Opinion: Qld crime stats raise questions over Crisafulli pledge
David Crisafulli finally produced the crime figures he has staked his leadership on, and it didn’t take long for the wiggle room to appear, writes Terry Goldsworthy. VOTE IN OUR POLL
Opinion
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The public may be many things, but they are not mugs. They can smell a rat when they see one. And so it was when Premier David Crisafulli announced the crime rate had gone down in Queensland.
What should have been a good news story soon turned out to be a PR problem for the government when the finer details of the statistics being used – or perhaps not used in this case – were made known.
A quick reminder of the recent Queensland election help set the scene.
Many of us remember the leaders’ debate where Mr Crisafulli pledged to resign if the number of crime victims did not fall during his first four-year term.
When pushed on it he doubled down and stated, “I’m serious about it, and I’m not giving myself any wriggle room. It’s victim numbers.”
So sure of what he was committing to, the would-be premier was able to quote off the top of his head the Australian Bureau of Statistics victim count for Queensland of 289,657.
The data being referred to were national statistics about victims of a range of personal, household and family and domestic violence offences as recorded by police.
These offences included one category called “other theft”, which made up 52 per cent of victims in Queensland.
It didn’t take long for the wiggle room to appear.
Just the day before the election Mr Crisafulli claimed it was the victim rate that he was referring to, not numbers.
Yet in the debate he clearly stated, “It’s the victim numbers that matter, the number of victims.”
The data released by the government this week was month-to-month data produced by Queensland Police Service, not the annual data used by the ABS.
The government media release assured us this was to ensure more transparency, more accountability and more information for Queenslanders than ever before to understand how successful government measures were.
It showed a decrease in the victims-of-crime rate.
Conveniently the data did not include victims of other theft.
According to Mr Crisafulli, that cohort had been left out because “that ... victim number actually increased by a larger proportion than what we were discussing in the 12 criteria that we’ve got here”.
The release of this data brings back memories of the Newman government in 2014, something the current government has gone to great lengths to distance itself from.
The Newman government claimed a 10 per cent reduction in crime across Queensland, only for analysis to show that in fact the actual reduction was more in the vicinity of 2 per cent.
The higher figure was achieved by only counting crime against the person and property crime and excluding the other crime category.
Nor should we forget that in 2017 the Queensland Audit Office found that between 2010-11 and 2015-16, 22 per cent of reported crime statistics were questionable at best and unreliable at worst and should be treated with caution.
The audit found that the QPS used questionable methods to decrease the reported crime and increase the amount of crime being solved.
There was a good news story here for the government.
In 2024-25 preliminary public data shows that the overall crime rate in Queensland has decreased by 2 per cent.
The rate of property offences decreased by 7 per cent, the rate of offences against the person decreased by 0.4 per cent.
The rate of other offences increased by 4 per cent.
Despite this the crime rate in Queensland remains at 20-year highs.
Governments need to be careful of being seen as trying to be tricky with data and statistics.
The public don’t like being treated as fools.
What was a good news story for the government now has all the makings of an own goal.
The success story has been lost in the hubris of massaging the message.
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Originally published as Opinion: Qld crime stats raise questions over Crisafulli pledge
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