Rob Molhoek MP - Keeping our Community Safe - May Update Report

Our personal safety, and the safety of our community, is important to all of us. I have had contact from many locals recently concerned about escalating crime in our local area, and right across the Gold Coast for that matter. We need your help, as the business community of Southport, to convince the Palaszczuk Labor Government to listen to and act on our community’s concerns.

Keeping Our Community Safe

Monday, 31 May 2021

Our personal safety, and the safety of our community, is important to all of us.

I have had contact from many locals recently concerned about escalating crime in our local area, and right across the Gold Coast for that matter.

We need your help, as the business community of Southport, to convince the Palaszczuk Labor Government to listen to and act on our community’s concerns.

Last week in Parliament the Opposition moved a Private Members Motion, which called on the Labor Government to restore the offence of breach of bail for youth offenders in Queensland.

So far, Labor has refused to support the LNP’s efforts to introduce an offence of breach of bail.

Unfortunately, when they came to Government, Labor scrapped the LNP’s strong youth justice measures in the Youth Justice and Other Legislation Amendment Bill of 2012, including:

Scrapping the breach of bail offence;
Making childhood findings of guilt inadmissible in court when sentencing a person for an adult offences;
Reinstating the principle that detention should be a last resort and be for the shortest appropriate period when sentencing a child; and
Reinstating the principle imprisonment is a sentence of last resort and a sentence that allows the offender to stay in the community is preferable.

also introduced the Youth Justice and Other Legislation (Inclusion of 17-year-old Persons) Amendment Bill 2016 which transitioned 17-year old’s from adult prisons to youth detention centres. This hasty response led to overcrowding in our youth detention centres and forced offenders to be detained in police watchhouses.

As we know, our Police are doing their very best, but they simply need more resources to combat escalating crime across the Gold Coast, particularly in the northern areas of the region.

My office is inundated with calls, emails and in-person reports, about crime in the Southport community. Similar matters have been raised at our Southport Community Consultative Committee recently, including some of the following –

A parent attacking a boy with a wooden stake after a group of teens had stomped on his son’s head;
A group of young students attacked on the way to Australia Fair Shopping Centre to get some lunch;
A group of 12- to 13-year-old kids causing trouble out the front of some local businesses, graffitiing their property, smashing windows, stealing furniture, urinating on their premises and staking claims on their buildings.

Just disgusting behaviour from some of our youth. Again, as always, it’s a small cohort of the same reoffenders, well known to police - whose hands are tied with our current weak system.

Over the weekend, LNP Leader David Crisafulli MP and Shadow Police Minister, Dale Last MP have reignited the push for breach of bail as an offence, following a spike in youth crime right across the state, including here on the Gold Coast.

I want the business community of Southport to know that the LNP are trying to do something about this constant issue of reoffending and urge the government to do more.

If your tired and you’ve had enough, please get behind the latest petition like 10,000 other Queenslanders already have in just 48 hours.