Peace and good behaviour order lawyers, Queensland

It is an order of a Queensland Magistrates Court, made under the Peace and Good Behaviour Act 1982, requiring a person to keep the peace and be of good behaviour towards you. It can also contain other stipulations or conditions the court thinks fit.

It is a civil order rather than a criminal one, and it applies to people you are not in a domestic relationship with: neighbours, co-workers, acquaintances.

Where someone has threatened to assault or injure you or a person in your care or charge, threatened to destroy or damage your property, or threatened to procure somebody else to do either. There is also a separate ground for intentional conduct directed at you that has caused you to fear your property will be damaged.

In every case the Act requires that you are in fear of the person complained against. Conduct that is infuriating but not frightening, and conduct involving no threat of that kind, generally falls outside the section.

Start with section 7(2), which is in the Act and which very little written about these orders mentions: the defendant may produce evidence that the complaint is made from malice or for vexation only. In a long-running dispute where the complaint arrived immediately after some other flashpoint, that is frequently the heart of the answer.

Beyond that: whether the conduct alleged is even within section 5, whether it is reasonable in the circumstances for the complainant to have the fear they claim, and what the contemporaneous record actually shows. And one thing that is not a defence, which is responding. Anything you send after being served becomes evidence.

You complete a complaint setting out the threats and why you are in fear, and swear it before a justice of the peace. Queensland Courts publishes the forms and the current fee.

The justice then has to be satisfied of two things before a summons issues: that the matter is substantiated, and that it is reasonable in the circumstances for you to have that fear. If they are satisfied, a summons is issued and served on the respondent requiring them to appear.

The court filing fee is modest and is published by Queensland Courts, which sets it annually. Legal Aid Queensland and community legal centres provide free guidance on the forms, and for a straightforward application many people do it themselves. We will tell you when that is the sensible course.

Where cost becomes a real question is a contested hearing, or being on the receiving end of one. Odyssey Legal offers fixed-fee options and a free 15-minute initial consultation so you can find out which situation you are actually in before committing to anything.

Yes, and the quality of it is usually what decides the matter. A justice of the peace has to be satisfied the complaint is substantiated before a summons will issue, and at a contested hearing the complainant has to prove the complaint.

What carries weight is contemporaneous material: messages, emails, recordings, dates and times written down when things happened, police or council reference numbers, and the accounts of anyone who witnessed the conduct.

There is no fixed period. Section 7(3)(b) says the order runs for such time, specified in the order, as the court thinks fit, so the duration is set case by case and appears on the order itself.

The order may also contain other stipulations or conditions, and those matter as much as the duration because breaching one of them is breaching the order.

Breaching an order is a criminal offence under section 11 of the Act. The maximum penalty is 100 penalty units or imprisonment for 1 year, and each contravention is a separate offence, including breaching any stipulation or condition attached to the order.

On a conviction for breach, section 12 allows the court to make a further order that the person keep the peace and be of good behaviour for such further time as it thinks fit.

The order itself is a civil order. It is not a conviction and it does not of itself give you a criminal record.

A conviction for breaching the order under section 11 is a different matter: that is a criminal offence and a conviction for it is recorded as one. A lot of what is written about these orders blurs the two, and the distinction is worth being precise about.

Yes. The complaint has to be heard and determined by the court under section 7, both sides can give evidence, and section 7(3) expressly allows the court to dismiss the complaint.

Many matters resolve at the first mention without a contested hearing, sometimes by an agreement or undertaking and sometimes by an order made by consent. For a respondent that is frequently a better outcome than a hearing they might lose.

Do not. Under section 8, if you do not appear at the time and place on the summons and service is proved, the court may issue a warrant to have you brought before it, and it may deal with the complaint in your absence.

An order made because nobody turned up to answer the complaint is as enforceable as one made after a full hearing, and breaching it carries the same consequences.

Neighbours are the single most common situation these orders are used for, so very possibly yes. The question is whether what your neighbour has done involves a threat of the kind section 5 covers, or intentional conduct that has made you fear for your property.

If the real issue is noise, a fence, trees, animals or a boundary, there are usually better and cheaper avenues than a complaint to a Magistrates Court, and a complaint that does not fit section 5 tends to make a neighbour dispute worse rather than better.

Queensland has no order called a restraining order. There are two orders that do that job and which one applies depends on your relationship with the other person, not on what they did.

If it is a current or former partner, a family member, or an informal care relationship, that is a domestic violence order under the Domestic and Family Violence Protection Act 2012 and it is not this. We do not act in domestic and family violence matters and the links on this page go to the services that do.

Circumstances change, and an order made two years ago in a dispute that has since resolved is worth reviewing rather than living with indefinitely.

What is available depends on the terms of your order, how it was made and what has changed since. It is worth a conversation with the order itself in front of us, because the answer turns on the document.

We act on both sides: preparing and running applications where the conduct genuinely fits the Act, and defending complaints where it does not or where the complaint is being used as a weapon in a dispute that has been running for years.

The free 15-minute initial consultation is the fastest way to find out which of those you are in. If our view is that you should use the free forms and do it yourself, we will say so.