Children & Families

This bill expands Queensland's youth crime laws, overhauls the drug diversion system, and creates new police powers in designated business precincts. It adds 12 new offences to the Adult Crime, Adult Time scheme so young offenders face adult penalties for more serious crimes, replaces the three-chance Police Drug Diversion Program with a stricter one-chance framework, and allows the Minister to declare business and community precincts where police have enhanced powers to address anti-social behaviour.

This bill implements the government's 'Making Queensland Safer Plan', centred on the 'adult crime, adult time' policy. It allows courts to sentence children to the same penalties as adults for 13 serious offences including murder, manslaughter, robbery and dangerous driving. It also removes the longstanding principle that detention should be a last resort for children and makes victim impact the primary consideration in youth sentencing.

This bill creates Daniel's Law, a three-tiered public child sex offender register for Queensland. It allows police to publish details of missing offenders who have breached their conditions, lets residents view photos of high-risk offenders in their local area, and enables parents to check whether someone with unsupervised access to their child is a registered sex offender.

This bill reforms how courts sentence sexual offenders in Queensland and creates a new offence for impersonating government agencies. It implements four recommendations from the Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council to better recognise victim harm, restrict the use of 'good character' defences, and protect child victims aged 16-17.

This bill extends Queensland's trial of electronic monitoring devices for children on bail by one year, to 30 April 2026. The trial allows courts to order children aged 15 and over who are charged with serious offences and have a history of offending to wear a monitoring device as a condition of bail. The extension gives the government time to properly evaluate whether the devices are effective before deciding the trial's future.

This bill amends Queensland's main education law to reduce administrative burden on schools, parents and students, and to strengthen student safety protections. It makes transfer notes mandatory when students change schools (implementing a Royal Commission recommendation), creates a streamlined framework for online learning services in state schools, modernises P&C Association rules for multi-campus schools, and extends home education eligibility to age 18.

This bill makes electronic monitoring of children on bail a permanent feature of Queensland's youth justice system, available statewide. Following an independent evaluation that found monitoring reduced reoffending, improved bail completion, and reduced time in custody, the government is removing the trial's restrictions on age, offence type, and geographic location. The bill commences on 30 April 2026.

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.

This bill strengthens Queensland police powers across several areas: extending monitoring periods for convicted child sex offenders, expanding covert investigation tools for cybercrime, allowing civilians to assist in undercover police operations, and introducing new offences to crack down on hooning events and their spectators.

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 Mason Jet Lee. It requires 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 makes it illegal to sell knives, swords, machetes, axes, Gel Blasters and other dangerous items to anyone under 18 in Queensland. It also bans the sale of weapons marketed to glorify violence — such as 'zombie knives' with violent imagery — and requires retailers to display warning signs and securely store particularly dangerous items. The bill responds to an 18% rise in knife-related offences since 2019 and a 22% rise among under-18s.

This bill establishes a nationally consistent worker screening system for people working with Australians with disability under the NDIS, replacing Queensland's existing yellow card system. It ensures that screening clearances are portable across all states and territories, introduces ongoing national criminal history monitoring, and streamlines the process for workers who also need a blue card to work with children with disability.

This bill updates Queensland's laws for monitoring convicted child sex offenders to address modern technology-based offending. It requires offenders to report their use of anonymising software, hidden vault applications and the digital identifiers of all their devices, and gives police stronger powers to inspect those devices and enter offenders' homes to do so.

This bill tightens bail for serious repeat youth offenders, trials electronic ankle monitoring for 16-17 year olds in limited areas, gives police new powers to scan for knives in Gold Coast entertainment precincts, and strengthens owner onus rules for hooning offences. It responds to a small cohort of recidivist young offenders responsible for nearly half of all youth crime, recent knife murders on the Gold Coast, and ongoing community concern about dangerous driving.

This bill creates Queensland's first laws to regulate the fertility industry and establishes a central register of donor conception information. It was introduced after high-profile failures in 2023, including allegations of wrong donor sperm being used and donors having far more genetic offspring than guidelines allow. The bill requires all fertility clinics to hold a Queensland licence, sets enforceable rules for how gametes and embryos are used, and gives all donor-conceived people the right to know who their biological donor is.

This bill implements the third tranche of legislative reforms recommended by the Women's Safety and Justice Taskforce, focusing on sexual violence and women and girls' experiences in Queensland's criminal justice system. It creates a new criminal offence to protect 16 and 17 year olds from sexual exploitation by adults in positions of authority, strengthens courtroom protections for victim-survivors, reforms evidence rules to make it easier to admit relevant past conduct in criminal trials, and extends non-contact orders from two to five years. The bill was passed with amendment.

This bill toughens Queensland's response to serious repeat youth offending, particularly involving stolen motor vehicles. It increases maximum penalties for unlawful use of motor vehicles to up to 14 years imprisonment, makes it a criminal offence for children to breach bail conditions, creates a new 'serious repeat offender' declaration for sentencing, and establishes multi-agency panels in legislation to coordinate support for high-risk young people.

This bill repeals and replaces Queensland's births, deaths and marriages registration law. It removes the requirement for surgery to change a person's recorded sex, allows same-sex parents to both use matching titles on birth certificates, streamlines registry services, and strengthens name change fraud prevention. It also adds new anti-discrimination protections for intersex people.

This bill makes wide-ranging reforms to Queensland's child protection system and blue card (working with children check) framework. It strengthens the rights of children in care, ensures their voices are genuinely heard in decisions affecting them, modernises the regulation of foster, kinship and licensed care, and connects Queensland to a national system for screening people who work with children.

This bill sought to raise the age of criminal responsibility in Queensland from 10 to 14 years old. Children under 14 would no longer have been charged, prosecuted, detained, or given criminal records. It also required the release of children already in custody and the expungement of their records. This bill failed at the second reading and did not become law.

This bill makes a broad set of changes to Queensland's policing, corrective services and child protection laws. It expands police powers to ban people carrying knives in safe night precincts, creates tougher parole rules for the most serious murderers, strengthens the No Body No Parole framework, introduces new criminal offences for killing or seriously injuring police and corrective services animals, and updates child sex offender monitoring and blue card screening to cover additional Commonwealth offences.

This bill strengthens Queensland's domestic and family violence laws by implementing key recommendations from the Women's Safety and Justice Taskforce. It recognises coercive control as a pattern of behaviour, modernises the stalking offence to cover technology-facilitated abuse, reforms court processes for competing protection order applications, and expands evidence rules so courts and juries better understand domestic violence dynamics. It also updates outdated sexual offence terminology and makes unrelated changes to the Coroners Act, Oaths Act, and Telecommunications Interception Act.

This bill gives Queensland stronger powers to enforce the national ban on recreational vaping and crack down on the illegal sale of vapes and tobacco. It creates new offences for supplying and possessing illicit nicotine products (including vapes and nicotine pouches), dramatically increases penalties, and introduces powers to close non-compliant shops and seek court injunctions against repeat offenders.

This bill overhauls Queensland's blue card system, which screens people who work or volunteer with children. It introduces a fairer risk-based assessment, expands the types of jobs and businesses requiring blue cards, and begins removing the blue card requirement for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kinship carers. It also enables sharing of child protection court records with family law courts across Australia.

This bill creates a mandatory child safe organisations system for Queensland, requiring organisations that work with children to meet 10 child safe standards and to report and investigate allegations of child abuse by their workers. It implements key recommendations from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, with the Queensland Family and Child Commission overseeing the system.

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 and other inquiries to strengthen protections for victim-survivors of domestic, family and sexual violence across the criminal justice system.

This bill sought to reform Queensland's Blue Card system for Indigenous communities by giving Community Justice Groups the power to approve restricted working with children clearances for community members who would otherwise be refused due to certain past criminal offences. It was a private member's bill introduced by Mr R Katter MP that failed at the second reading stage and did not become law.

This Greens private member's bill sought to implement recommendations from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse by making it easier for survivors to sue institutions. It would have created a legal duty for schools, churches, and other organisations to prevent child abuse and reversed the burden of proof so institutions had to show they took reasonable steps. This bill was discharged and did not become law.

This bill reforms Queensland's criminal justice response to child sexual abuse, implementing key recommendations from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It creates mandatory reporting obligations for all adults, introduces new offences for possessing child abuse objects, strengthens sentencing for child sexual offenders, and establishes a pilot scheme to help vulnerable witnesses give evidence in court.

This bill creates a portable long service leave scheme for Queensland's community services industry. It allows workers who frequently change employers within the sector — due to short-term funding arrangements and contract-based employment — to accumulate long service leave credits across the industry rather than losing entitlements with each job change. The bill also fixes a loophole in the Industrial Relations Act 2016 so that employees dismissed due to illness are entitled to pro rata long service leave.

This bill creates a new independent Child Death Review Board and expands requirements for government agencies to review their involvement when a child known to Queensland's child protection system dies or suffers serious physical injury. It implements recommendations from the Queensland Family and Child Commission's review prompted by the death of 21-month-old Mason Jet Lee, replacing the existing Child Death Case Review Panels with a more independent, whole-of-system approach.

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 a legal framework to recognise Torres Strait Islander traditional child rearing practice (Ailan Kastom), under which children are permanently placed with cultural parents within the extended family. It establishes a new Commissioner to decide applications for cultural recognition orders that transfer legal parentage, so that a child's birth certificate and legal identity match their cultural reality. This is the first legislation of its kind in Australia.

This bill implements key recommendations from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It amends the Civil Liability Act 2003 to reverse the burden of proof so institutions must demonstrate they took reasonable steps to prevent child sexual abuse, and creates a legal framework for suing unincorporated organisations like churches that could previously avoid liability.

This bill reforms Queensland's youth justice system by creating stronger bail protections for children, reducing the time young people spend in custody on remand, and banning electronic tracking devices on children. It implements the Queensland Government's Youth Justice Strategy 2019-2023 and its principle that detention should be a last resort for young people.

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 Queensland's 'No Card, No Start' policy, requiring everyone to hold a blue card (working with children clearance) before starting child-related work. It modernises the blue card application process with online applications, creates a register of home-based care services to better monitor children's safety in foster care, kinship care and family day care settings, and expands the list of offences that permanently disqualify a person from working with children.

This bill enables Queensland to participate in the National Redress Scheme for people who experienced institutional child sexual abuse as children. The scheme was established in response to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The Queensland Government committed $500 million in redress payments for abuse that occurred in its institutions.

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.