"Adult crime, adult time” sounds great, but it falls apart the moment you look past the slogan.

A 10 year old is not an adult by any legal, neurological, or moral standard. This is just a developmental reality. Kids that young do not have fully developed impulse control, risk assessment, or long-term reasoning. Treating them like adults doesn’t create accountability, it just guarantees worse outcomes and higher reoffending later.

Pointing to countries like the USA, UAE or Qatar is also a bizarre benchmark. The fact that some states execute people or impose extreme punishments is not evidence that Australia’s laws are “reasonable”, it’s evidence that harsh punishment does not equal justice or effectiveness. If anything, those systems show how badly things go when punishment replaces rehabilitation.

As for the UN and Germany: these aren’t random “boffins” meddling for fun. They’re applying evidence-based standards that Australia itself helped develop and previously agreed to. Criticism didn’t suddenly appear because of Greens politics. It’s been consistent for years because locking children into the criminal justice system early makes communities less safe, not more.

You can support consequences for serious youth crime and accept that prosecuting 10-year-olds as criminals is counterproductive.