Queensland's premier says she is comfortable overriding human rights to tighten youth justice laws, but won't say who came up with idea of making breaching bail a crime for children.
The proposed laws also increase the maximum penalties for car thefts, allow police to arrest kids on suspicion they may breach bail and make courts take into account - during sentencing - crimes that serious repeat offenders could hypothetically commit in the future.
When asked if she was comfortable overriding her own human rights laws, despite widespread criticism from watchdogs and charities, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she was.
"Yeah, the legislation says that we can provide that statement to the parliament, and that's exactly what we did," she told reporters on Friday.
Queensland Human Rights Commissioner Scott McDougall said he is stonewalled by the premier about the bill, which could result in more children being kept behind bars without actually improving public safety.
"It was unfortunate: we did write to the premier and have not yet had a response," he told ABC Radio National on Friday.
He said Indigenous communities weren't consulted, despite the government saying the laws will have a "greater impact" on Indigenous children.
Mr McDougall said making it a crime for children to breach bail will criminalise behaviour that's not unlawful and drag more young people into detention.
Most evidence showed that "incarceration and hyper-vigilant policing" didn't improve community safety or reduce safety, the commissioner said, but actually made it worse.
The premier refused to say who proposed the child bail policy, saying "the community" had been talking about it for a long time.
"Now we've been listening to the community, that's exactly what we've done. And now they're out there for community consultation," Ms Palaszczuk said.
Public submissions on the bill close on Friday with a committee to probe it for two weeks before the Labor-controlled parliament takes a vote.
The submission period for most other legislation is usually weeks, with parliamentary committee probes running for months, but Ms Palaszczuk defended the short turnaround.
"Well, we also elect members of parliament, our members of parliament have now gone back to their communities, they can hear what the communities have to say," she said.
"And I would like to see bipartisan support on these laws we've introduced."
Mr McDougall said capacity limits at the state's youth detention centres are being stretched already, and about 70 per cent of kids behind bars are Indigenous children
"So we have more numbers of children in watch houses, spending longer periods of time, we're talking about 10 or 11 children in one cell, sharing one toilet, having to go to the toilet in front of their peers, sleeping on plastic mats, having no access to fresh air, daylight exercise, family limited, very limited access to education and health," he said.
"These are appalling conditions that we are tolerating in Australia today. And we cannot allow that inhumane treatment to be normalised.
"It's absolutely heartbreaking to visit these places and see the large numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in there."
However, Ms Palaszczuk insisted that watch house numbers had come down "in the last couple of weeks" but couldn't provide figures.
