Introduction by Croakey: The National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People, Sue-Anne Hunter, has urged the Queensland Government to withdraw its so-called ‘circuit breaker’ legislation, saying it represents a “failure of care” towards those it targets.
Like other critics of the Youth Justice (Circuit Breaker) Amendment Bill 2026, she says it represents a return to the much criticised “youth boot camps” under the former Newman Government, which were “found wanting on family engagement, cost and reintegration”.
Hunter’s open letter has been supported by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Katie Kiss, who said children and young people sent away under the new laws to residential facilities, potentially in rural or remote areas, will be “out of sight, out of mind”.
In their article below, Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy detail how the ‘circuit breaker’ legislation raises profound questions about freedom of movement, privacy, protection of families and children, cultural rights, equality, liberty and security, and humane treatment.
The rubber-stamping of the legislation by a parliamentary committee comes as the Crisafulli Government continues to roll out more of its alarming ‘tough on crime’ programs. This includes introducing legislation this week where children and adult offenders charged under the proposed ‘breach bail, go to jail’ laws will face a mandatory minimum sentence of 12 months behind bars.
Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy write:
There are moments when we need to stop allowing governments to define things by the names they give them.
Queensland’s new “Circuit Breaker” program is being sold as an alternative to imprisonment: a therapeutic intervention, a chance for children to reset, a way of diverting them from prison.
However, if you strip away the government language and look at what is actually being proposed, a court will be able to order a child to leave their home and community and live for months at a residential facility, potentially in a rural or remote location.
That child will be under 24-hour supervision, electronically monitored, required to follow directions and prescribed programs, and prohibited from simply leaving. If they do not comply with the order, they can be brought back before a court and potentially end up in detention.
The Queensland Government committed $80 million over four years to establishing this system. It wants us to understand that investment as evidence that it is doing something about youth crime.
Prisons by another name
Those of us at Sisters Inside who have spent decades working alongside criminalised women and girls see something else: a significant expansion of the infrastructure available to control, contain and remove children.
We should be extremely careful about accepting the claim that Circuit Breaker is an alternative to incarceration simply because the Government has decided not to call the buildings prisons.
If a child is compelled by a court to live somewhere, cannot freely leave, is watched around the clock, has their movements electronically monitored and can face punishment for non-compliance, the distinction between “detention” and “residential rehabilitation” becomes dangerously thin.
Queensland has been down versions of this road before. The state previously experimented with youth boot camps, programs similarly premised on the idea that removing children from their environments and placing them in highly structured residential settings could change their behaviour.
An evaluation of that program found limited evidence that it reduced recriminalisation and problems achieving its objectives around family and community engagement. The program was ultimately scrapped.
Yet many of the underlying ideas have returned: removal, structure, discipline, residential intervention and the belief that changing the child’s behaviour can somehow resolve the circumstances surrounding their criminalisation.
Unprecedented intervention
The Government insists Circuit Breaker is different. Indeed, it says the model is unlike anything currently operating elsewhere in Australia. That should invite greater scrutiny, not less.
When a government proposes an unprecedented coercive intervention into the lives of children, it should be able to demonstrate an extraordinarily strong evidence base for doing so.
Instead, after considering 57 submissions and hearing serious concerns from legal organisations, child advocates, psychiatrists, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations and others, Queensland’s Justice, Integrity and Community Safety parliamentary committee has recommended that the bill be passed.
That decision should trouble Queenslanders, because the committee report exposes just how profound the concerns about this legislation are.
It acknowledges limitations on rights including freedom of movement, privacy, protection of families and children, cultural rights, equality, liberty and security, and humane treatment when deprived of liberty.
It nevertheless concludes those limitations are justified in pursuit of community safety and helping children to participate more positively in society.
Human rights, however, matter most precisely when governments believe they have a politically compelling reason to override them. They mean very little if they protect only people the public finds sympathetic.
First Nations children
Children accused or convicted of offences may be among the least politically popular people in Queensland right now, but they do not cease being children because governments call them offenders.
And we already know which children will bear the greatest weight of these laws.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are catastrophically mass represented throughout Queensland’s youth justice system.
Any significant expansion of the state’s power to remove criminalised children from their families and communities will inevitably fall disproportionately upon them.
This cannot be treated as an unfortunate side effect to be mitigated later through cultural programming or occasional family contact. It goes to the heart of what this legislation authorises the state to do.
The National Commission for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People warned that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are likely to be disproportionately affected and raised concerns about maintaining connections to family, kin, culture and Country.
Other stakeholders questioned the adequacy of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander governance and cultural safeguards and the failure to properly incorporate the Child Placement Principle.
The Government’s response is essentially that existing provisions of the Youth Justice Act remain relevant, that courts can consider systemic disadvantage and intergenerational trauma, and that community involvement should occur where practicable.
Historical resonance
But separation is not incidental to Circuit Breaker. It is part of its design. The Government itself has spoken about removing children from communities and the negative influences it says contribute to their offending.
Australia should understand the historical weight of that idea.
For generations, governments have justified the removal of Aboriginal children by claiming they needed to be separated from supposedly harmful families, communities and environments for their own welfare, discipline, development or protection. Governments should know by now the violence contained in the belief that Aboriginal children can be made safer by taking them away.
You cannot acknowledge the history of forced removal in one breath and construct new mechanisms for removing Aboriginal children from family, community and Country in the next.
There is another fundamental problem with Circuit Breaker. The children entering Queensland’s youth justice system do not arrive there without histories.
Many have experienced poverty, homelessness, racism, disability, family violence, institutionalisation, child protection involvement, exclusion from school, mental distress and profound trauma.
Some have already spent much of their childhood being moved between residential care placements, watch houses, detention centres and other institutions.
When governments encounter children living with this level of harm, they repeatedly ask the wrong question: how do we control this child? Where can we put them, how can we monitor them, how can we make them comply and how can we change their behaviour?
We should instead be asking what happened around that child, what they need, what their family needs, what resources their community has been denied and what would need to change for that child to have a genuinely safe and supported life.
Electronic monitoring does not heal trauma.
Removing a child from their community does not cure poverty or create stable housing.
Strict routines do not provide disability support, and surveillance cannot substitute for mental health care, education, cultural connection or long-term relationships with trusted adults.
Months inside a highly controlled environment cannot repair the structural circumstances to which a child will eventually return.
This is perhaps the deepest problem with the Circuit Breaker philosophy: it locates the problem inside the child. Change the child, discipline the child, remove the child, monitor the child and teach the child different behaviours.
But when that child comes home, if the poverty remains, the housing crisis remains, racism remains, family violence remains, disability supports remain inaccessible and schools continue excluding children, what exactly has been broken?
Scrutiny needed
There are other details in this legislation that deserve far greater public scrutiny. Significant aspects of how Circuit Breaker will operate are left to regulation, including matters relating to suitability, providers and locations, recordings involving children and aspects of the handling of electronic-monitoring information.
Considerable discretion is given to the Youth Justice chief executive in determining whether a child is suitable for the program.
The scheme can also apply in relation to offences allegedly committed before the legislation commences. The committee acknowledges the retrospective impact on children’s rights and liberties, but accepts it on the basis that Circuit Breaker is being offered as an alternative to remand or detention. Again, the benevolent description of the program is being used to justify powers that should otherwise cause serious concern.
Then there is the reporting provision raised by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service (ATSILS), Legal Aid Queensland, the Office of the Public Guardian and the Queensland Family and Child Commission.
They expressed concern about allowing self-incrimination to operate as a reasonable excuse for failing to make a particular report about harm or suspected harm, including the possibility that it could discourage reporting where a provider or worker was themselves responsible for the harm.
The department says other mandatory reporting obligations continue to apply, and the committee accepted that explanation.
Accountability crucial
When the state is creating residential institutions where children may be sent far from their existing support networks and will live under the authority of adults around the clock, there should be no ambiguity about accountability for harm.
Closed institutions create conditions in which abuse can become difficult to see, difficult to report and extraordinarily difficult for children to escape. Sisters Inside has spent more than three decades listening to people who know what happens when institutions are trusted to police themselves.
The fact that Circuit Breaker facilities will be operated by approved non-government providers does not change the coercive nature of the scheme. The court makes the order. The child must go. The child must remain. Their movements are monitored. The state determines the consequences of non-compliance. Outsourcing the operation of a coercive institution does not transform it into voluntary care.
This distinction matters because governments have become increasingly adept at expanding carceral power beyond conventional prison walls while describing it through the language of support, rehabilitation, therapeutic intervention and safety.
The architecture of containment does not always look like razor wire and cells. Sometimes it looks like electronic monitoring, compulsory residential programs, behavioural contracts and organisations contracted to supervise people on behalf of the state.
The most useful question is often the simplest: can the person leave?
For children ordered into Circuit Breaker, the answer is no.
None of this requires us to minimise harm caused by children. Communities deserve safety, and people harmed by crime deserve care, resources and meaningful responses. But we should reject the idea that community safety can only be produced by continually expanding the machinery available to control children.
Genuine safety
Imagine what $80 million could build if Queensland started somewhere else: safe housing, Aboriginal community-controlled services, intensive family support, accessible disability and mental health services, community-controlled healing programs, education that refuses to discard difficult children, long-term youth work, support for families experiencing poverty, and safe places children can voluntarily go when home is not safe.
These are not soft responses. They are the difficult and unglamorous infrastructure of genuine safety. They require governments to invest in children before a crisis rather than waiting until a child can be characterised as dangerous enough to justify another coercive intervention.
Building another place to send children is easier.
Queensland has spent years escalating its response to children in the criminal legal system. Each time harsher laws and greater powers fail to produce the promised safety, governments prescribe another dose: more police, more monitoring, more detention capacity, more punitive bail laws and more ways of controlling children.
Circuit Breaker belongs to that same political tradition, even if this time the language has been softened.
The committee report presented Queensland with an opportunity to ask whether we really want to continue down this path. Instead, after pages documenting concerns about evidence, human rights, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, cultural connection, remoteness, disability, mental health, accountability, retrospective application and delegated powers, its ultimate recommendation is remarkably simple: pass the bill.
We should refuse the linguistic trick at the centre of that recommendation.
A child does not experience deprivation of liberty as freedom because parliament chooses a nicer name for the building. A court-ordered institution does not become therapeutic simply because an NGO operates it. Electronic monitoring does not become care because the device is attached to a child’s ankle rather than a prison wall.
And removing a child from their family, community and Country does not become progressive because the government calls it a Circuit Breaker.
There is nothing innovative about removing children. Australia has been doing that for generations.
The truly radical circuit breaker would be to stop.
About the authors
Tabitha Lean is an activist, poet and storyteller. An abolition activist determined to disrupt the colonial project and abolish the prison industrial complex, she’s filled with rage, channelling every bit of that anger towards challenging the colonial carceral state. Having spent almost two years in Adelaide Women’s Prison, 18 months on Home Detention and three years on parole, Tabitha uses her lived prison experience to argue that the criminal punishment system is a brutal and too often deadly colonial frontier for her people. She believes that until we abolish the system and redefine community, health, safety and justice; her people will not be safe. She is a member of the National Network of Incarcerated & Formerly Incarcerated Women & Girls.
Debbie Kilroy OAM was first criminalised at the age of 13 and spent over two decades in and out of women’s and children’s prisons. Driven to end the criminalisation and imprisonment of girls and women, Debbie established Sisters Inside, as well as her law firm, Kilroy & Callaghan Lawyers. An unapologetic abolitionist, Debbie’s activism work centres on dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex and all forms of carceral control and exile. With a firm belief that there should be ‘nothing about us without us’, Debbie established the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls to centre the voices, experiences and aspirations of criminalisation and imprisonment women and girls in order to change the face of justice in this country.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on justice and policing
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