Public Health

This bill strengthens safety and health laws for Queensland mines in response to the re-emergence of black lung disease. It delivers 15 improvements including higher penalties, proactive duties on company directors, a new civil penalty regime, mandatory safety systems for small opal and gem mines, and broader inspector powers.

This bill makes it easier for Queenslanders to compare the quality of hospitals and aged care facilities by creating a public reporting framework. It also sets minimum staffing levels in public aged care homes and reforms how health complaints are handled between the Health Ombudsman and the national regulator AHPRA.

This bill was introduced in February 2020 in direct response to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. It amends the Public Health Act 2005 to allow declared public health emergencies to be extended by regulation for up to 90 days at a time, instead of the previous 7-day limit, giving Queensland Health greater continuity in managing the pandemic response.

This bill reforms how health practitioners who treat other health practitioners handle mandatory reporting, and toughens penalties for people who pretend to be registered health professionals. It was agreed by all Australian health ministers through COAG and applies nationally, with Queensland as the host jurisdiction.

This bill overhauls Queensland's workplace health and safety framework by implementing recommendations from two major reviews. It strengthens health and safety representatives, gives registered unions a direct role in workplace safety matters, makes it easier to prosecute the most serious safety offences by adding negligence as a fault element, and bans insurance against WHS fines.

This bill makes a range of changes across five health-related Acts to improve healthcare access, strengthen patient safety, and update health legislation. Key reforms include allowing nurses and midwives to perform early medical terminations of pregnancy, counting newborns as separate patients for maternity ward staffing ratios, and enabling better sharing of patient safety information across Queensland Health.

This bill would have made it easier for Queensland firefighters who develop certain cancers to get workers' compensation. It proposed 'deemed disease' coverage for 12 cancers linked to firefighting, meaning the cancer would automatically be treated as work-related if the firefighter had served a minimum number of years. The bill was discharged and did not become law.

This bill expands the Adult Crime, Adult Time youth sentencing scheme to 12 additional serious offences, replaces the existing police drug diversion program with a stricter one-chance framework, and creates new Designated Business and Community Precincts where police have enhanced powers to tackle anti-social behaviour.

This bill extended Queensland's COVID-19 emergency powers from their original expiry in late 2020 and early 2021 until 30 September 2021. It maintained the Chief Health Officer's ability to issue public health directions, continued hotel quarantine cost recovery, and preserved emergency provisions in the Mental Health Act to allow mental health patients to comply with health directions.

This bill amends eight health-related Acts to improve Queensland's health system. It strengthens protections for public health workers, modernises the Queensland Cancer Register to collect better data on cancer diagnosis and treatment, enables schools to share information with the children's vision screening program, and simplifies organ donation consent in private hospitals.

This bill establishes Health and Wellbeing Queensland, a new statutory body with an initial budget of nearly $33 million dedicated to preventing chronic disease and improving the health of Queenslanders. It takes a whole-of-government and community approach, working across sectors like education, employment and housing to tackle the social factors that drive poor health outcomes.

This bill makes wide-ranging amendments across Queensland's health laws to embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health equity, ban conversion therapy by health service providers, strengthen collaboration across the public health system, and update private hospital accreditation requirements. It also repeals the redundant Pap Smear Register and makes administrative changes to the Queensland Mental Health Commission.

This bill creates a single law for exhibiting animals in Queensland, covering zoos, wildlife parks, aquariums, circuses and mobile animal shows. It replaces four overlapping Acts with one exhibition licence and a new legal duty to minimise animal welfare, biosecurity and public safety risks.

This bill makes a wide range of transport-related changes including broadening how speed and red-light camera fine revenue can be spent on road safety, expanding the types of motorised mobility devices legally allowed on paths, improving court processes for vehicle modification offences, and protecting health professionals who report medically unfit interstate drivers.

This bill overhauls Queensland's casino and gambling regulation following major integrity failures found at casinos in other states. It introduces stronger enforcement powers for casino operators including fines up to $50 million, enables cashless gambling across all forms of gambling, creates a new simulated events wagering product, and simplifies fundraising rules for national charities.

This bill makes it easier for first responders to claim workers' compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It creates a presumptive system where PTSD in eligible workers is automatically assumed to be caused by their work, removing the burden on injured workers to prove the connection. This responds to evidence from Beyond Blue and other reviews showing first responders experience mental health conditions at substantially higher rates than the general workforce.

This bill extends Queensland's COVID-19 emergency response legislation from 31 December 2020 to 30 April 2021, keeping in place temporary measures across tenancy, court proceedings, health, and other areas. It also reforms by-election procedures during the pandemic, allows artisan distillers to sell spirits directly to the public, changes how local government councillor vacancies are filled, and bolsters youth detention centre staffing powers.

This bill creates Queensland's voluntary assisted dying scheme, giving adults who are suffering from a terminal illness expected to cause death within 12 months the legal right to choose the timing and manner of their death. It establishes a rigorous process involving three requests and two independent medical assessments, with extensive safeguards to protect vulnerable people from coercion.

This bill overhauls Queensland's casino regulation following the Gotterson Review, which found money laundering, links to organised crime, and inadequate harm minimisation at Star Entertainment's Queensland casinos. It introduces mandatory identity-linked player cards, cashless gambling limits, binding pre-commitment systems for loss and time limits, a new supervision levy on casinos, five-yearly reviews of casino operations, and requirements to exclude people banned from interstate casinos.

This bill creates a new independent state body called the Healthy Futures Commission Queensland, focused on helping children and families live healthier lives. The Commission will fund community projects, partnerships and research aimed at promoting healthy eating, physical activity and reducing health gaps between different Queensland communities.

This bill improves Queensland's workers' compensation scheme based on a major independent review, strengthens protections for apprentices and trainees, and requires Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander representation on the TAFE Queensland Board. It also repeals the redundant Commonwealth Games Arrangements Act 2011.

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 does two things: it replaces Queensland's 1982 law for hospital foundations with a modern framework for how these charities support public hospitals, and it amends drug laws to let Queensland farmers grow low-THC hemp for food. The changes modernise foundation governance and open Queensland to the new national hemp food market starting 12 November 2017.

This bill replaces the Queensland Institute of Medical Research Act 1945 — which is nearly 80 years old — with a modern governance framework for one of Australia's leading medical research institutes. It strengthens integrity and accountability requirements for Council members, modernises how researchers are rewarded for commercially successful discoveries, and streamlines leadership appointments.

This bill makes changes across five health-related areas: strengthening Queensland's pharmacy ownership licensing rules before they fully commence, moving occupational lung disease reporting from a state register to a national one, improving mosquito monitoring for Japanese Encephalitis Virus, clarifying how an Acting Mental Health Commissioner can be appointed, and fixing a drafting error about who can dispose of radioactive material.

This bill updates Queensland's electrical safety and workplace health and safety laws based on recommendations from five major reviews. It brings new technologies like e-scooters and battery storage systems under electrical safety regulation, strengthens industrial manslaughter laws to cover deaths of bystanders, makes it easier to prosecute serious safety breaches, and gives worker safety representatives new powers to document hazards.

This bill creates Queensland's first laws regulating fertility clinics and assisted reproductive technology services. It introduces a licensing scheme for ART providers, establishes a central register of donor conception information, and gives donor-conceived people the right to find out who their biological donor is from age 16.

This bill extended Queensland's COVID-19 public health emergency powers from 30 April 2022 to 31 October 2022, while allowing most other temporary COVID-19 measures to expire. It kept in place the Chief Health Officer's power to issue public health directions, emergency powers in corrective services and disaster management, and mental health patient leave provisions, with all measures tied to the ongoing public health emergency declaration.

This bill strengthens Queensland's infection control rules for hospitals, dental practices, medical clinics and acupuncture clinics. It was prompted by a Brisbane dental clinic incident where substandard sterilisation exposed staff and patients to blood-borne diseases. The changes give Queensland Health faster and stronger powers to investigate, require improvements, or order a clinic to stop a service.

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 protects the title 'surgeon' within the medical profession so that only doctors with significant specialist surgical training can use it. It responds to widespread consumer confusion in the cosmetic surgery industry, where any registered doctor could previously call themselves a 'cosmetic surgeon' regardless of their qualifications. The bill also clarifies tribunal powers when disciplining health practitioners.

This bill strengthens safety and health protections for workers in Queensland's coal mining, quarrying, and metalliferous mining sectors. Prompted by the re-identification of coal workers' pneumoconiosis (black lung disease), it increases penalties for safety breaches, introduces civil penalties for corporations, requires company directors to proactively ensure safety compliance, and improves disease reporting and health surveillance for current and former mine workers.

This bill made temporary amendments to over 20 Queensland Acts as the state's third legislative response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It addressed issues that could not be dealt with under the existing COVID-19 Emergency Response Act 2020 modification framework, providing financial relief for workers, property owners and businesses, strengthening public health and emergency powers, and enabling corrections, disability and mental health services to operate safely during the emergency. Most provisions expired on 31 December 2020.

This bill would have made the Health Ombudsman the independent auditor of Queensland public hospital waiting times. Each Hospital and Health Service would have had to send quarterly data on surgery, dental and specialist waits to the Ombudsman, who would then audit it and publish a public report. The bill failed at its second reading and did not become law.

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 overhauls safety and health laws for Queensland's mining, quarrying, petroleum and gas, and explosives industries. It responds to the Brady Review of fatal mining accidents and the Coal Mining Board of Inquiry by introducing critical control requirements, mandatory professional development for safety roles, stronger enforcement tools, and clearer industrial manslaughter liability for labour hire and contractor arrangements.

This bill gave Queensland authorities the legal powers needed to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, including lockdowns, quarantine orders, business closures, and restrictions on gatherings. It also amended electoral and planning laws to provide flexibility during the public health emergency, with most emergency powers set to expire one year after commencement.

This bill proposed to reform Queensland's abortion laws by setting clear rules on who can perform terminations, when abortions after 24 weeks are allowed, and by creating safe access zones around clinics. Introduced by independent MP Rob Pyne, the bill was withdrawn and did not become law.

This bill amends the Public Health Act 2005 to make Queensland hospitals and residential aged care facilities actively manage the risk of Legionella and other waterborne hazards in their water supplies. It was introduced after a 2013 Legionnaires' disease outbreak at The Wesley Hospital in Brisbane.

This bill gives Queensland Health significantly stronger powers to shut down shops selling illegal tobacco and vapes, and hold their landlords accountable. It responds to the rapid growth of the illicit tobacco and vaping market, which is increasingly linked to organised crime and poses serious public health risks, particularly for young people.

This bill replaces Queensland's gene technology law with a new Act that automatically applies the Commonwealth's gene technology laws as Queensland laws. It lets the Queensland Government 'opt out' of specific Commonwealth changes by regulation if needed, and carries over existing GMO licences and approvals.

This bill extended most of Queensland's temporary COVID-19 emergency laws until 30 April 2022, continuing the legal basis for public health directions, quarantine requirements, and support measures across multiple sectors. It also reformed the quarantine fee system to allow prepayment and third-party liability, and clarified that quarantine directions could be issued electronically.

This bill makes a set of changes across health, research and criminal law. It equalises Queensland's age of consent at 16 for all sexual activity, gives GPs access to hospital records through a system called The Viewer, streamlines research use of patient data, lets schools share student details with immunisation and dental providers, and frees QIMR Berghofer to pay research bonuses up to $10 million a year without Cabinet approval.

This bill sets up a compulsory registration scheme for anyone who breeds a dog in Queensland, so authorities can find and shut down cruel puppy farms. It also modernises the Biosecurity Act — aligning animal feed rules with national standards, letting officials place restrictions on contaminated animals or materials rather than only on places, and updating the lists of banned pests, diseases and weeds. A smaller change clarifies the offence of using an animal as a 'kill or lure' to blood a hunting dog.

This bill creates an independent Domestic and Family Violence Death Review and Advisory Board to examine why people are dying from domestic and family violence in Queensland and recommend changes to prevent future deaths. It amends the Coroners Act 2003 to set up the Board's membership, functions, powers, and reporting requirements, implementing a key recommendation of the Not Now, Not Ever report.

This bill lets Queensland childcare services refuse to enrol or exclude children who aren't up to date with their vaccinations, and protects operators from being sued for those decisions. It also gives the Health Ombudsman stronger powers to compel people to attend and answer questions during healthcare complaint investigations.

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 proposed extending Queensland's smoking bans to cover public transport stops, pedestrian malls, swimming pools, skate parks and the area within 5 metres of government buildings. It also aimed to stop cigarettes being sold from vehicles or pop-up stalls at public events. The bill was discharged and did not become law.

This bill updates 10 Queensland agriculture laws with mostly technical changes — clearing the way for drone-based crop spraying, tightening controls on feeding animal products to livestock, speeding up exotic disease responses, simplifying pet microchip rules, and realigning company director liability with national principles. It also stops the automatic repeal of rules that manage the state's 38 remaining forest reserves, keeping them in place until those lands can be transferred to new tenures.

This bill improves workers' compensation for Queensland coal miners and others with dust-related lung diseases, sets up a committee so families of workers killed or seriously injured at work have a formal voice, and strengthens electrical licensing safety rules. It responds to the re-identification of coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP) in Queensland.

This bill creates a lifetime no-fault scheme for Queensland workers who suffer catastrophic injuries at work, such as spinal cord injury, major brain injury, severe burns or loss of limbs. It guarantees them ongoing treatment, care and support regardless of who caused the accident, starting from 1 July 2016. The bill also reforms self-insurance rules, blocks injury costs being shifted onto subcontractors, and protects compensation payments from dropping when wages fall.

This bill replaces Queensland's 80-year-old medicines and poisons laws with a modern regulatory framework. It consolidates the Health Act 1937, Health (Drugs and Poisons) Regulation 1996, and Pest Management Act 2001 into a single, outcomes-based system that is easier for health practitioners and businesses to follow while better protecting public safety.

This bill adopts the Commonwealth Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 as a law of Queensland, ensuring all manufacturers of therapeutic goods — including sole traders and partnerships — meet national safety and quality standards. It closes a regulatory gap where small manufacturers trading only within Queensland were not subject to any therapeutic goods regulation.

This bill puts frontline clinicians onto Queensland's Hospital and Health Boards and strengthens enforcement against illegal vaping. It requires each hospital board to include at least one doctor, nurse, or allied health professional who works at that hospital, and it allows seized vaping goods to be immediately destroyed rather than stored for weeks in expensive, hazardous conditions.

This bill overhauls Queensland's smoking product laws to reduce smoking rates, combat the illicit tobacco trade, and protect more people from second-hand smoke. It introduces mandatory licensing for all tobacco and vaping product sellers, creates new offences for supplying illicit tobacco, expands smoke-free zones to outdoor dining areas, markets, and school carparks, and strengthens protections for children.

This bill would have required the Queensland Health Minister to take steps to make whole plant medicinal cannabis affordable for patients who need it. It focused on pushing the Commonwealth to relax import rules and subsidise overseas-produced medicinal cannabis while Australian production was not yet available. The bill was a private member's bill introduced by Mr Steve Dickson MP and lapsed without becoming law.

This bill rolls back two key parts of Queensland's 2016 alcohol-fuelled violence laws after an interim review found venues were routinely working around them. It scraps the 1am lock-out and the two-tier '3am safe night precinct' system, keeping a uniform 3am last drinks across all 15 precincts, while tightening the rules on one-off late-night trading permits and letting courts ban drug traffickers and suppliers from licensed areas.

This bill amends eight Queensland health Acts to fix implementation issues with the new fertility clinic regulatory framework, create a legal basis for organ donation procedures before circulatory death, require cosmetic surgery safety standards at private hospitals, and give the government broader powers to remove health board members. It is the third health legislation amendment bill for 2025.

This bill brings paramedics under Australia's national health registration scheme for the first time, meaning anyone calling themselves a paramedic must be registered and meet national standards. It also recognises nursing and midwifery as separate professions, gives regulators stronger powers to act quickly against practitioners who pose a public risk, and creates new offences (with fines up to $30,000) for deregistered practitioners who ignore prohibition orders.

This bill makes wide-ranging amendments to health and retirement village legislation. It repeals Queensland's separate medicinal cannabis approval system in favour of the Commonwealth framework, creates a mandatory register for occupational dust lung diseases like black lung and silicosis, gives Queensland Health new powers to issue public pollution notices, streamlines radiation safety licensing, modernises tissue donation laws for research, and requires retirement village operators to buy back unsold freehold units within 18 months.

This bill gives Queensland much stronger powers to crack down on the illegal sale of vaping products and illicit tobacco. It creates new offences for supplying, possessing, advertising and promoting vaping products, with penalties of up to 2,000 penalty units or 2 years imprisonment. It also introduces powers to shut down non-compliant businesses and makes it a specific offence to litter vaping devices.

This bill removes stamp duty for first home buyers purchasing new homes or vacant land to build on, with no property value cap. It also lets home buyers rent out part of their property without losing stamp duty concessions, and exempts medical practices from payroll tax on wages paid to GPs.

This bill reforms the national system for regulating health practitioners in three key areas. It requires practitioners whose registration has been cancelled to go through a tribunal process before they can reapply, permanently publishes sexual misconduct findings on the public register, and creates new legal protections for people who report concerns about health practitioners.

This bill changes six Queensland health laws at once. Its main change is a new menu labelling scheme that requires large fast-food chains, cafe and bakery chains and supermarkets to show kilojoule information on their menus. It also lets health authorities publicly name unsafe food businesses, makes it easier to fill temporary vacancies on health boards, gives registered midwives direct access to the Pap Smear Register, and clarifies that cord blood can be donated to stem-cell registries.

This bill targets alcohol-fuelled violence by cutting late-night liquor trading hours, banning rapid intoxication drinks after midnight, and stopping new extended trading approvals for takeaway alcohol. It also reforms drug and alcohol bail conditions to focus on treatment instead of punishment, and tidies up a range of liquor rules covering craft beer, community clubs, bed and breakfasts and car park events.

This bill reforms how health practitioners can regain their registration after being struck off, increases transparency about practitioners found guilty of sexual misconduct, and strengthens protections for people who report concerns about health practitioners. It amends the national health practitioner law that applies across all Australian states and territories, with Queensland-specific modifications for the co-regulatory role of the Health Ombudsman.

This bill strengthens how Australia's health practitioner registration scheme protects the public. It makes public safety the paramount principle, creates new powers to stop unregistered people from providing health services, dramatically increases penalties for misleading health advertising, and embeds cultural safety for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples as a guiding principle of the scheme.

This bill brings back a drug court in Queensland by creating a new sentencing option called a Drug and Alcohol Treatment Order. Designated magistrates can suspend a prison sentence of up to four years while the offender completes a court-supervised treatment program of at least two years. The bill also tightens the dangerous drug definition, clarifies that long prison sentences can never be 'spent', and gives extra court protections to victims of domestic strangulation.

This bill sought to remove abortion from Queensland's Criminal Code by repealing the three sections that made it a crime for women to end a pregnancy or for doctors to help them. The bill was withdrawn and did not become law.

This bill creates a legal pathway for seriously ill Queenslanders to be treated with medicinal cannabis, while keeping all other cannabis use illegal. Doctors can apply to Queensland Health for approval to prescribe medicinal cannabis to a specific patient, or, in future, prescribe as-of-right if they belong to a class of specialists listed in a regulation. Pharmacists need a dispensing approval to hand it out, and patients, carers and institutions have clear rules about how to store and use it.

This bill amends Queensland's tobacco laws to ban smoking in many more outdoor public places, including bus stops, outdoor malls, public swimming pools, skate parks, under-age sports grounds, childcare centres and aged care homes. It also stops the sale of smoking products from pop-up stalls at festivals and gives councils a new general power to ban smoking at other outdoor public places.

This bill replaces Queensland's Plumbing and Drainage Act 2002 with a new Plumbing and Drainage Act 2017, modernising how plumbing work is regulated. It streamlines how plumbing work is approved, toughens penalties for unlicensed work, and creates a new mechanical services licence that covers heating, air-conditioning and medical gas work in large buildings and hospitals.

This bill wound down Queensland's broad COVID-19 emergency powers and replaced them with a more targeted, temporary framework expiring on 31 October 2023. It allowed the Chief Health Officer to issue public health directions only about isolation, quarantine, mask wearing and worker vaccination in high-risk settings, with new requirements for public justification and parliamentary oversight.

This bill makes wide-ranging amendments to Queensland's health legislation, with the most significant reforms to the Mental Health Act 2016. It strengthens the rights of people receiving mental health treatment by replacing 'best interests' tests with a rights-based approach, improves safeguards around electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), enables international patient transfers, and aligns confidentiality provisions across health agencies.

This bill puts minimum nurse-to-patient and midwife-to-patient ratios into Queensland law for the first time. It amends the Hospital and Health Boards Act 2011 so the government can legally require public hospitals to staff prescribed wards at set ratios, with the initial targets being 1 nurse or midwife for every 4 patients on day shifts and 1 for every 7 at night.