Queensland’s bizarre plan to jail parents

And this is where the state government plan starts to unravel.

First, jail time is not the answer. It is a heavy handed and extreme measure. It will cause more problems than it resolves. How will children, whose parents leave them alone to go to the pubs or play the pokies, benefit from having their parents sent to prison?

Jail terms guarantee the family will be split and the children farmed out to relatives or foster parents. The impact on children could be traumatising beyond measure.

Children are highly impressionable. Family lawyers say children of divorcing parents often feel they are somehow to blame for their parents’ divorce. If errant parents are jailed, surely children will stress that this is somehow their fault? The measure is almost guaranteed to cause more pain than it prevents.

Unfortunately Queensland is at risk of getting a reputation for being “the nanny state” where decisions are being made with little or no community consultation, by a government that argues it knows what is best for us.

The plan to impose jail terms on parents who leave children under 12 alone is the latest incarnation of that “nanny state” mentality.

Parents who ignore their children to drink or play the pokies need intervention to curb their behaviour. Prison should be a last resort, not used as a first line punishment.

Has anyone in the State Government actually thought this thing through? If you send parents to prison, it must also impose a burden on other family members or the Department of Child Safety people if they have to arrange foster homes, or whatever, for children whose parents are in jail.

Changing the Criminal Code to punish parents who leave their children alone at casinos, pubs or shopping centres, is also fraught with apparent loopholes.

Premier Anna Bligh says it’s up to the police to use their “commonsense, man in the street" judgments on what constitutes children being left for an unreasonable amount of time.

This is fraught with potential problems too. One police officer’s definition of “unreasonable” could be radically different from another officer’s view.

The Premier spoke of jailing parents who abandon their children at pubs, casinos or shopping centres. But within days of the new law being announced, there were media reports about three children - one of them a baby only months old - being dumped at a North Queensland McDonalds while their parents went drinking at a local pub.