The Queensland Government’s 2025 Budget continues a dangerous pattern of pouring billions of dollars into systems of surveillance, punishment, and control—while communities cry out for housing, health care, education, and real safety.
Despite glossy spin about prevention and support, this budget is a $3 billion reinforcement of the carceral state:
- $2.387 billion over six years for a new prison—Lockyer Valley Correctional Centre—to expand Queensland’s capacity to cage people.
- $458.5 million for victim support services, co-opted to uphold a punitive justice framework, including $50 million for a new Victims Advocate Service whose stated aim is to “put victims first”—a polictical tactic used to justify more incarceration.
- $80 million for Circuit Breaker Sentencing programs—coercive rehabilitation framed as an “alternative to detention,” but still tied to the criminal legal system and court orders.
- $40 million for Youth Justice Schools, institutions designed not as sites of care or learning, but as extended arms of the carceral pipeline for children.
- $75 million over four years for youth co-responder models and “crime hotspot” initiatives—an intensified police presence masked as prevention.
- $31.8 million for strengthening the prison-like dangerous sex offender precincts.
- $147.9 million to equip police with more weapons and surveillance tools—including tasers, body-worn cameras, tyre deflation devices, and tactical first aid kits.
‘This budget is a grim manifesto of a government obsessed with “law and order” over life and dignity. The expansion of cops, courts, and cages comes at the direct expense of what actually keeps communities safe: stable housing, culturally strong and community-led services, health care (including mental health and disability supports), education, income security, and healing,’ said Tabitha Lean.
‘The so-called “diversion” initiatives in this budget are not investments in community care. They are extensions of control—designed to catch people earlier in the system and entrench state surveillance under the guise of help. These measures do nothing to address the root causes of harm and everything to expand the reach of the carceral net,’ said Tabitha Lean.
‘The Government’s refusal to fund community-led, transformative approaches speaks volumes. What is needed is not more investment in prisons for our children, or $2 billion mega-prisons, but a radical redirection of resources toward collective care, accountability, and justice outside of state violence,’ said Tabitha Lean.
‘We demand a Queensland that imagines safety beyond punishment. That listens to criminalised people, especially Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children. That funds liberation—not lifelong entrapment in systems of harm,’ said Tabitha Lean.
Enough is enough.
Stop funding punishment. Start funding freedom.
For further comment, please contact Tabitha Lean on 0499 780 226.
