On 26 October 2025, a year to the day after Queenslanders elected David Crisafulli's LNP government, a mother in Ripley, on Ipswich's booming western fringe, drops her son at the bus stop for the ride to school and drives on to an early shift, past a road-safety sign that has stood since the government's first month in office: "Adult crime. Adult time." Her husband is a paramedic. Some nights he calls to say he is still ramped outside Ipswich Hospital's emergency department, hours after knock-off, waiting with a patient for a bed that has not opened. Her power bill is smaller than it was two years ago; her rent is not. She voted LNP for the first time in her life, mainly because nine years of Labor government had, on her own accounting, made ordinary life harder rather than easier. A year on, she is not sure whether this government has actually fixed anything, or simply changed which problems get the attention.
That uncertainty is the right place to start an audit. Twelve months is not long enough to fairly judge outcomes that move on longer clocks than an election cycle — hospital beds, stadiums and sentencing regimes all take years to prove themselves right or wrong. It is long enough to check what the Crisafulli government promised against what it has actually done, using the government's own published data, the state's Auditor-General and national benchmarks, and to be honest about which results are still too early to call.
What the government did
Crisafulli led the LNP to a comfortable win on 26 October 2024, ending nine years of Labor government under Annastacia Palaszczuk and, briefly, Steven Miles. Five commitments have defined the year that followed: a tougher youth justice regime after a decade of rising offending; a final decision on the 2032 Olympics main stadium, after Labor left the question unresolved across three premiers; a costed plan to cut ambulance ramping, the issue voters told pollsters mattered most; cost-of-living relief funded substantially by the coal royalty revenue Labor raised in 2022; and a general pledge to govern more competently than the government it replaced.
On each, the government moved quickly. The Making Queensland Safer Act, extending adult sentencing to children for a defined list of offences and overriding the state's Human Rights Act to do it, passed and received assent on 12 December 2024 — inside its first 100 days — and was expanded twice more through 2025, examined in full in this site's companion analysis of "adult crime, adult time" (approx.; Making Queensland Safer Act 2024; Amendment Bill 2025, Explanatory Notes). A fresh 100-day review of Olympic venue options, ordered within weeks of taking office, reported on 8 March 2025; on 25 March 2025 Crisafulli announced a 63,000-seat stadium would be built at Victoria Park after all — the site, and largely the plan, he had campaigned against, a reversal set out in detail in this site's analysis of the stadium and cost saga (approx.; Games Independent Infrastructure and Coordination Authority, 2032 Delivery Plan, Mar-2025). An $18.5 billion Hospital Rescue Plan, including a dedicated $1.7 billion ramping package, was funded across the government's first two budgets, alongside a $1 billion Queensland Ambulance Service package — the subject of this site's separate audit of hospital ramping (Queensland Budget 2025-26 and 2026-27, Service Delivery Statements — Queensland Health). On coal royalties, the government did the opposite of what parts of its own base expected: rather than wind back the higher rates Labor introduced in 2022, it kept them, telling the resources sector not to expect a cut before the decade is out, a decision analysed in full in this site's audit of the royalty windfall and the dependence it created (approx.; Queensland Resources Council address, 2024). And on the Path to Treaty process Labor legislated in 2023, the government moved to wind back its truth-telling element, a decision that remains contested and is examined separately in this site's analysis of the path to treaty repeal (approx.; Queensland Parliament, 2025).
The strongest case
A government that made the calls Labor kept deferring, and published the numbers to prove it
Judged purely on pace, the Crisafulli government's first year compares well with its predecessor's last. The Making Queensland Safer Act passed inside 100 days, on an issue Labor had spent years managing rather than resolving. The Olympics stadium question, unresolved by Palaszczuk and then rejected by Miles across three years and two governments, was tested twice and settled within five months of the new government taking office — a genuinely difficult, unpopular-with-someone-either-way decision that a government could have deferred again, as its predecessor did, and chose not to. On ramping, the metric that arguably decided the election, the government has not just spent money; it began publishing ramping and emergency department data more often and in more detail than Labor did, making an audit like this one possible in close to real time rather than waiting for an annual report (approx.; Queensland Government, Ministerial Statement, Feb-2025). And on coal royalties, the government resisted a politically tempting option — cutting a tax its own side had criticised in opposition — because the revenue, even as it shrinks, is now load-bearing for the health and cost-of-living spending built on top of it. None of that guarantees the underlying problems are fixed. It does show a government willing to make decisions and be measured against them, rather than manage a problem indefinitely, which was a large part of Labor's defeat.
The evidence
Four of the five commitments now have enough primary-record data to check. On youth crime, the Department of Youth Justice's own 2024–25 annual reporting shows more than 5,800 charges laid under the new laws in their first roughly six and a half months, with over 30 per cent of Childrens Court matters now containing at least one prescribed offence (approx.; Dept of Youth Justice and Victim Support, Annual Report 2024–25). The government's stated aim, deterrence, is harder to isolate: it points to a reported 7.2 per cent fall in crime victims through 2025, but that figure bundles the sentencing law together with extra police and youth co-responder funding delivered over the same period, and no published research separates out what the tougher sentences alone contributed (approx.; Queensland Government Ministerial Statements, 2025–26).
On ramping, the government's own quarterly figures show real movement: the statewide rate fell from a June 2024 peak of 44.5 per cent to 37.3 per cent in the December 2025 quarter, a genuine improvement of more than seven percentage points in about fourteen months (Queensland Audit Office, Health 2024, Jan-2025; Queensland Ambulance Service performance data, Dec-2025 quarter). It remains well above the 26.8 per cent recorded in 2019-20 and roughly seven to eight points above the sub-30-per-cent target the government has set for October 2028, with under three years left to close the gap. Elective surgery has moved faster: the waitlist fell from 66,232 patients at the end of 2024 to 59,393 by March 2026, helped by a $1.8 billion, four-year outsourcing program called Surgery Connect (Queensland Health, Our Performance dashboards, Mar-2026). That progress sits against a health system under real financial strain — the Queensland Audit Office recorded a combined $960.6 million deficit across Queensland Health and its Hospital and Health Services for 2024-25, the largest on record (Queensland Audit Office, Health 2025, Jan-2026).
On the stadium, the Auditor-General's finding matters as much as the announcement: Preparing for the Brisbane Games, tabled 13 December 2024, found no single Queensland Government document consolidates all estimated Games costs into one confirmed total, a gap that remained unresolved when the stadium's construction cost was reported in January 2026 at about $2.3 billion (approx.) — lower than the $3.8 billion figure attached to the same project ten months earlier, with no public document explaining the difference (Queensland Audit Office, Preparing for the Brisbane Games, Dec-2024). On coal royalties, the fiscal swing behind the government's cost-of-living relief is stark: revenue peaked at roughly $15.3 billion in 2022-23, fell to about $10.5 billion in 2023-24, and is forecast at only around $4.8 billion for 2025-26, before a partial recovery to about $6.9 billion forecast for 2026-27 (Queensland Treasury, Report on State Finances 2022-23 and 2023-24; Queensland Budget 2025-26). The government's cost-of-living package for 2025-26, including a continued household energy rebate and a locked-in flat public transport fare Labor had only trialled, was funded from that same, now much smaller, revenue base — smaller in scale than the one-off relief Labor funded from the 2022-23 royalty peak (approx.; Queensland Budget 2025-26, Cost of Living Statement).
The critique
Set against the government's own commitments, the clearest broken promise is the stadium. Crisafulli campaigned on ruling out a new stadium and attacking Labor's indecision on the same question; five months into government, his own review recommended the option he had campaigned against, and he adopted it in full. Governments are entitled to change position on new evidence, but a review commissioned and controlled by the same government that announces its outcome, run to a 100-day deadline the government itself set, does not carry the weight of a genuinely independent process — and the Auditor-General's finding, thirteen months on from its first report, that no consolidated Games budget yet exists, means Queenslanders still cannot see the total bill for the decision.
Crisafulli won government promising no new stadium at Victoria Park; five months later, his own government approved one on that exact site.
The youth justice record shows a similar pattern: real speed, thinner scrutiny. The original Bill was declared urgent and given roughly eight days of committee examination, with the government's own compatibility statement conceding the changes did more harm to children's rights than the accountability aim they served — an admission it addressed by overriding the Human Rights Act rather than narrowing the Bill. First Nations children, about 9 per cent of Queensland's youth population, made up 69 per cent of the "serious repeat offenders" cohort the government's own auditor identified, and no evaluation clock is attached to the sentencing changes themselves, only a five-year sunset on the legal override that permits them (approx.; Queensland Audit Office, Reducing Serious Youth Crime, 2024; Human Rights Act 2019 (Qld), ss43–46). A government that moved this fast on the law has not moved with matching speed to prove the law is working.
On cost of living, the fairness this masthead insists on cuts against the government too. Keeping the coal royalty tiers Labor introduced is a fiscally sound decision, but it means the relief funded from that revenue — energy rebates, the flat public transport fare, and the health and youth justice spending built on the same budget line — now rests on a base forecast to run at under a third of its 2022-23 peak. Ramping has genuinely improved, but the government chose its own deadline, October 2028, on the exact metric that unseated Labor, and it remains seven to eight percentage points short with under three years to close the distance, while the health system it is drawing on to close it is running the largest deficit on record.
The risk to the future
Three self-set deadlines are now converging on the next election
The Crisafulli government has structured its own accountability around dates that land inside its first term: a sub-30-per-cent ramping rate by October 2028, a stadium that must be built on a compressed schedule ahead of the fixed 2032 Games opening, and cost-of-living relief funded from coal royalty revenue the government's own budget expects to keep shrinking before it partly recovers. None of these is disqualifying on its own — every government inherits constraints it did not choose — but together they mean the next two to three years, not the first twelve months, will show whether this government's fast decisions were also the right ones. If the health deficit keeps widening, if coal prices do not recover as forecast, or if the stadium's cost gap between its March 2025 and January 2026 figures turns out to be real rather than a reporting quirk, a government that set its own deadlines on the issues that decided the last election will have handed the next one a ready-made scorecard of its own making.