Queensland has legislated remote camps for children, while Victoria has made it easier to sentence young offenders as adults. Victoria once kept more kids out of jail by investing in community alternatives. That hard-won approach is being lost in the race to sound tough.

On 17 September the Queensland parliament passed the Youth Justice (Circuit Breaker) Amendment Bill 2026. Courts may now order children to live for up to six months at remote camps run by non-government providers, wearing electronic monitoring devices. The program will take up to 60 children and is funded at $80 million over four years. The government calls it the last stop before detention. Its critics call it a boot camp by another name.

Queensland has run this experiment before. In 2013 the Newman government, with Jarrod Bleijie as attorney-general, opened youth boot camps. The Palaszczuk government closed them in 2015 after a KPMG evaluation found that almost two in three participants reoffended and that the camps did no better than ordinary detention. Mr Bleijie is now deputy premier. The Queensland family and child commissioner has said he is not satisfied that harm to children in isolated camps would be reported and investigated, and the national children’s commissioner has called for the scheme to be abandoned.

A sequence, not an episode

Within weeks of the October 2024 election the Crisafulli government passed the Making Queensland Safer Act 2024. It requires children convicted of listed offences to be sentenced as adults, imposes mandatory life imprisonment for murder, removes from the Youth Justice Act the principle that detention is a last resort, removes the presumption favouring non-custodial orders, and overrides the state’s own Human Rights Act 2019. A 2026 amendment added a further 12 offences and extended the scheme to attempts, conspiracies and accessories.

Queensland’s reliance on detention was already visible in the data. On an average night in the June quarter of 2025 Queensland held 300 young people in detention, against 229 in New South Wales and 148 in........

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