Committee Details

Committee’s report

The committee tabled Report No. 6, 58th Parliament - Youth Justice (Monitoring Devices) Amendment Bill 2025 on 28 March 2025. 

The Bill will be debated in the Legislative Assembly in due course.

View: Report 
View: Executive Summary

About the BILL 

On 20 February 2025 the Hon Laura Gerber MP, Minister for Youth Justice and Victim Support and Minister for Corrective Services, introduced the Youth Justice (Monitoring Devices) Amendment Bill 2025 into the Queensland Parliament.  The Bill was referred to the Justice, Integrity and Community Safety Committee for detailed consideration.   

View: Explanatory speech
View: Bill                                   
View: Explanatory Notes             
View: Statement of compatibility  

The purpose of the Bill is to extend the electronic monitoring trial period by one year, to allow time for a comprehensive review to be completed to inform government decisions about electronic monitoring for child offenders.

Section 52AA of the Youth Justice Act 1992 (the YJ Act) allows a court, in certain circumstances, to impose on a grant of bail to a child who is at least 15 years, and whose offending history meets certain criteria, a condition that the child must wear a monitoring device while released on bail. The criteria were designed to target serious repeat offenders.

Section 52AA was introduced in 2021 to facilitate a trial of electronic monitoring as a bail condition and included a two-year sunset clause. A 2022 review found that the initial trial failed to confirm the overall effectiveness of electronic monitoring in deterring offending behaviour, among other things, due to the low numbers of children ordered on a monitoring device, and that there was a need for further research with a larger sample size.

The Strengthening Community Safety Act 2023 kept electronic monitoring as a trial, expanded the trial to include 15-year-olds and extended the trial a further two years to 30 April 2025. The Youth Justice (Monitoring Device Conditions) Amendment Regulation 2023 added three new trial sites and the Youth Justice (Monitoring Device Conditions) Amendment Regulation 2024 added a further five sites commencing 28 August 2024. 

From 30 August 2024 the Queensland Community Safety Act 2024:

• expanded the list of prescribed indictable offences under section 52AA to include specified offences involving violence or threats of violence; and
• expanded the criteria to include children who have been charged with a prescribed indictable offence in the preceding 12 months.

Further information

Further information including written briefings, correspondence, response to submissions, transcripts and answers to questions taken on notice are available under the Related Publications tab.

Call for submissions

The committee invited submissions on all aspects of the Bill, from all interested parties. Submissions closed on 10:00am on Tuesday, 4 March 2025. You can view the submissions under the Submissions tab.

PUBLIC PROCEEDINGS

The committee held public proceedings on Monday, 17 March 2025. See timeline below for further information.

Timeline