Mondays With Mullane: Breach Bail, Go to Jail. About Bloody Time. Now Where Are the Cells?

Disclaimer: Mondays With Mullane is opinion, Danny’s own, and it contains language your nan wouldn’t use in church.

Breach bail, go to jail.

Four words, one rhyme, and about ten years too late.

This week the Queensland Parliament is expected to pass David Crisafulli’s breach bail laws, and for once I am going to start a column by saying something nice about a politician, so pour yourself a drink and sit down before you fall down.

About bloody time.

Here is what the bill does, in plain English, because God knows nobody in George Street speaks it.

If you are a repeat offender, out on bail, and you go and commit another serious offence, you face a minimum of one year inside.

Not a stern word.

Not a youth worker with a lanyard and a pamphlet.

A year.

There is a new standalone offence for breaching bail, with a maximum of three years.

Courts and police will have to refuse bail unless they are satisfied “to a high degree of confidence” that the little darling won’t do it again.

It applies to kids charged with Adult Crime, Adult Time offences, and there are 47 of those, including murder, manslaughter, robbery and rape, so we are not talking about some poor kid who nicked a Mars bar.

The government has also admitted it will have to override the Human Rights Act to make it work.

The luvvies are clutching their pearls over that one.

I’ll get to them.

A Car Dealer Knows a Repeat Customer

I sold cars for most of my working life, and before you say it, yes, I’ve read the jokes, I wrote half of them, it’s in the book.

One thing the car game teaches you is that a customer who comes back three times isn’t an accident, he’s a pattern.

Same with crooks.

A mate of mine had his shop broken into three times by the same kid.

Three times.

Same kid, same window, same smirk, and every time the kid was back on the street before my mate had swept up the glass.

The Police Minister, Dan Purdie, put it better than I could when the laws were announced in August.

He said offenders are “arrested in the morning and released to offend again in the afternoon”.

He called it catch and release.

That’s a fishing term, for those of you in Paddington who’ve never held a rod, and it’s a bloody good description of the Queensland bail system for the last decade.

Crisafulli himself said these laws “aren’t about the unlucky first-time offender”, they’re about the repeat offender who knows his bail conditions and decides to go and commit another serious offence anyway.

Good.

I have no sympathy for a kid who has stood in front of a magistrate, promised to behave, and then gone and done it again before the ink dried.

That’s not a cry for help.

That’s a business model.

The Rhyming Slogan Department

Now, before the LNP faithful start sending me flowers, let me spoil the party.

This is the government’s second rhyming slogan in two years.

Adult crime, adult time, and they’ve pushed through three tranches of that already.

Now breach bail, go to jail.

Steven Miles, who has all the charm of a flat tyre, said back in July they “needed to find a new rhyme to fix crime”.

Annoyingly, the bastard had a point.

If Adult Crime, Adult Time was working the way they told us it would, why do we need a sequel?

Labor’s own statement said the LNP was back for its ninth justice bill of this kind.

Nine.

I’ve sold fewer lemons.

And here is the bit that should make every voter on the Gold Coast choke on their schooner.

Two years ago, during the leaders’ debate, Crisafulli said he would quit within four years if he couldn’t cut the number of victims of crime.

Then on the eve of the election he added two little words: “per capita”.

I spent long enough in the car game to know a fine-print clause when I see one.

That’s the “conditions apply” sticker on the windscreen.

So Is It Working or Not?

Depends who you ask, and how much they want your vote.

The ABS figures show victims of crime in Queensland fell by around 4 per cent in 2025.

That’s about 12,000 fewer victims than the year before.

I’ll take it.

Twelve thousand people who didn’t get their car flogged or their front door kicked in is not nothing.

The government prefers a bigger number, almost 10 per cent, which it gets by comparing police statistics for 2023-24 with 2025-26.

Bond University criminologist Terry Goldsworthy called that “smoke and mirrors”, and he says the falls actually started in Labor’s last year.

He also said the thing nobody in George Street wants on a billboard.

Queensland’s overall crime rate is still at a 20-year high.

Read that again.

Two years in, three tranches of tough laws, more than 7,000 kids charged with over 34,100 offences under Adult Crime, Adult Time, and we are still at a 20-year high.

Ask Sarah Sullivan in Brisbane.

Her family moved rentals this year after at least four alleged attempted break-ins in three months.

Two boys, 15 and 17, were charged after one attempt in June.

The 15-year-old got 12 months’ probation.

Her words: “I was just struck by how young they were.”

Ask Tara Howard up in Townsville, whose dance studio was allegedly set alight by two 15-year-old boys in 2023.

She rebuilt it with the community’s help, then sold it, because she couldn’t face it any more.

“I was just watching it burn,” she said.

That is what youth crime does.

It doesn’t just take your telly.

It takes the thing you spent your life building.

Nobody Built the Bloody Cells

Here’s where I get properly fucking furious, and this time it’s with both sides.

If you are going to lock more kids up, and I’m all for it when they’ve earned it, you need somewhere to put them.

Simple, isn’t it?

You don’t open a car yard with no cars.

On the morning of Wednesday the 21st of October, the Queensland Police Service’s own figures showed 44 children sitting in police watch houses.

Twenty-three of them had been there for more than seven days.

The longest had been there 18 days.

A watch house is a police lock-up built for adults to sit in for a night or two before court.

It is not a youth detention centre, and everybody knows it.

In August the Australian Workers’ Union said every youth detention centre in the state was at capacity, with another 40 kids in watch houses waiting for a bed.

Corrective Services was already forecasting somewhere between 1,500 and 5,200 extra prisoners by 2035, and that was before this bill.

Crisafulli admits the new laws will “put pressure on the system”.

His answer, and I quote, is that between people being able to “roam free and maraud and create destruction” or “having extra people in a cell”, he’ll always choose the safety of Queenslanders.

Fair enough, Premier.

I’d rather have more crooks in a cell than in my lounge room too, which is almost exactly what you told Parliament in August.

But which cell?

The new youth detention centre at Woodford was announced by Labor in June 2023, due in 2026, for $627 million.

The price has since blown out to about $983 million, and it won’t be open until the end of 2027.

So Labor promised a building it didn’t deliver, and the LNP is passing a law that needs a building that doesn’t exist yet.

If I’d run my car yard like that, I’d have been bankrupt in a fortnight.

Meanwhile the coppers minding these kids in watch houses signed up to catch crooks, not run a junior jail, and Miles, to his credit, said Labor is “deeply concerned” that more police and detention workers will be assaulted because of overcrowding.

He also said Labor “could have and should have done more” when it was in government.

Steven, mate, that’s the most honest thing you’ve said in your career, and it’s ten years too late.

The Human Rights Brigade

Now to the luvvies.

The bill overrides the Human Rights Act, and the advocates say it will expose more children to inhumane conditions, worsen reoffending, and hit First Nations kids hardest.

Of those 44 kids in the watch houses last Wednesday, 28 were First Nations.

That’s not a number I’m going to wave away, and neither should you.

But here’s my question.

Where were the human rights of the woman in Townsville watching her life’s work burn?

Where were the human rights of the Sullivan family, lying awake waiting for the next bump in the night?

I ran the biggest gay bar on the Gold Coast, so don’t lecture me about rights.

I fought for people’s right to live how they like for a long time before it was fashionable.

But your rights end at my front door, and at my mate’s shop window.

The Bar Association reckons the new laws take away the reason to plead guilty, so the courts will clog up even worse.

They might be right.

But the answer to a clogged court is more magistrates and more cells, not more kids back on the street by lunchtime.

So, About Bloody Time, But

I’ll vote for this law.

Labor will too, which tells you everything about where the public is.

But passing a law is the easy bit.

Any idiot in a suit can stand up in George Street and read out a rhyme.

The hard bit is the boring bit: the beds, the staff, the courts, the rehab that actually works, and the kid who gets a trade instead of a rap sheet.

Two years in, the crime rate is still at a 20-year high, and the kids we are locking up are sitting in adult watch houses for up to eighteen days because nobody built the cells.

So here’s my Question: Premier, you put your job on the line on victim numbers.

When Woodford finally opens its doors, will you still be there to cut the ribbon?

Until then, lock your car, check your back door, and have a good fucking drink.

You’ve earned it.

Love as always Danny

PS: if you want to know how a car dealer learns to smell bullshit at fifty paces, it’s all in my book, Car Dealers and Other Honourable Professions.

And Remember:

Trust no Single Source

Trust Your Gut

and Stay Curious

Danny

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Images: Queensland Parliament House by John Robert McPherson (CC BY-SA 4.0); David Crisafulli © The State of Queensland (CC BY 4.0); Queensland Police Headquarters, Roma Street, by Kgbo (CC BY-SA 4.0); thumbnail bars by Matt Brown (CC BY 2.0); all via Wikimedia Commons.