Economic abuse and the coercive control offence

Where economic abuse fits

Coercive control commenced as an offence in Queensland on 26 May 2025. It was designed to capture patterns of domestic violence that never fit neatly into an existing charge, because each individual act looked minor or lawful when viewed on its own.

The structure of the offence is worth having clearly in mind before looking at economic abuse specifically. A person commits the offence if, in a domestic relationship, they engage in a course of conduct against the other person that is domestic violence on more than one occasion, they intend the conduct to coerce or control that person, and the conduct would in all the circumstances be reasonably likely to cause harm.

Economic abuse is one of the categories of behaviour that can be domestic violence for that purpose. It is a building block, not a standalone charge. Our broader guides cover the coercive control offence and what counts as domestic violence for it.

The definition

Economic abuse means behaviour by a person that is coercive, deceptive or unreasonably controls another person, either:

1. in a way that denies the second person the economic or financial autonomy they would have had but for that behaviour; or
2. by withholding, or threatening to withhold, the financial support necessary for meeting the reasonable living expenses of the second person or a child.

So there are two parts. A threshold about the character of the behaviour, and an outcome that the behaviour must produce. Both have problems.

The examples do not help

The legislation offers examples, and they are close to useless as a guide.

Nearly all of them label something as unreasonable or coercive without describing what makes it so. "Preventing a person from seeking or keeping employment" is given as economic abuse, with no explanation of what the prevention consisted of or how it met the threshold. "Unreasonably disposing of property" is another, which appears to confuse the requirement of unreasonable control with a general test of whether the conduct was unreasonable.

An example that restates the conclusion does not illustrate the rule. Anyone trying to work out whether particular conduct crosses the line is left with the definition itself.

Three undefined words carry the whole threshold

To be economic abuse, the behaviour must be coercive, deceptive, or unreasonably controlling. None of those three is defined for this purpose.

Deceptive

This one is manageable. If you lie to someone or induce them to act on a false premise, that is deception. It is a familiar concept and courts apply it constantly.

Coercive

Harder. Where is the boundary between coercion and the ordinary pressure people apply to a partner? If a wife cries because her husband will not guarantee a credit card application, and he then agrees, has he been coerced?

Ordinary dictionary definitions of "coerce" turn on two elements: the person was unwilling, and force was used. The legislation defines "coerce" elsewhere, though not for this purpose, as to compel or force a person to do, or refrain from doing, something.

That definition does two things. It drops the requirement that the person was unwilling, and it widens the concept beyond force to include compulsion. Read together, it becomes possible that coercion can be established by persuasion, and that a person who was willing at the time can nonetheless have been coerced.

The risk that creates is specific. Conduct that both people experienced as cooperative at the time can be reconstructed years later as coercion, and the person alleged to have coerced has no contemporaneous record showing otherwise.

Unreasonably controlling

Hardest of the three. If a couple agree that one of them manages the finances and provides the other with an allowance for day to day spending, is that unreasonably controlling? Is the reasonableness measured against community standards, or against the standards of the particular relationship?

The Act does provide a defence. It is a defence for the person to prove that the course of conduct was reasonable in the context of the relationship between the two people as a whole.

That helps, but it does not solve this problem, for two reasons. It does not touch the meaning of "unreasonably controlling" in the definition, so it does not tell you where the line sits. And by the time a defence is in play, a person has already been charged with an offence carrying fourteen years.

Denying financial autonomy

Assume the threshold is crossed. The behaviour must then produce one of two outcomes.

The first is that it denies the other person economic or financial autonomy they would otherwise have had.

The target is clear enough. It is the situation where someone cannot access their own money, cannot meet their own needs without permission, and becomes wholly dependent on their partner. The words do capture that.

The difficulty is the word "autonomy", which is not defined and can mean several different things: the right of self-determination, independence, or freedom from external control or influence.

That raises an awkward question. Does anyone in a domestic relationship have true financial autonomy? Most relationships involve significant interdependence. Both people provide for and rely on the other, decisions are made jointly and separately, and the degree of independent financial control each has moves around over time depending on income, children, health and circumstance.

Read broadly, a test asking whether behaviour denied someone financial autonomy could be met by ordinary relationship arrangements. How courts read it will matter a great deal.

Withholding support

The second outcome is withholding, or threatening to withhold, the financial support necessary for the reasonable living expenses of the other person or a child.

The target here is the partner who uses money for basic needs as leverage. Keep the house clean or I stop paying for your petrol. That is a recognisable pattern and it should be caught.

The open question is what counts as a reasonable living expense. That is likely to be assessed against the standard of living of the particular household, which means the same conduct could be economic abuse in one relationship and not in another. A household expense that is a necessity to one family is an extravagance to another.

Subjectivity of that kind is not unusual in law, and courts deal with it. It does mean that nobody can predict in advance exactly where the line falls.

So is it economic abuse?

Economic abuse in relationships is genuine and it should be addressed. Including it within the coercive control offence will almost certainly capture the conduct Parliament had in mind.

The concern is that it also reaches further than that. Three undefined threshold words, an undefined concept of autonomy, and a subjective test of reasonable living expenses give a lot of room to characterise ordinary financial arrangements as abuse after a relationship has ended badly.

How police and courts interpret these terms over the next few years will decide whether the concern was warranted. Until there is a body of decisions, anyone facing an allegation of this kind should get advice early, because the offence is indictable and dealt with in the District Court.