Steven Miles may have just run out of pages in the populist playbook of Queensland premiers.
In the two months he has been in the top job, the union-installed Labor leader has tried it all to reverse plummeting support for the third-term government ahead of the October state election.
He has donned emergency services gear and talked up Queenslanders’ resilience over the summer of disasters, demanded the Reserve Bank cut interest rates, and blasted the supermarkets over grocery prices.
Labor Party insiders have been quietly crowing that the strategy has worked, with secret union-commissioned polling apparently showing a 3 per cent bounce in the primary vote since Annastacia Palaszczuk quit.
And Miles, as well as his Police Minister Mark Ryan, has once again turned to a tried and true formula in attacking magistrates as youth crime continues to fester as an issue that could defeat Labor.
It has dogged the government, with youths seemingly running riot for years in regional centres like Townsville and Mt Isa, and a number of horrific murders, allegedly at the hands of teenagers, occurring in the suburbs of Brisbane in the past 18 months.
In its first term in power, back in 2016, the Palaszczuk government watered down the state’s youth justice laws, making jail a “last resort” sentence for recidivist youths and bail the preferred option for those arrested.
In response to opposition attacks and growing community anger, the government moved twice to toughen the bail laws it had relaxed, specifically for serious young offenders.
But a series of particularly heinous crimes – most recently with last Saturday’s shocking stabbing murder of Ipswich grandmother Vyleen White, allegedly by a teenager who was out on bail – has kept the issue red hot.
Last year, Miles echoed earlier comments by Palaszczuk in saying “the courts were not meeting community expectations” in granting bail to youths who committed “further crimes” on their release.
On Tuesday, Miles again had a go at magistrates who shut out media wanting to cover the court appearances of those allegedly involved in the murder of Ms White and the theft of her car.
And, after it was revealed that the alleged murderer was out on bail at the time of the killing, Ryan again blasted magistrates and publicly called on them to “use the tools in their toolbox” to refuse bail for repeat offenders.
It was a classic deflection that aimed to paper over problems with the Youth Justice Act and Labor’s own appointment of a cohort of magistrates that one top Labor insider lamented privately was full of “activists”.
Miles got blasted by Queensland’s Council for Civil Liberties over his “weak and repetitive attacks on Queensland’s judiciary” for following the laws they were given by Labor.
After nine years in power, Labor had hoped a new premier and a promised policy reset – including a review of the plans to rebuild the Gabba that he championed in cabinet last December – was enough. It isn’t.
Youth crime is the first issue to expose Miles’s main obstacle in seeking re-election – the government’s record.
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