The Great Leap Backward: Criminal Law Reform with the Hon Jarrod Bleijie

Abstract

On 3 April 2012, the Honourable Member for Kawana, Jarrod Bleijie MP, was sworn in as Attorney-General for Queensland and Minister for Justice. In the period that followed, Queensland’s youngest Attorney-General since Sir Samuel Griffith in 1874 has implemented substantial reforms to the criminal law as part of a campaign to ‘get tough on crime’. Those reforms have been heavily and almost uniformly criticised by the profession, the judiciary and the academy. This article places the reforms in their historical context to illustrate that together they constitute a great leap backward that unravels centuries of gradual reform calculated to improve the state of human rights in criminal justice.

Keywords: criminal law, legal history, human rights, Jarrod Bleijie, great leap backward

JEL Classification: K14