At the end of year 4, I said goodbye to my classmates and my teacher. I was a little sad, a little excited: the next year, I was to change schools. The new year began, and I entered a new world. Lunchtime was handball against the wall or cricket, the wickets metal bins. I didn’t get on with my new teacher. Two kids made my life difficult: they’d be nice to me and then they wouldn’t. And I made a new best friend.

I summon this because I have been trying to remember what it was like to be 10. In much of Australia, that is the age at which you may be judged criminally responsible for your actions. New laws in Queensland, introduced last week under a slogan chilling in its childishness – “adult crime, adult time” – mean 10-year-olds will now be sentenced as adults if they commit certain offences.

Illustration: Joe BenkeCredit:

Because youth detention centres are crowded, children are sometimes held in “watch houses” alongside adults. In 2019, the ABC’s Four Corners reported on some of the children held in these horrible places. A boy who had “the cognitive function of someone younger than six years old”. A boy who said he had been held, alone, for 23 days was “worried about his birthday being forgotten”. A girl “placed in a pod with two alleged male sex offenders”.

Last week, Queensland’s government released a legally required statement on the laws’ impacts. Because it has to be, the statement is shockingly honest. The laws mean more........

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