A parliamentary inquiry,due to make recommendations to government by November,was quietly set up last month to consider overhauling laws banning begging,public urination and public intoxication.
A total of 2102 people were charged or fined for begging,public urination and public intoxication across Queensland in 2021,with charges for the latter accounting for more than half of that figure.Wolter Peeters
So-called public order offences are disproportionately used against First Nations people,with the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody urging their removal more than 30 years ago.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk,asked if she supported the call to overturn public intoxication laws this week,stopped short of explicitly supporting change,but accepted her state was the last to act.
Palaszczuk suggested the change would be necessary “if we are going to be pursuing treaty and reconciliation” with First Nations people. “Now Queenslanders have the chance to have their say on these measures,” she said.
Speaking at an initial public briefing on Tuesday,Deputy Commissioner Steve Gollschewski said the number of people charged for public urination,intoxication and begging across the state was “low”.
A total of 2102 people were charged or fined for the offences in 2021. Public intoxication charges accounted for 1256 of those,with half of the offenders identifying as Indigenous,despite only making up 4.6 per cent of the population.
Gollschewski said public intoxication charges were laid at a lower rate than the five-year Victorian average to 2019. There,the Andrews government has delayed because of COVID health system pressures on trials of sobering-up centres.
Despite the national moves on public intoxication reforms,swearing in public is still an offence in every Australian jurisdiction. Such elements of Queensland’s public order laws also appear within the inquiry’s scope.
In December,the Queensland Law Society wrote to Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman urging action on the intoxication laws to lower the number of First Nations people being taken into custody,where almost one-quarter of deaths are among those suspected of committing public order offences.
That letter detailed 2019-20 financial year statistics that showed police were over 11 times more likely to pursue such charges against First Nations people than the rest of the population.
Dominic Brunello,chair of the QLS’s criminal law committee,said there was a “need for reform” of public order offences in the state to ensure they reflect community standards.
He warned that any change to intoxication laws needed to also ensure public-nuisance offences – which fall under the public-order banner but carry higher penalties and include disorderly or offensive behaviour or language – were not used more by police instead.
“Such laws should only be initiated when it is in the public interest to do so,in a manner that does not disproportionately affect socially or economically disadvantaged groups,” Brunello told this masthead in a statement.
“Public-order offences give police wide discretionary powers in deciding who and when to prosecute,and this has the capacity to result in the selective enforcement of these laws. In our view,there remains a need for reform.”
University of Queensland law professor Tamara Walsh,who also leads the institution’s deaths in custody project,said you would be “hard-pressed” to find people beyond those groups being criminalised under the laws.
“You can’t make a law for the many when you’re actually only trying to control the behaviour of a few,because you just inevitably catch people in your net that you don’t want to,” Walsh said. “I hope there will be a review of the public nuisance[laws].”
A 2017 paper by Walsh in theGriffith Law Review,citing the most recently available public nuisance court data from 2014,noted that of a total of 35,000 charges or fines that year,9 per cent were due to offensive language against police.
“A significant proportion of these offences were committed by Indigenous people,” she wrote.
Speaking at the inquiry,Gollschewski said police used the public intoxication offence as a “low-impact way” of intervening to avoid an escalation in behaviour,or use of other offences.
Queensland’s Chief Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Officer,Haylene Grogan,told the inquiry the need for change was “clear and evidence-based”.
“We need to find solutions to public drunkenness outside the criminal justice system,” she said. “We need to tackle the underlying social and emotional wellbeing issues driving this vicious cycle.”
The Morning Edition newsletter is your guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories,analysis and insights..