Queensland has legislated remote camps for children, while Victoria has made it easier to sentence young offenders as adults. Victoria once kept more kids out of jail by investing in community alternatives. That hard-won approach is being lost in the race to sound tough.

On 17 September the Queensland parliament passed the Youth Justice (Circuit Breaker) Amendment Bill 2026. Courts may now order children to live for up to six months at remote camps run by non-government providers, wearing electronic monitoring devices. The program will take up to 60 children and is funded at $80 million over four years. The government calls it the last stop before detention. Its critics call it a boot camp by another name.

Queensland has run this experiment before. In 2013 the Newman government, with Jarrod Bleijie as attorney-general, opened youth boot camps. The Palaszczuk government closed them in 2015 after a KPMG evaluation found that almost two in three participants reoffended and that the camps did no better than ordinary detention. Mr Bleijie is now deputy premier. The Queensland family and child commissioner has said he is not satisfied that harm to children in isolated camps would be reported and investigated, and the national children’s commissioner has called for the scheme to be abandoned.

A sequence, not an episode

Within weeks of the October 2024 election the Crisafulli government passed the Making Queensland Safer Act 2024. It requires children convicted of listed offences to be sentenced as adults, imposes mandatory life imprisonment for murder, removes from the Youth Justice Act the principle that detention is a last resort, removes the presumption favouring non-custodial orders, and overrides the state’s own Human Rights Act 2019. A 2026 amendment added a further 12 offences and extended the scheme to attempts, conspiracies and accessories.

Queensland’s reliance on detention was already visible in the data. On an average night in the June quarter of 2025 Queensland held 300 young people in detention, against 229 in New South Wales and 148 in Victoria, and almost nine in ten of its detained children were unsentenced. Queensland’s own figures show Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children made up about 70 per cent of those in custody on an average day in 2023 to 2024, and were detained at around 26 times the rate of other children in the year to June 2025. The Queensland Audit Office reported in 2024 that the number of young offenders had been falling for a decade, even as a small cohort of serious repeat offenders grew. The response to that cohort has been to widen the net for all children.

Queensland has cycled through inquiry, partial reform and regression for four decades. Its latest turn shows how a race to the bottom can unfold: an election fought on youth crime, a government with a large parliamentary majority, rapidly passed legislation and a human rights statute set aside by express override.

Victoria built the alternative

This matters for Victoria because Victoria once demonstrated that another course was possible.

The Cain government’s Carney Committee laid the foundations, and the Children and Young Persons Act 1989 gave them statutory form. The Act separated the criminal and protective jurisdictions of a new Children’s Court, raised the minimum age of criminal responsibility from eight to 10, and set out a sentencing hierarchy with detention at the end of it.

Behind the statute sat operational infrastructure: regional juvenile justice units in Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Shepparton, Wodonga, Traralgon, Mildura and Warrnambool, staffed by qualified social workers and youth workers with caseloads small enough to sustain working relationships with young people, their families and their schools.

Through the 1990s Victoria had the lowest rate of youth detention among the mainland states, and it still has the lowest rate in the country. When magistrates had credible community alternatives, they used them.

Two lessons follow. Low detention was produced by investment, not rhetoric. And the settlement was fragile. The Kennett government’s cuts to community services weakened the regional units in ways that took years to show.

Victoria is converging on Queensland

Victoria enters the 2026 campaign with important safeguards, including a dedicated Youth Justice Act and a specialist Koori Court. But the policy direction of the past two years runs the other way. In August 2024 the Allan government abandoned its commitment to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14, settling on 12 against the recommendation of the Yoorrook Justice Commission. The 2025 bail amendments made community safety the overarching consideration in bail decisions and created new bail offences. Crime Statistics Agency data showed unsentenced receptions to Youth Justice up 35 per cent in the year to June 2025, and the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service reported a 300 per cent increase in young Aboriginal people refused bail and remanded over the same period.

Victoria’s own adult sentencing laws, promoted as ‘adult time for violent crime’, passed in December 2025, exposing children aged 14 and over to adult sentences in adult courts for offences including aggravated home invasion, carjacking and intentionally causing injury with gross violence. The opposition has pledged to add five more offences, among them car theft and violent disorder, if elected.

Both sides now claim the mantle of toughness. The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission warned when the adult sentencing laws passed that they were unlikely to reduce crime over time and would fall most heavily on First Peoples, racialised communities and children with mental illness. In mid-2025 Aboriginal children in Victoria were detained at 7.7 times the rate of non-Aboriginal children. That is the lowest ratio among the states, and a gap the reforms of the past decade have not closed.

What the evidence shows

On few questions of criminal justice policy is the evidence as settled. Detention does not reduce reoffending. Community-based alternatives produce better outcomes at lower cost. The harms of detention fall most heavily on the children least able to bear them. The children in custody are a concentrated cohort marked by trauma, cognitive impairment, mental disorder and child protection involvement, whose needs a custodial response cannot meet.

The federal problem

The deeper difficulty is structural. Because youth justice sits with the states and territories, a child’s fate depends on which side of a border they live. Sub-national human rights instruments offer little protection when a government is prepared to override them, as Queensland has done repeatedly.

The case for Commonwealth action, grounded in Australia’s obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, is not that Canberra would design better youth justice systems than the states. It is that a national floor would stop the race to the bottom.

What Victorians should ask

Until that floor exists, state elections decide these questions. Victorian candidates should be asked five things. Will they restore detention as a genuine last resort in bail decisions for children, and publish remand numbers so the effect can be tracked? Will they commit to an independent review of the adult sentencing laws, with published data on who has been sentenced and with what result, before extending them? Will they rebuild regional community supervision on the scale that once kept Victorian detention numbers low? Will they fund the Aboriginal youth justice agencies the Youth Justice Act 2024 provides for, so that Aboriginal community-controlled organisations can make decisions about Aboriginal children? And will they set a timetable for raising the minimum age to 14?

Queensland’s record shows where the punitive course can lead: hundreds of children detained, almost nine in ten of them unsentenced, and Aboriginal children grossly overrepresented – in a state where the number of young offenders had already been falling. Victoria built the alternative once, in living memory, and the evidence for it has only strengthened. The November election will show whether either party is prepared to say so.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.