Crisafulli’s sentencing boss held youth crime concerns
Cross-examination on youth crime
Has the Crisafulli government misjudged the legal eagle picked to advise the Attorney-General on its election-winning issue: youth crime?
Retired District Court chief judge Kerry O’Brien was hand-picked this week to chair the government’s Sentencing Advisory Council. It’s the body charged with giving legal legitimacy to the crackdown on juvenile offenders, and the government’s flagship law reform: jailing kids who commit so-called “adult crimes” for “adult time”.
Queensland voters and victims’ advocates are fans of the tough-on-crime push; the United Nations special rapporteur on torture not so much.
QSAC’s job is to advise the Attorney-General on sentencing – if asked – and to inform the community about sentencing through research and publications.
Chooks wonders whether O’Brien’s views on juvenile offenders have changed since the long-serving judge was head of the Children’s Court in the early 2000s, under the Beattie government.
Back then, O’Brien was a persistent thorn in the Labor administration’s side, raising serious concerns about the treatment of 17-year-old offenders as adults before the law.
“In Queensland, young people are not lawfully permitted to vote or to drink alcohol until they reach the age of 18, yet, at the age of 17, their offending exposes them to the full sanction of the adult criminal laws,” O’Brien wrote in the Children’s Court annual report in 2002-03.
There are I believe real concerns involved with the potential incarceration of 17 year olds with more seasoned and mature adult offenders. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child considers a person as a child until he/she reaches the age of 18 and other Australian states have adopted a similar approach. The recommendation deserves careful consideration. ”
Chooks asked Attorney-General Deb Frecklington’s office how O’Brien’s views fit with the ‘Adult Crime Adult Time’ sentencing reforms and whether she was aware of them before the appointment.
A spokeswoman responded: “We aren’t concerned about decades-old comments said prior to Labor’s youth crime crisis”.
Jobs for the Boys (again)
For a government that pledged hand-on-heart to do things differently, there’s a lot about the Crisafulli Liberal National Party government that feels awfully familiar.
During an interminable near-decade in Opposition, the LNP couldn’t stop (correctly) criticising the Labor government for “brazen political cronyism” declaring that “appointing Labor mates to taxpayer-funded gigs doesn’t pass the pub test”.
But it appears David Crisafulli and his government have dismounted that particular high horse, and dug up yet another ex-LNP MP for a taxpayer-funded gig.
Lachlan Millar, who retired at the October election after nearly 10 years as MP for the sprawling outback electorate of Gregory, has been quietly appointed as a director of the Gladstone Area Water Board, for which he’ll be paid more than $30,000-a-year for about ten meetings.
By Chooks’ count, that makes five former LNP MPs with government jobs: Jeff Seeney (former LNP Deputy Premier now CS Energy deputy chair), Andrew Cripps (former LNP Mines Minister, now State Recovery Coordinator), Michael Hart (recently retired LNP MP for Burleigh now Work Health and Safety Board chair) and Julian Simmonds (former federal LNP MP and LNP Brisbane City Councillor and now acting chief executive officer of Economic Development Queensland).
Ah Queensland. Beautiful one day, the Mates State every day.
The cost of a deal
It seems the price of striking a deal with the Crisafulli Government over public sector wage deals is for union bosses to publicly cuddle up with the ministers.
Multiple enterprise bargaining agreements are being negotiated across the 270,000-strong public service, triggering the first teachers’ strike in 16 years.
So far, teachers and nurses appear to have been excluded from the offer of generous cash bonuses for retention and shift work on top of the government’s base pay offer, which have been secured by Queensland police and firefighters.
In the past two weeks, the first responders have struck “in-principle” agreements with the government, which will cost the state’s bottom line about $195m over the next three years.
But spies tell Chooks that union leaders have also been told that they must stand up with their respective ministers and “cheerfully” announce the deal to the public – even before they have told their own membership of the terms and won their support.
It’s one reason why Queensland Police Union boss Shane Prior has copped flak from sections of the force’s ranks after fronting a press conference with Premier David Crisafulli and Police Minister Dan Purdie, all singing from the same hymn sheet about how good the proposed deal was for the constabulary.
But Queensland Professional Firefighters’ Union boss John Oliver may not have read the entire memo before doing the joint sell on Friday morning with Fire Minister Ann Leahy.
When asked what he thought about the long-awaited deal, an unenthused Oliver could only muster that it was “okay”.
It’s hard to see the teachers sharing the same podium with Crisafulli and Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek after many took to the streets during Wednesday’s strike carrying signs accusing the pair of ignoring their concerns about workplace violence.
Pyne’s Queensland retreat
You would think that with the LNP in government in Queensland, someone like former federal Liberal minister and lobbyist Christopher Pyne would be making hay in the Sunshine State.
But it seems that his firm, Pyne and Partners, is winding down its local operations.
As of a few weeks ago, it no longer has a physical presence in Queensland after the last of its Brisbane-based lobbyists recently left the firm.
The lobby shop is still registered locally but apparently has only six Queensland clients.
Canberra-based director of the firm Tony Hodges, a former spruiker for Julia Gillard, tells Chooks the Queensland clients are more focused on their advocacy in the nation’s capital.
Wild West
As if we didn’t already know, Ipswich Labor is a house divided.
It’s no secret federal Labor MP for Blair Shayne Neumann (Right faction) and his state counterpart Ipswich MP Jennifer Howard (who defected from the Right to join the Left earlier this year) are at war.
Howard’s attempt last year to roll Neumann for Blair preselection on gender quota grounds was thwarted by Anthony Albanese.
And now, Labor members in Blair were able to show their loyalty in branch delegate elections – the only seat of Queensland’s 30 to be forced to a ballot rather than a factional compromise.
Branch delegates win the right to vote on the floor of Labor’s state conference, to help decide the party’s policy platform.
Before the vote, the Right held 7 delegates in Blair to the Left’s two. After the vote (which was tallied this week) the result is closer than Jarrod Bleijie to an Elvis impersonation. The Right has lost ground and its lead has narrowed to 5-4. Howard got the most first preference votes of any candidate; Ipswich West MP Wendy Bourne scraped over the line with preferences to win one of the Right spots.
Both factions are trying to spin the result in their favour. As one Left source claimed, the result shows Neumann does not have overwhelming branch support as he’s always claimed. Another Leftie says the Right has gone from having an “absolute majority” to Blair being as “tight as hell”.
But Right sources says the result is exactly what they expected after Howard’s defection, and not all of her support shifted with her when she flipped factions.
There are a couple of certainties though. After Albanese and Labor’s triumph in May, which saw a netball team’s worth of new Queensland ALP women MPs elected to federal parliament, Neumann will not be troubled by an AA challenge again.
And the other rolled-gold fact? There will be no peace in Ipswich Labor any time soon.
Vale Rod Welford
A who’s who of Queensland Labor farewelled former Attorney-General Rod Welford at a memorial service at the QPAC Playhouse Theatre in Brisbane on Thursday, after his death in late June from cancer aged just 66.
Former Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and her ex-Labor Minister father Henry Palaszczuk sat next to another former premier Peter Beattie and his wife Heather, and were joined in the crowd by former Beattie government ministers Matt Foley, John Mickel, Kerry Shine, Dean Wells and Stephen Robertson. Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt, who (briefly) succeeded Welford in the state seat of Everton in 2009 spoke, as did Foley.
Former Governor-General and Queensland Governor Quentin Bryce was there; Bryce was Welford’s law lecturer at the University of Queensland.
Welford was a successful solicitor and barrister before entering parliament in 1989, when Labor leader Wayne Goss ended the Nationals’ three-decade reign. When he quit politics in 2009 – after serving in the Goss, Beattie and Bligh Cabinets as AG, education, arts, and environment ministers – he segued into a forward-thinking career in specialising in energy efficiency. The super-fit Welford was state president of the Royal Life Saving Society of Queensland and represented the society not only on governance boards, but on the water as a competitive lifesaver.
But it was Welford’s generosity that shone through for those at the memorial, when it was revealed Welford had bequeathed about $5m through Queensland Gives – chaired by former Court of Appeal president Margaret McMurdo – to the ‘Welford Sustainable Future Fund’.
The money will be distributed to the Environmental Defenders Office, the Queensland Trust for Nature, The Australia Institute, the Centre for Public Integrity, and to Griffith University scholarships.
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Anti-abortion activists plot ‘wholesale capture’ of LNP
G’day readers, and welcome to this week’s edition of Feeding the Chooks, your regular peek behind the scenes of Queensland politics.