Crime remains a key Queensland election issue but a prominent youth advocate has debunked claims of a crisis.

Since well before political campaigning got under way on October 1, the Liberal National Party has homed in on juvenile crime across the state, promising to toughen laws if elected.

Adult sentences for serious youth offending, the removal of detention as a last resort from the youth justice act and remote facilities for rehabilitation have been put forward by the LNP.

And they have not been alone, with the Labor government also claiming youth crime is up and needs to be met with harsher penalties.

However, CEO Katherine Hayes from the Youth Advocacy Centre, a non-profit organisation that seeks to increase legal and social access for young people, says the word “crisis” does not apply.

“There’s no youth crime crisis,” she told AAP.

“The interesting thing about the youth crime debate is that, firstly, crime statistics generally have been going down for the last 30 years, but that’s never acknowledged.

“The second thing is none of the parties look at the evidence about what works, and there’s really clear evidence about how you resolve these issues, but no one ever looks at that.

“The other thing is, I really like how there has started to emerge a theme of wanting to address early intervention, which has been absent in recent years.”

Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows the state’s youth crime rate has, in fact, halved in the past 14 years.

Police say the rate of child offenders dropped two per cent in 2023/24 and since 2012/13, rates have decreased 18 per cent.

But that is not to say serious crimes are not being committed across the state and certain towns are experiencing higher than average rates of offending.

“There have been some really severe, awful incidents that are at the forefront of people’s minds,” she said.

“I think that has created this climate of fear.

“We shouldn’t forget that places like Mount Isa and Townsville have particular circumstances and a racial element which is different to the overall trend across Queensland.

“Until we address the poverty and disadvantage and vulnerability of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and help stop that cycle of poverty, then this will just continue in those areas.”

Queensland has three juvenile detention centres with another two in the pipeline.

The representation of First Nations children in the Cleveland youth detention centre in Townsville is more than 95 per cent.

A report from The Queensland Family and Child Commission says the state’s current detention model is “the most expensive and least effective solution to youth crime that we have designed”.

In 2020/21 Queensland had the second-highest percentage of young people reoffending after release from detention, at 91.26 per cent.

Another report from the Child Death Review Board shows Queensland locked up more children than the rest of the country.

This post was originally published on Michael West.