Queensland to unwind ‘knee-jerk’ action on decades-old inquiry call

Public drunkenness could become a crime in Queensland again, with the LNP government saying it will focus on reversing a “short-sighted” decision made by the previous Labor government.

Queensland decriminalised public drunkenness, becoming the last Australian state to do so, under former Labor premier Steven Miles in 2024.

Miles was acting on a recommendation made more than three decades ago in a landmark royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody.

The 1991 royal commission found that the charge of public drunkenness disproportionately affected Aboriginal people.

Laws were also changed to allow people to have a reasonable excuse for public urination.

The state LNP, in opposition at the time, have consistently argued against the changes since.

After his government first floated potential action to wind back the changes in June, Premier David Crisafulli was asked at a media conference on Tuesday if there was a need to change the laws.

“They were knee-jerk, they were short-sighted, and time has proven how wrong they are. So the short answer is yes,” Crisafulli responded.

He said some of his partyroom colleagues had been pushing him to act, including Maryborough MP John Barounis, whose community Crisafulli described as being “under siege” due to the change.

“But it’s a number of regions. If you send a message to people that that kind of behaviour becomes tolerated, well, then it just keeps ratcheting up,” he said.

“We are working on [law changes] at the moment.”

Crisafulli said Police Minister Dan Purdie would pursue the matter “for the year of 2026”, but no further detail was given.

First Nations people have consistently faced disproportionate police use of public drunkenness laws and other public order offences.

During a Queensland parliamentary inquiry in 2022 probing decriminalisation of the laws, Police Commissioner Steve Gollschewski said the number of charges laid statewide were low.

Queensland’s Chief Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Officer, Haylene Grogan, had told the inquiry the need for change was “clear and evidence-based”.

“We need to find solutions to public drunkenness outside the criminal justice system,” she said. “We need to tackle the underlying social and emotional wellbeing issues driving this vicious cycle.”

Victoria announced it would decriminalise public drunkenness in 2019, as a coroner investigated the death of 55-year-old Yorta Yorta woman Tanya Day.

Day was asleep on a train from Bendigo to Melbourne when she was arrested under public drunkenness laws on December 5, 2017. That night, she fell and hit her head in the cells of the Castlemaine police station and died in hospital from a brain haemorrhage less than three weeks later.

Her family argued she would still be alive had public drunkenness not been a criminal offence.

In a statement on Tuesday, responding to remarks by Queensland Attorney-General Deb Frecklington, Sisters Inside chief executive Debbie Kilroy described the push by the LNP government as “historical denial”.

“The government knows exactly what it is doing. It knows who will be targeted, who will be arrested, and who will end up in cells. This is not a failure of knowledge, it is intent,” Kilroy said.

“Police already have move-on powers. There are already laws to deal with harm or violence. What this proposal does is reopen a direct pipeline from the street to custody, the very pipeline the royal commission warned against.

“Queensland does not need a return to laws that were condemned more than 30 years ago. It needs courage to break from a system that cages Aboriginal people and then acts surprised when the body count keeps rising.”

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