Responding to a Protection Order Application
You have three real options and they are not equally understood. The worst outcome is doing nothing, because an order can be made in your absence.
If you are named as the respondent to a Queensland protection order application you can consent to the order, consent without admissions, or contest the application at a hearing. An order can be made in your absence if you do not attend. A protection order is civil and is not a criminal conviction, but it has real consequences — including for firearms licences, blue cards and some occupations — and contravening it is a criminal offence.
Your three options, honestly described
Being served with an application is alarming and the instinct is often either to fight everything or to agree to anything to make it stop. Neither is usually right. There are three courses available and the choice between them should be made on information.
Consent without admissions deserves particular attention because it is widely misunderstood. It is not an admission of guilt, and it does not create a criminal record. For many respondents — particularly where the practical conditions are ones they can comply with anyway — it resolves the matter without a contested hearing and without conceding the allegations.
The consequences that are easy to miss
Before consenting, it is worth understanding what an order actually affects, because the answer is not nothing.
The firearms consequence is automatic and frequently comes as a surprise, particularly to rural and primary production respondents for whom a licence is a working necessity. If that applies to you, say so early, because it bears on whether contesting is worthwhile.
If the conditions do not fit your life
The conditions are negotiable even where the order is not contested. This is the most useful work that can be done in many of these matters, and it is regularly overlooked by respondents who focus on whether an order will be made at all.
An order that prohibits all contact will be breached if you and the aggrieved must arrange time with children. A condition excluding you from premises you jointly own has immediate practical consequences for where you sleep. Conditions can be drafted to permit contact through a nominated third party, or in writing only, or for the sole purpose of arranging time with children, or as permitted by a family law order.
Getting this right is not a technicality: contravening a condition is a criminal offence, and the most common contraventions we see are not acts of defiance but ordinary life colliding with a condition nobody thought about. See our contravening an order page.
Where there are also criminal charges
It is common for a protection order application and a criminal charge to arise from the same incident. They run in parallel, on different tests, and what is said in one can be used in the other. An admission made to resolve the protection order quickly can appear in the criminal proceeding, where the consequences are considerably more serious.
For that reason the two should be considered together and in sequence, not separately. This is the single strongest argument for getting advice before the first return date rather than after it.
The Act contains specific provisions about cross-applications, the identification of the person most in need of protection, and the duration of orders. These have been amended and are not reproduced here — confirm the current provisions before relying on them. See source 1.