Criminal Law

This bill establishes a Victims' Commissioner as an independent statutory officer to promote and protect the rights of victims of crime in Queensland. It also creates the Sexual Violence Review Board to examine systemic problems in how sexual offences are reported, investigated and prosecuted. The bill transfers the Charter of Victims' Rights from the Victims of Crime Assistance Act 2009 and gives the Commissioner power to handle complaints when victims' rights are breached.

This bill amends Queensland's Criminal Code to enshrine 'castle law' principles, giving homeowners and occupiers broader legal protection when using force against intruders. It extends the existing self-defence provision beyond dwellings to cover other premises such as vehicles, caravans and tents, and expands the circumstances in which potentially lethal force may lawfully be used. It was introduced as a private member's bill following the largest e-petition in Queensland history, with 113,380 signatures.

This bill makes major reforms to combat metal theft with new offences and penalties up to 25 years imprisonment, streamlines the coronial system, increases stock offence penalties, gives media a legal framework to access court information, and doubles the District Court's civil jurisdiction to $1.5 million. It also makes technical updates across more than 25 Acts covering casino law, privacy, integrity, evidence rules, and judicial administration.

This bill extends and expands 'Jack's Law' — police powers to scan people for concealed knives without a warrant using hand-held metal detectors. Named after 17-year-old Jack Beasley who was fatally stabbed in Surfers Paradise in 2019, the law now applies to all 15 safe night precincts across Queensland and all public transport stations and vehicles.

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 expands the Adult Crime, Adult Time youth justice scheme to cover 12 more serious offences, replaces Queensland's drug diversion program with a stricter framework that gives offenders only one chance at diversion, and creates Designated Business and Community Precincts where police have enhanced powers to tackle anti-social behaviour.

This bill strengthens Queensland's hate crime laws by creating higher penalties for offences motivated by hatred based on race, religion, sexuality, sex characteristics or gender identity. It also bans the public display of hate symbols like Nazi imagery, and makes it easier to prosecute serious vilification offences. The bill implements recommendations from the Legal Affairs and Safety Committee's inquiry into serious vilification and hate crimes.

This bill makes it illegal to sell knives, swords, machetes, axes, spear guns, spears, and replica firearms (including Gel Blasters) to anyone under 18 in Queensland. It also bans the sale of weapons marketed as suitable for violence and requires retailers to display prohibition signs and securely store dangerous items.

This bill establishes Forensic Science Queensland as an independent statutory body responsible for providing forensic services to support Queensland's criminal justice system. It implements the key recommendation of the Commission of Inquiry into Forensic DNA Testing, which found serious failings in how DNA evidence was tested and managed. Queensland becomes the first Australian state with dedicated legislation governing forensic science services.

This bill reforms Queensland's criminal appeals system in two significant ways. It creates a new right for convicted persons to make subsequent appeals to the Court of Appeal when fresh or new compelling evidence emerges, even after their original appeal has been decided. It also expands the double jeopardy exception — which previously only applied to murder — to allow retrials for 10 additional serious offences punishable by life imprisonment.

This bill implements the government's 'adult crime, adult time' policy, allowing children convicted of serious offences like murder, robbery, burglary and dangerous driving to receive the same penalties as adults. It also removes the principle of detention as a last resort, makes victim impact the primary consideration in sentencing young offenders, and creates an automatic process to transfer 18-year-olds from youth detention to adult prisons.

This bill amends over 30 Acts and regulations within the justice portfolio to improve how Queensland's courts, tribunals, and administrative agencies operate. It modernises the coronial system, strengthens protections for vulnerable witnesses, speeds up the handling of property offences, and fixes various anomalies across the justice system.

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 makes changes across several unrelated areas of Queensland law. It clarifies sexual consent provisions in the Criminal Code following a Queensland Law Reform Commission review, bans online wagering sign-up inducements, strengthens alcohol-fuelled violence measures including longer police banning notices and tighter ID scanning, and ensures victims of solicitor dishonesty receive full compensation from the Legal Practitioners' Fidelity Guarantee Fund.

This bill makes wide-ranging changes across Queensland's justice system, courts, electoral processes, and victims' rights. Major reforms include formally recognising the deaths of unborn children in criminal sentencing, allowing media to identify sexual offence defendants before committal, improving accountability for Justices of the Peace, modernising legal costs disclosure, and saving postal votes affected by envelope errors.

This bill introduces sweeping reforms to how e-bikes, e-scooters and personal mobility devices are regulated in Queensland, responding to a near-doubling of injuries and 12 fatalities in 2025. It sets a minimum rider age of 16 with a licence requirement, gives police power to seize and destroy illegal devices, creates new drink riding offences for cyclists and e-mobility riders, and limits footpath speeds to 10 km/h.

This bill tightens bail rules for serious repeat young offenders, gives police new powers to scan for knives in Gold Coast entertainment precincts, and makes it harder for hooning drivers to avoid identification. It responds to a small cohort of recidivist youth offenders responsible for nearly half of all youth crime, tragic knife murders in Surfers Paradise, and ongoing community concerns about dangerous driving.

This bill would have created criminal offences for Queensland Cabinet ministers who fail to declare conflicts of interest. It was a private member's bill introduced by then-Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington following a Crime and Corruption Commission investigation into allegations about the Deputy Premier. The bill lapsed at the end of the 56th Parliament and did not become law.

This bill decriminalises termination of pregnancy in Queensland by removing century-old Criminal Code offences and creating a new health-based legal framework. Based on 28 recommendations from the Queensland Law Reform Commission, it allows medical practitioners to perform terminations on request up to 22 weeks gestation, with clinical safeguards for later terminations. It also establishes safe access zones around clinics and protects women from criminal liability.

This bill creates new criminal offences for sharing intimate images without consent, commonly known as 'revenge porn'. It criminalises both the actual distribution of intimate images and threats to distribute them, with penalties of up to 3 years imprisonment. Courts can also order offenders to remove or delete the images.

This bill establishes Queensland's participation in a national scheme for transferring community based sentences — such as probation, community service and intensive correction orders — between Australian states and territories. It replaces informal interstate supervision arrangements that had no enforcement powers, ensuring offenders who move interstate can be properly supervised and held accountable for breaches in their new jurisdiction.

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 toughens Queensland's response to youth crime by increasing penalties for motor vehicle theft (up to 14 years for aggravated offences), strengthening bail conditions for young offenders, and creating a new 'serious repeat offender' declaration that prioritises community safety in sentencing. It also establishes multi-agency collaborative panels to coordinate support services for at-risk children.

This bill makes several changes to policing and emergency services laws in Queensland. It expands the Police Drug Diversion Program so people caught with small quantities of any dangerous drug — not just cannabis — can be diverted to health services instead of going to court. It also increases the maximum penalty for drug trafficking to life imprisonment, creates tougher penalties for evading police in dangerous circumstances, and introduces a new offence for assaulting fire and emergency services workers.

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 restores the Crime and Corruption Commission's power to publicly report on corruption investigations in Queensland. A 2023 High Court decision found the CCC did not have this power, invalidating past reports. The bill creates a new legal framework for public reporting with safeguards to protect individuals' rights while ensuring government transparency.

This bill makes Jack's Law permanent and expands police powers to use hand held scanners to detect knives and weapons in public places across Queensland. It also extends terrorism preventative detention powers by 15 years, confirms Marine Rescue Queensland can receive charitable gifts, and validates past SES volunteer appointments.

This bill creates new criminal offences for using dangerous attachment devices — such as sleeping dragons, dragon's dens, monopoles, and tripods — during protests. It responds to incidents where activists used these devices to block transport infrastructure and businesses, endangering themselves, emergency workers, and the public.

This bill sought to make supervision orders for dangerous sex offenders indefinite rather than fixed-term, and to create automatic lifelong electronic monitoring for repeat sex offenders. It was a private member's bill introduced by Mr Janetzki MP that lapsed at the end of the 56th Parliament and did not become law.

This bill modernises Queensland's fines enforcement system by centralising the management of camera-detected and tolling offence fines under the Queensland Revenue Office and SPER, so people deal with one agency instead of several. It also reduces land tax for Special Disability Trusts, guarantees the security of rental bonds held by the Residential Tenancies Authority, and updates government confidentiality rules.

This bill introduces a Digital Licence App so Queenslanders can carry their driver licence and proof of identity on their phone. It also enables cameras to detect seatbelt and mobile phone offences, fixes technical issues with drink driving interlock laws, preserves legal interests in rail and busway corridor land, and gives Transport and Main Roads access to private land for environmental management.

This bill implements integrity reforms recommended by the Coaldrake Report and Yearbury Report. It overhauls the regulation of lobbyists to increase transparency, strengthens the independence of Queensland's five core integrity bodies by giving parliamentary committees a greater role in their funding and appointments, and extends the Ombudsman's jurisdiction to cover non-government organisations delivering public services on behalf of government.

This bill makes changes across several areas of Queensland's justice system. It introduces shield laws to protect journalists' confidential sources, creates a pilot program allowing domestic violence victims' police-recorded statements to be used as court evidence, and establishes new rules for handling deceased persons' remains in criminal cases following the Daniel Morcombe inquest.

This bill sought to raise Queensland's minimum age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14 years old, consistent with United Nations standards and medical evidence that children under 14 lack the brain development to fully understand the consequences of their actions. It was a private member's bill introduced by Michael Berkman MP (Greens) that failed at its second reading vote and did not become law.

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 makes wage theft a criminal offence in Queensland, with penalties of up to 10 years imprisonment for stealing wages and 14 years for fraud against employees. It also creates a simpler, cheaper process for workers to recover unpaid wages through the Industrial Magistrates Court, including conciliation before matters go to a hearing.

This bill reforms Queensland's Crime and Corruption Commission to make it more accountable, independent and effective. It overhauls the CCC's enforcement powers into a unified framework, requires the Director of Public Prosecutions to advise on corruption charges before they are laid, extends journalist shield laws to CCC proceedings, and introduces fixed seven-year non-renewable terms for commissioners.

This bill decriminalises sex work in Queensland by repealing criminal offences that made most forms of sex work illegal and abolishing the brothel licensing system. It implements recommendations from the Queensland Law Reform Commission to treat sex work as legitimate work, while introducing new offences specifically targeting the exploitation of children and coercion in commercial sexual services.

This bill enables Queensland to participate in national facial biometric identity matching services, removes restrictions on police accessing driver licence photos for serious crime investigations, increases penalties for explosive offences, and provided temporary extended liquor trading for the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast.

This bill strengthens Queensland's anti-corruption framework by widening the definition of 'corrupt conduct' and giving the Crime and Corruption Commission broader powers to investigate corruption risks. It also implements recommendations from two parliamentary committee reviews to improve how the Commission handles disciplinary matters, shares information, and treats people named in its reports.

This bill strengthens safety obligations for heavy vehicle businesses, increases penalties for driving offences that cause death or serious injury, and introduces several road safety improvements. It also establishes a national database of heavy vehicles and facilitates the transition from the Federal Interstate Registration Scheme to state-based registration.

This bill reforms Queensland's youth justice laws to keep more children out of custody and ensure they receive appropriate support. It creates a new bail framework with a clear presumption in favour of releasing children, bans electronic tracking devices on young people, enables better information sharing between government agencies and service providers, and authorises body-worn cameras in youth detention centres.

This bill strengthens Queensland's response to domestic and family violence by implementing recommendations from the Women's Safety and Justice Taskforce. It recognises coercive control as a pattern of behaviour, modernises stalking laws to cover technology-facilitated abuse, reforms how courts handle competing domestic violence claims, and improves evidence rules so juries better understand DFV dynamics. It also makes unrelated changes to the Coroners Act, Oaths Act, and Telecommunications Interception Act.

This bill strengthens the independence of Queensland's key integrity watchdogs — the Auditor-General, the Integrity Commissioner, and the Ombudsman — following the 2022 Coaldrake Report into public sector culture and accountability. It makes the Auditor-General an officer of Parliament, creates the Office of the Queensland Integrity Commissioner, and introduces a criminal offence for unregistered lobbying.

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 implements a national agreement to make it much harder for people with links to terrorism to get bail or parole in Queensland. It amends four Acts to create a presumption against bail and parole for anyone convicted of a terrorism offence or subject to a Commonwealth control order, requiring them to prove exceptional circumstances before being released.

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 updates police powers and several related laws to improve community safety and front-line policing. It creates new search powers for high-risk missing persons, simplifies crime scene rules, strengthens evade police provisions, streamlines parole board processes, and adds Commonwealth child sex offences to Queensland's reportable offender scheme.

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 makes coercive control a criminal offence in Queensland and introduces an affirmative model of consent for sexual offences. It implements recommendations from the Women's Safety and Justice Taskforce to better protect victims of domestic, family and sexual violence, while also reforming how courts handle bail, sentencing and evidence in these cases.

This bill restores the Crime and Corruption Commission's ability to publicly report on corruption investigations, after the High Court ruled in 2023 that the CCC had no such power. It creates a structured framework for the CCC to prepare reports and make public statements about corruption, balanced by a public interest test, identity protections, and procedural fairness for people affected.

This bill responds to the December 2025 Bondi Beach terrorist attack by strengthening Queensland's laws against hate speech and antisemitism, and significantly toughening firearms regulations. It bans hate symbols of terrorist organisations, criminalises prohibited expressions that incite hatred, creates new protections for worshippers at religious sites, and imposes some of Australia's strongest penalties for weapons offences including new crimes targeting 3D-printed firearms.

This bill increases the financial assistance available to victims of violent crime in Queensland, with the maximum payment for primary victims rising from $75,000 to $120,000. It recognises the seriousness of domestic and family violence by boosting the special assistance payment for those victim-survivors from $1,000 to $9,000. These are the first increases to most victim assistance caps since 2009.

This bill implements a wide-ranging package of community safety reforms across policing, criminal law, weapons regulation, youth justice, domestic violence protections, and road safety. It expands police powers to scan for knives in more public places, introduces Firearm Prohibition Orders against high-risk individuals, creates new offences to protect emergency workers, and establishes a framework for removing criminal content from social media.

This bill proposed to implement the 'castle doctrine' in Queensland by expanding when homeowners and occupiers can legally use force — including lethal force — to defend against intruders. It was a private member's bill introduced by Nick Dametto MP that lapsed at the end of the 57th Parliament and did not become law.

This bill sought to create three new criminal offences targeting trespass on business premises and transport infrastructure. It was a private member's bill introduced by Mr D Last MP that lapsed at the end of the 56th Parliament and did not become law.

This bill proposed to crack down on firearms crime by introducing Firearm Prohibition Orders, creating new offences for shooting at buildings and possessing 3D gun blueprints, and significantly increasing penalties for weapons offences. It was a private member's bill introduced by Trevor Watts MP and lapsed at the end of the 56th Parliament without becoming law.

This bill expands Queensland's 'Adult Crime, Adult Time' policy by adding 20 serious offences to the list of crimes for which young offenders can be sentenced as adults. It is part of the Government's Making Queensland Safer Plan and follows advice from an Expert Legal Panel. The bill also improves victim notification arrangements.