The questions swirling in Qld’s $500m new youth justice program orbit

Welcome to Brisbane Times’ Queensland public sector column, Public Circus. This week: checking in on a key election pledge, the premier’s department adds staff, what wasn’t in the budget, and more.

Establishing a swathe of new early intervention and rehabilitation programs for youth offenders was a major plank of the Crisafulli government’s election pitch to Queenslanders.

With a more than $480 million price tag, most of the work is tendered out to third-party providers. So what is going on?

On Friday, we heard one of the $225 million Staying on Track providers (one we’d had our eyes on) had been referred to state and federal authorities over allegations it misused public funds.

Then there’s the provider for the $50 million Regional Reset scheme that’s been defunded over (contested) claims it wasn’t delivering on its contract requirements.

Circus reached out to the department, the offices of Gerber and Crisafulli, and Fearless Towards Success with additional questions.

A government spokesperson said Fearless Towards Success was successful “through a standard procurement process”.

A spokesperson for Gerber said: “We won’t be lectured to by Di Farmer and the Labor Party after their failure to deliver effective early intervention and rehabilitation programs created a Youth Crime Crisis”.

Crisafulli backed Gerber on Sunday when asked if he had confidence in her to manage the programs’ rollout. “Very much so,” he responded. On whether he was then worried about departmental procurement processes, he didn’t say.

We’re sure Crisafulli wouldn’t have been seeking to throw the department, with its third (still acting) director-general in Michael Drane, under the bus, given the news often filtering out of Gerber’s orbit.

Much fanfare was made among Crisafulli and Treasurer David Janetzki’s political budget bluster last week of the number of public servants joining the ranks.

Almost 8700 full-time equivalent roles were added in the year to March, as detailed in the parallel-released State of the Sector by David Mackie’s Public Sector Commission.

Of these, 91 per cent were said to be in frontline and frontline-support positions – something the government has been very keen to spruik, as departments apply significant scrutiny to new or vacating corporate and senior executive roles.

This lift represented a 3.2 per cent increase to a total FTE count of 279,577, down from the 4.9 per cent increase to March 2025 laid alongside last year’s budget.

While that document accounted for a 2.2 per cent uptick in funded roles in the 2025-26 financial year, the budget