands the types of work and businesses that require blue cards, simplifies the disqualification process, removes blue card requirements for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kinship carers, and improves information sharing between agencies.

This bill creates a mandatory child safe organisations system for Queensland, requiring organisations that work with children to meet 10 child safe standards and report allegations of child abuse by their workers. It implements key recommendations from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and gives the Queensland Family and Child Commission new powers to oversee child safety across sectors including schools, childcare, health services, religious bodies, sport clubs, and government agencies.

This bill enables the National Redress Scheme for Institutional Child Sexual Abuse to operate in Queensland, following recommendations from the Royal Commission. The Queensland Government committed $500 million for redress payments to people who experienced child sexual abuse in government-run institutions. The scheme provides eligible survivors with monetary payments, counselling and psychological care, and a direct personal response from the responsible institution.

This bill strengthens Queensland's criminal law response to child homicide, following a Sentencing Advisory Council inquiry that found community expectations were not being met. It requires courts to treat a child's vulnerability as an aggravating factor in manslaughter sentencing, expands the definition of murder to include reckless indifference to human life, and increases the maximum penalty for failing to supply necessaries to dependants from 3 to 7 years.

This bill would have created a new Blue Card framework giving Indigenous community justice groups the power to recommend restricted working with children clearances for people in their communities. It aimed to address chronic unemployment in remote Indigenous communities where the standard Blue Card system's inflexibility prevents people with certain past offences from accessing employment, even when the local community considers them safe. The bill's second reading was defeated and it did not become law.