Corporal punishment in primary and secondary schools
There has been considerable uniformity across Australian states and territories in either explicitly banning the use of corporal punishment in schools or removing provisions in education Acts that provided a defence to the use of reasonable chastisement by people acting in the place of a parent (e.g., teachers) (see Table 3). Legislation in Queensland and South Australia does not explicitly state that corporal punishment is banned in schools. However, the provisions that previously allowed for the use of corporal punishment in schools have been removed from the relevant education legislation. There remains some ambiguity in the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australian law, where amendments have been made to education legislation that previously allowed for the use of physical punishment, but not to criminal codes that still (in principle) give authority to a parent, or a person in place of a parent, to "use reasonable corrective force".
There is less consistency in the degree to which Australian jurisdictions have abolished the use of corporal punishment in non-government schools (see Table 3). New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria are the only states where statutes clearly stipulate that corporal punishment is banned in both government and non-government schools. The Australian Capital Territory Education Act 2004 does not explicitly ban corporal punishment in non-government schools, however, the interpretation of the Act, which states that corporal punishment is banned in "all schools", is that the relevant provision applies to both.