On 27 August 2026, the Queensland Government introduced the Breach Bail, Go to Jail and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2026 into Parliament. It is not yet law. If passed as introduced, it would create a new standalone offence, carrying a mandatory minimum of one year actually served in custody for people who commit certain serious offences while already on bail, unlawfully at large, or who failed to appear in court. It would also make bail much harder to get for anyone charged with one of those offences while already on bail for anything else. The Bill is currently before a parliamentary committee, with a proposed commencement date of 30 November 2026.
What offence does the Bill actually create?
The Bill would insert new sections 29AA to 29AE into the Bail Act 1980 (Qld). The core of it, section 29AA, creates a new misdemeanour: committing a “prescribed offence” (for an adult) or a “significant offence” (for a child) at any time while you are released on bail, unlawfully at large after bail was revoked, or have failed to appear in court under a summons or notice to appear.
This is a separate charge from whatever new offence you are alleged to have committed. You would be sentenced for the underlying offence in the usual way, and separately convicted of the new section 29AA offence for having done it while on bail, unlawfully at large, or on the run from a court date.
What is the mandatory minimum penalty?
The Bill sets a minimum penalty of one year’s imprisonment, served wholly in a corrective services facility, with a maximum penalty of three years imprisonment. The “served wholly in custody” wording is specifically chosen to force the courts to impose it, meaning there is no discretion to suspend it, allow immediate parole release, or impose other penalties that would otherwise avoid full-time custody for that minimum year. For a child, the equivalent is detention in a detention centre.
A court would still sentence you for the underlying offence separately, under the usual sentencing principles for that offence. The section 29AA charge is a separate conviction with its own sentence. The Bill does not say whether that year runs after or alongside (concurrent with) the sentence for the underlying offence; it leaves that to the ordinary sentencing rules and discretion, which is a point worth watching as the Bill goes through committee.
Which offences would trigger it?
The Bill’s proposed Schedule 1 lists specific “prescribed offences” under the Criminal Code (Qld) and two other Acts which would be captured under the new provisions. The list covers categories including:
- Homicide and serious violence: murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, grievous bodily harm, torture, wounding, unlawful striking causing death, serious assaults (for example on police or a person over 60), assault occasioning bodily harm (aggravated), kidnapping, deprivation of liberty, and unlawful stalking.
- Rape and sexual offences: rape, attempted rape and assault with intent to rape (whoever the complainant is), sexual assault where the victim is a child or the offence is aggravated, indecent treatment of a child, grooming, and repeated sexual conduct with a child.
- Child exploitation material offences: making, distributing, possessing or administering a website involving child exploitation material.
- Domestic and family violence: coercive control, and choking, suffocation or strangulation in a domestic setting.
- Property and acquisitive crime: robbery, burglary, arson, stealing a vehicle or firearm, and unlawful use of a motor vehicle.
- Driving: dangerous operation of a vehicle, damaging an emergency vehicle while driving, and endangering a police officer while driving. Drink and drug driving under the traffic legislation is not listed, but a dangerous driving charge is.
- Drug trafficking under the Drugs Misuse Act 1986, and two firearms offences under the Weapons Act 1990.
The list extends to attempts to commit one of these offences, conspiring to commit it, or becoming an accessory after the fact.
Does this apply to your first bail application?
No. This is the detail easiest to miss in the headlines: the new offence and the tougher bail test only apply to someone who is already on bail, unlawfully at large, or has already missed a court date, and is then alleged to have committed one of the listed offences during that period. If this is your first time being charged and you have no earlier grant of bail, the Bill does not change anything about how your bail application would be decided. However, if you fail to appear in court on that offence, and are charged with committing one of the above offences, then you’re in trouble.
Does the Bill treat children the same way as adults?
No. Children are dealt with under parallel amendments to the Youth Justice Act 1992 with a different offence list, though the test and the minimum penalty are mirrored. A child charged with committing a “significant offence” while on bail, unlawfully at large, or after failing to appear would face an equivalent “high degree of confidence” test under a new section 48AG, and could be sentenced under section 29AA if convicted. “Significant offence” is not the same list as the adult schedule; it is the existing Adult Crime, Adult Time category already used elsewhere in Queensland’s youth justice scheme.
What is the “high degree of confidence” test?
Separately from the new offence, the Bill would insert a new section 16AA into the Bail Act. It applies where an adult is charged with a prescribed offence allegedly committed while on a previous grant of bail, unlawfully at large, or after failing to appear. In that situation, a court or police officer would have to refuse bail unless the defendant proves, to a high degree of confidence, that they will not commit another prescribed offence if released. The Bill also adds these charges to the existing show cause list as a new section 16(3)(h), and section 16AA(3) requires the court to decide show cause first. A defendant who shows cause must also be able to address the “high degree of confidence” question.
This is a significantly higher bar than Queensland’s existing “show cause” test, under which a defendant charged with a serious offence must show why their detention is not justified, but can still succeed if they can overcome the ordinary risk factors set out in section 16 of the current Bail Act. “High degree of confidence” is a stricter form of words the Bill has flagged as being incompatible with Queensland’s Human Rights Act 2019.
Where does the “high degree of confidence” test come from?
The Bill has borrowed the phrase from other jurisdictions. The Bill’s explanatory notes explain that the test “or equivalent” is used in New South Wales, the Northern Territory and, in a limited way, Victoria. Each of those versions is narrower than what is proposed in this Bill, however, so it will be interesting to see how Queensland courts approach this definition when considering what those words actually mean.
New South Wales introduced the phrase in April 2024 in section 22C of the Bail Act 2013 (NSW). It applies only to 14 to 17 year olds charged with car theft or serious break-and-enter offences (since widened to “performance crime” offences) while already on bail for the same type of offence. Their provision asks whether the bail authority “has a high degree of confidence the young person will not commit a serious indictable offence while on bail subject to any proposed bail conditions”. Two features can be immediately distinguished from the Queensland Bill. Firstly, section 22C(3) says that the onus of establishing bail should be refused “remains with the prosecution”, and the Attorney-General told Parliament the test “does not impose an onus of proof on the accused person in the way that the show cause test does”. Secondly, it was enacted as a temporary measure. It was extended once in 2025 and is currently due to expire on 1 October 2026, two months before Queensland’s version would commence. And, more importantly, there is no NSW equivalent of this provision for adults.
The Northern Territory introduced their own version in May 2025. Where the Territory’s presumption against bail applies, section 7A(2AB) of the Bail Act 1982 (NT) requires the court to have “a high degree of confidence, when considered in isolation from” the ordinary bail considerations, that the person will not commit a prescribed or serious violence offence “or otherwise endanger the safety of the community”. The words “in isolation” is what the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency has called an “impossibly high threshold” in a High Court challenge filed in December 2025, which argues the laws punish people before any finding of guilt. That case has not yet been decided as at the date of this article.
Victoria uses an analogous phrase. Since 31 March 2026, section 4F of the Bail Act 1977 (Vic) treats an accused as an unacceptable risk unless the decision-maker is satisfied “there is a high degree of probability” that they would not commit one of six offences (armed robbery, aggravated burglary, home invasion and carjacking, plus the aggravated forms of the last two), where the new charge was allegedly committed while on bail for one of the same six. Statistics from Victoria Legal Aid show that the 2025 Victorian bail changes resulted in a reduction in First Nations adults granted bail at a first application from 56 to 47 per cent.
Queensland applies a similar test to the Victorian formulation in section 13(3) of the Dangerous Prisoners (Sexual Offenders) Act 2003, where the Supreme Court can only find that a prisoner is a serious danger to the community if it is satisfied “by acceptable, cogent evidence” and “to a high degree of probability”. That standard has been considered at length by Queensland courts for two decades, but it has the important distinction that the onus rests on the the State to prove it applies to a sentenced prisoner. In the case of this Bill, it reverses the onus, and places the burden on a defendant who has not been convicted of anything and is - by law - presumed to be innocent until proven guilty.
What have the courts said about the test so far?
The only judicial commentary on the exact phrase comes from decisions of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, and the themes are consistent.
In R v RB [2024] NSWSC 471, Lonergan J described it as “a test unknown to the criminal law”. Nothing in the NSW Act, and nothing in the Queensland Bill or its explanatory notes, says what the words mean or what matters should be taken into account to inform the assessment.
In R v BH [2024] NSWSC 1577, Yehia J said the section “involves an evaluative judgment requiring the Court to reach a state of satisfaction regarded as a ‘high bar’ but not a state of certainty. The Court does not need to be certain that the young person will not commit a further relevant offence. However, the test is a more onerous one than the ‘show cause’ requirement which applies to adults”. Her Honour also noted that “‘probability’ and ‘confidence’ are not completely synonymous”, so the phrase is not simply the familiar “high degree of probability” standard under another name.
In TB [2025] NSWSC 38, Lonergan J summarised the view of three judges of that court: the obligations owed to children under the Children (Criminal Proceedings) Act “appear to have had violence done to them by the enactment of s 22C”, which “requires children to be treated less favourably, and their liberty treated less favourably, than if the same circumstances applied to a person aged 18 or older”. Queensland’s Youth Justice Act carries its own charter of principles, and the same tension will arise here for children caught by the new section 48AG.
The NSW Government’s stated evidence that the test is “working” is that the bail refusal rate under section 22C is more than double the rate for youth offences generally. The Law Society of NSW’s reply was that this counts refusals, not reoffending, and that the extension went ahead “without publishing the evaluation of the provision that was promised”. No jurisdiction has yet published data showing the test actually does anything to reduce offending on bail.
What Queensland’s legal profession told the committee
Submissions to the committee closed on 7 September 2026, and more than 200 have been published to the date of this article. Most are short submissions from individuals from the community in support of the Bill. However, every legal and professional body that made a submission opposes it, for good reason.
The Queensland Law Society calls the high degree of confidence test “an unprecedented and conceptually unstable standard of proof”, points out that section 16AA gives no list of matters relevant to it (unlike section 16(2) for the ordinary risk assessment), and relies on the same NSW decision quoted above. It also says the new section 29AA offence is “procedurally unworkable” and risks “capturing a much broader cohort of low-level offenders than intended”. The Bar Association of Queensland adds two practical objections: the test “does not take into account the strength of the prosecution case”, and it leaves no room to weigh time already served on remand. It considers the provisions “susceptible to constitutional challenge” and notes that the Northern Territory’s equivalent is already before the High Court. Legal Aid Queensland describes it as “a test unknown in criminal law with the significant potential to be unevenly applied”, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service says it is broader than any interstate version and “would make Queensland an outlier”.
The Victims’ Commissioner supports the Bill’s intent but asks whether the agencies making bail decisions have the resources to assess risk properly. The Public Advocate simply asks for a support person for defendants with cognitive disability who face the test. The committee is due to report on 16 October 2026, and the government has said the Bill will pass this year, so we expect the test to survive largely as drafted, with these submissions shaping how courts read it rather than whether it passes through as law.
Our view of the test
Three things about the Queensland version deserve attention.
It is stricter than the law it is based on. New South Wales confines the test to children, leaves the onus on the prosecution, and uses it for a cohort that show cause does not normally apply to. Queensland’s section 16AA applies to adults, shifts the onus on the defendant, and applies in addition to show cause. That is, a person must first show cause under section 16(3), and if they can, they must still satisfy the court to a high degree of confidence that they will not commit a further prescribed offence while on bail. The Bill also drops the words “subject to any proposed bail conditions” that anchor the NSW test. We expect Queensland courts will still ask what conditions can be imposed to address risks, because section 16AA(6) preserves the ordinary operation of section 16, but the drafting means it is an uphill battle for defence lawyers to win.
The words will be defined by the courts, not Parliament. Our expectation is that the Supreme Court of Queensland will adopt the NSW reading: a demanding, forward-looking evaluation, higher than show cause, short of certainty. Until that happens, and there are published reasons or standards applied by the Supreme Court, anyone refused bail under the new test in the Magistrates Court should be looking at a Supreme Court application as soon as possible, rather than waiting for circumstances to change.
In practice, it will be decided on the evidence. Confidence about bail has to relate back to something the court can point to: confirmed accommodation away from any complainant or co-accused, employment or study that can be verified, treatment that has already started rather than been promised, a surety with real money at stake, and conditions such as a curfew and reporting that answer the specific risk alleged. That is already what a well-prepared show cause application looks like. If those conditions can be satisfied, the court must then consider if they have a high degree of confidence that the defendant won’t commit a further prescribed offence on bail. And those applications are the ones that are usually complicated by things like a poor criminal history, drug offending, or homelessness. As a result, the borderline applications that currently succeed under show cause today are the ones that will probably fail under section 16AA.
Most importantly, whether any of this reduces offending on bail is unproven. The interstate evidence so far shows more people on remand; it does not yet show fewer offences. That is a policy question for Parliament. Does it just simply delay re-offending to 12 months later? Does it serve to simply institutionalise young people and adults, leading to worse outcomes and more offending? These are questions that are not addressed, and which should be what matters most to our society. Either way, what is not in doubt is that from commencement the people caught by the test will be in a materially worse position than they are today, which is a reason to get advice early rather than after a second charge is laid.
When would this become law?
As at 11 September 2026, the Bill is a proposal only. It was introduced on 27 August 2026 and referred to the Justice, Integrity and Community Safety Committee, which is expected to report by mid-October 2026 before the Bill returns to Parliament for debate. If passed without amendment, clause 2 of the Bill sets a commencement date of 30 November 2026. Any of these dates, and the content of the Bill itself, could change before it becomes law, as committees can recommend amendments, and the government could adopt or reject them.
What should you do if you are currently on bail?
If you are already on bail, timing matters, because the two halves of the Bill apply depending on your circumstances. The new section 29AA offence would apply only where the bail was granted, or the summons or notice to appear served, on or after commencement (new section 53(3)). The stricter bail test in section 16AA would apply to any listed offence allegedly committed after commencement, whichever side of that date your existing bail was granted (new section 53(2)). So a person granted bail in October 2026 and charged with a schedule offence in December would face the high degree of confidence test but not the mandatory year; a person granted bail after 30 November who does the same would face both. Either way, if you are worried about a possible new charge while you are on bail, or have already been charged, getting advice before your next court date, not after, is what matters most.
What this doesn’t change
The Bill leaves most of Queensland’s existing bail framework in place. The ordinary presumption in favour of bail, the existing “show cause” list (with the one addition described above), and the “unacceptable risk” test in section 16 of the Bail Act would all continue to operate as they do now for everyone else. Read our full explainer on how bail actually works in Queensland for that existing framework, including what happens if bail is refused and how a Supreme Court application works.
If you or someone you love is on bail and facing a new charge, or has been charged with breaching bail conditions, contact us for confidential advice about your bail application, available 24/7 for urgent matters.
This article is general legal information, not advice about your situation.
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