Comment: Yet another lost shot at being honest

Despite promising to make these crucial youth justice statistics known, neither the Premier, the Youth Justice Minister nor Police Minister have said a word, writes Stephanie Bennett.

Parliament’s second sitting in more than three months will be dominated on Wednesday by victims of crime marching to the house to demand action from the government.

It has become a sad, regular occurrence – and yet they, and many Queenslanders, will ask what has changed in the six months since an emboldened Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk declared the state would now have the “toughest laws in the nation”.

The milestone also coincides with the release of key three performance metrics agreed to by the Premier after The Courier-Mail and the state’s mastheads banded together to demand their publication – the measures experts said were crucial to tackling the issue. They are not pleasant reading.

Word is that Youth Justice Minister Di Farmer has organised a meeting with a delegation of five from the rally organisers – and this is a positive step. And so is the department stepping up and fulfilling the government’s commitment to publish the data it said it would.

What is disappointing is that it was buried in a budget document, and uploaded quietly to a government website. That neither the Premier, the Youth Justice Minister nor Police Minister Mark Ryan fronted a media conference, sent out a press release – or even tweeted – these crucial statistics is bitterly disappointing, but not surprising – because they paint a stark picture of a youth justice crisis getting worse. There are more First Nations kids behind bars each day now, than there were six months ago. More juveniles are reoffending.

And the cohort most dangerous to the community – the serious repeat offenders the government’s laws were largely designed to target – has grown from 17 per cent to 20 per cent. It’s another lost opportunity for transparency for this government.