Queensland should join other Australian states and decriminalise public intoxication while removing criminal offences for begging and public urination, a parliamentary inquiry recommends.
In a report tabled to state parliament on Monday the committee’s chair, Labor’s Corrine McMillan, said the three offences disproportionately affected the “most marginalised Queenslanders”.
Queensland police data shows Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are “significantly overrepresented” among those charged with the three offences, while the report in cited research shows “a strong correlation between intoxication and higher risk a person will die in custody”.
In the report, McMillan said Queensland must finally act upon recommendations from the 1991 royal commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, given the state had now embarked “on a journey to a Path to Treaty”, something she described as “a highly significant moment in Queensland’s history”.
“This is an essential first step to right the wrongs of our past, an essential first step towards a fairer, more just and compassionate Queensland,” McMillan said.
While First Nations people make up 4.6% of Queensland’s population, they account for more than 47% of those charged with the three offences – meaning Indigenous people were charged at almost 19 times the rate of the non-Indigenous people. The report also cited police data showing that the public “very rarely reports instances of public urination”.
“In the first two months of 2022, only six charges of public urination were based on reports made to the police by members of the public,” the report read.
“Police detected the other 91 instances of public urination that led to charges being laid during this period.”
The committee’s recommendation to decriminalise, however, was “subject to appropriate community-based health and social welfare responses being in place”, including cultural awareness training for “all frontline workers responding to or providing services in connection to these offences”.
It also recommended police retain relevant powers to address aggressive and violent behaviour.
Queensland is the only state not to have adopted recommendations to decriminalise public intoxication after Victoria passed a bill last year to decriminalise the offence after the inquest into the death of Indigenous woman Tanya Day.
The inquiry received 45 submissions, the majority of which backed decriminalising the offences as they disproportionately had an effect on vulnerable members of the community and were not effective in deterring the behaviour.
The committee’s two Liberal National party members, however, said they supported those submissions that “expressed concerns with the proposed repealing of these legislative provisions”.
Stephen Bennett and Mark Robinson said decriminalisation would “ultimately not deal with in many cases underlying problems of poverty, homelessness, and entrenched disfranchisement”.
“Many of the committee’s other recommendations do not recognise the reality: that the community expects to be able to use public spaces and for them to be free from begging, public intoxication and public urination while utilising these public spaces,” they wrote.
“The committee’s report does not reflect what many see as a disproportionate response to these offences and will be seen as a continuation of a soft crime government that fails to plan.”
In his statement of reservation, Greens MP Michael Berkman said he backed the “general thrust” of the report, especially the primary recommendations to repeal the three offences.
Berkman raised a number of concerns, including the risk of greater police reliance on the more serious offence of public nuisance.
He said the arguments made to decriminalise public intoxication also made for an “equally as important and sensible” case to decriminalise illicit drugs.
McMillan said it was clear that a health and welfare response needed to strike a balance between people’s enjoyment of public spaces and protecting vulnerable people who were not acting aggressively.
She said a law enforcement approach would not deter many and result in their precarious situations becoming more dire.
“They have no realistic prospect of paying their fines, nor should they be put at risk by being incarcerated,” she said.
