Seniors

This bill creates an independent advisory and monitoring board to oversee the Public Trustee of Queensland. It responds to the Public Advocate's 2021 report which found the Public Trustee needed greater transparency and accountability in how it manages the financial affairs of vulnerable Queenslanders, particularly people with impaired decision-making capacity.

This bill supports two housing reforms: enabling the Homes for Homes charitable donation scheme to operate in Queensland, and improving financial transparency in retirement villages. Homes for Homes allows property owners to voluntarily donate a portion of their sale price to fund social and affordable housing. The retirement village changes give residents better access to financial information about how their fees and charges are spent.

This bill establishes a voluntary assisted dying scheme in Queensland, giving eligible adults who are suffering from a terminal condition the legal right to choose the timing and manner of their death with medical assistance. It creates a detailed request and assessment process with extensive safeguards, an independent oversight board, and legal protections for participating health practitioners.

This bill establishes the Queensland Veterans' Council as a new statutory body to take over management of Anzac Square in Brisbane, administer the Anzac Day Trust Fund that supports ex-service personnel and their families, and formally advise government on veterans' matters. It consolidates three existing governance arrangements — Brisbane City Council's trusteeship of Anzac Square, the Anzac Day Trust Board, and the Queensland Veterans' Advisory Council — into a single body.

This bill reforms Queensland's laws governing manufactured homes in residential parks to better protect home owners from excessive rent increases and difficulty selling their homes. It caps annual site rent increases at the higher of CPI or 3.5 per cent, bans market rent reviews, creates a buyback scheme for unsold homes, and introduces new transparency requirements for park operators. The reforms respond to concerns from approximately 38,000 home owners across 203 residential parks in Queensland.

This bill creates a new framework for publicly reporting quality, safety and staffing information about Queensland hospitals and aged care facilities. It also sets minimum staffing levels in public aged care homes and reforms the health complaints system to improve coordination between the Health Ombudsman and the national health practitioner regulator, AHPRA.

This bill modernises Queensland's guardianship laws to better protect adults who cannot make decisions for themselves, while also fixing unrelated issues with government integrity and corruption reporting. It implements recommendations from the Queensland Law Reform Commission's five-year review of guardianship law and the Age Friendly Community Action Plan.

This bill makes a range of amendments to health and other portfolio legislation. It repeals Queensland's separate medicinal cannabis approval process in favour of the Commonwealth system, creates a register to track occupational dust lung diseases like black lung and silicosis, gives Queensland Health new powers to require public notification of pollution events, streamlines radiation safety licensing, clarifies rules for tissue removal in medical research including for children, and ensures retirement village residents with freehold units receive payment within 18 months of leaving.