Queensland budget: extra police, prevention and prisons in youth crime crackdown

Afraid of teenage thugs? Queensland taxpayers will provide locks and CCTV cameras for the elderly living in the state’s most dangerous towns.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Treasurer Cameron Dick announced the state budget in Brisbane. Picture: Dan Peled / NCA NewsWire

Elderly residents afraid of intruders will be handed $30 million to install locks and security cameras in their homes, as part of the Queensland government’s record $446 million in spending to fight youth crime.

The Palaszczuk government will double spending on a program called “helping seniors secure their homes’’, in youth crime hot spots of Cairns, Mount Isa, Townsville and Toowoomba over the next two years.

Amid growing community anger over rising rates of increasingly violent youth crime – including alleged stabbing murders – the government will spend $446 million over five years on policing, prevention and prisons.

Police will monitor social media platforms, such as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram, to identify and respond to crime, at a cost of $12.8 million over three years.

Youth justice workers will team up with police in “rapid response squads’’ to “prevent, disrupt and respond to youth crime in hot spot areas around the state,’’ state budget papers reveal.

Taxpayers will spend $850,000 to prevent crime among young people “congregating in Stockland and other shopping precincts in Townsville” over the next two years.

Teenagers in Townsville, a car theft crime spot, will be provided with a “safe space to engage in vocational and educational workshops, drug and alcohol treatment services, life skills training and mentoring with pathways to further education,’’ the budget papers state.

A group of young people pose in front of a stolen car in an image shared to the Townsville crime Instagram page.

In Townsville, Cairns and Mount Isa, $1.8 million will be spent over two years to “break the cycle of youth crime by dealing with underlying issues that lead some young people to offend including poor school attendance, mental health concerns, drug and substance misuse, domestic violence and family dysfunction’’.

Two more youth detention centres will be built at Woodford, northwest of Brisbane, and near Cairns, with $17.2 million to deal with overcrowding in existing centres.

After-hours support, flexible schooling and “cultural mentoring’’ will be offered to young people engaging in “anti-social behaviour’’.

Basketball clinics will be offered to youths identified as at-risk of offending, as well as those in detention, through the Big Bounce initiative.

Money will also be spent on electronic monitoring of youth on bail, as well as fast-track sentencing to address delays in court proceedings.

The government will spend $11.4m to hire 123 more child safety officers next financial year.

It will also spend $50 million to build new Queensland Police-Citizens Youth Clubs in priority locations over the next two years.

Domestic and family violence is also tackled in the budget, with $225 million to pay for new women’s shelters, counselling services and a protected witness program for victims over the next five years.

Upgrades of 81 courts will prevent victims coming into contact with perpetrators, while frontline health workers will be trained to detect domestic violence and deal with victims’ trauma.

The Coroners Court has been given nearly $19 million extra over four years “to meet community expectations of comprehensive and timely coronial investigations’’.

And the District Court will receive a $34 million funding boost over four years to support “escalating workloads’’.