“Sir Joh can be remembered, and he’ll lengthy be remembered. However not for what he wished to be remembered for.”
This was my prediction when Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen died in 2005, heading up one among quite a lot of obituaries.
Propelling my pen was a way of obligation to do justice to the stunted alternatives and deliberate and informal cruelties inflicted on the state and plenty of, many, Queenslanders below Australia’s most blinkered, authoritarian and corrupt postwar regime.
The steadiness within the preliminary flood of obituaries was about two-thirds extra adulation than condemnation.
Cranes on the skyline and large holes within the floor carried extra weight than stamping on civil liberties and corruption.
There’s significantly better steadiness in newly minted tv documentary Joh: Final King of Queensland, airing on Stan this weekend.
Its signature contact is having Sir Joh current as actor Richard Roxburgh delivering attribute monologues to reply or extra usually homily his means round any questions or criticisms of his conduct. Vignettes from household, mates, political luminaries, journalists, historians and opponents and a wealth of obtainable footage hold the narrative going.
Again then, Joh’s fairly deliberate – even educated – incoherent rambling was all too regularly excessively tidied up by reporters after which judged by commentators as proof of his political acumen.
After all, it additionally opened up alternatives for us reporters. As soon as, on a gradual information day when he was nonetheless talking to me, I requested Joh whether or not he was considering sending the then Liberal chief, Sir Llew Edwards, off to a coveted London posting.
Nothing in his “Properly, you recognize Phil …” constituted a direct denial so sure, there was a narrative.
It’s straightforward to caricature a lot of Bjelke-Petersen’s reign. Presumably Sir Joh had a hand within the wording of the quotation for his 1984 knighthood, which famous he was “a powerful believer within the idea of parliamentary democracy” who had made “many enhancements within the parliamentary course of”.
This not lengthy after the Liberals had deserted the Coalition as a result of Joh’s refusal to countenance parliamentary committees and whereas the legislative meeting continued to show in new information for the brevity of its sitting classes.
In reality, Sir Joh (1968-1987) was the final and second-longest lasting of a string of strongmen Australian state premiers – Robert Askin (New South Wales: 1965-1975), Henry Bolte (Victoria: 1955-1972), Sir Charles Court docket (Western Australia: 1974-1982) and Thomas Playford (South Australia: 1938-1965).
All had been conservative and variously infamous for driving roughshod over Westminster traditions and disrespect of civil liberties, abuse of the electoral system, and tolerance or participation in corruption.
Even contemplating Askin’s organised crime associations, Bjelke-Petersen was to surpass all of them. Of many biographies, my vote for each greatest and greatest titled goes to Evan Whitton’s The Hillbilly Dictator.
That Queensland suffered for longer and graduated into such a relic of poor governance was, in Sir Joh’s solely legitimate defence, partly as a result of an extended string of Labor governments had demolished an inconvenient higher home and completely gerrymandered the citizens.
The Coalition authorities which fell, considerably shocked, into authorities in 1956 ignored the pungent scent of corruption round Frank Bischof and appointed him police commissioner.
In 1963, within the Nationwide Lodge royal fee, a future chief justice of the excessive court docket of Australia was efficiently hoodwinked right into a discovering of negligible police corruption. Tony Fitzgerald, most of the similar names in rather more senior positions 24 years later, discovered in any other case.
Sir Joh, initially an impassioned critic of Labor’s gerrymander, went on to embrace the innovation of creating islands of Aboriginal communities inside different electorates.
Policing turned political, more and more aimed toward opponents of the regime.
A notable scarcity of actual communists (Queensland police had practically crushed Australia’s solely ever Communist member of parliament to dying in 1948) didn’t deter the anti-communist rhetoric Joh aimed on the Labor social gathering, unions, college college students and Aboriginal activists.
Sir Joh lengthy denied even the opportunity of corruption within the police power, nicely past the optimum level to beat a hasty retreat to “I knew nothing”. It’s arduous to reconcile this with the Fitzgerald inquiry’s capacity to accumulate the information of any cupboard assembly of curiosity however one – the one which noticed Terry Lewis appointed as commissioner of police.
All of that is comparatively nicely canvassed in Final King. My solely quibble is that it leaves the query of whether or not Sir Joh was personally corrupt unnecessarily unresolved.
When Sir Joh died, so did the defamation writ that he had issued years earlier than for my publishing the small print of the corruption expenses that had been ready in opposition to him in relation to brown paper baggage of money delivered to his workplace. True, he by no means confronted these specific expenses, however allegations of mendacity to Fitzgerald concerning the brown paper baggage was the essence of the trial that introduced him inside a Young National juryperson of changing into the primary Australian premier to be consigned to a time period in jail.
The particular prosecutor judged Sir Joh too previous to face a second trial earlier than a recent jury – unlucky for the sake of historical past, and likewise in that it could have deterred Sir Joh from launching a daft $338m declare in opposition to Queensland and Queenslanders for private damages arising from the Fitzgerald inquiry.
Different tribunals, nonetheless, had been in a position to make definitive rulings.
An impressive A Present Affair program in 1989 detailed the largesse given to Bjelke-Petersen by development magnate Sir Leslie Thiess. Thiess instantly sued for defamation and misplaced, the jury discovering that Sir Leslie had bribed Sir Joh on an extravagant scale, defrauding his personal shareholders within the course of.
Bjelke-Petersen’s pioneering position within the bribe by means of defamation settlement racket was then highlighted by the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal. When Alan Bond let it slip that threats to his enterprise had been a characteristic of a 1986 $400,000 cost to Sir Joh in settlement of a 1983 defamation case, the tribunal delved deeper into whether or not Bond was a match and correct sufficient individual for a sizeable lump of the printed spectrum.
Backing up the tribunal, the excessive court docket outlined Bond’s proposal to pay Bjelke- Petersen the $50,000 Channel 9’s attorneys thought was an inexpensive or at the very least defensible sum, with the $350,000 steadiness to satisfy his calls for to return as “a cost abroad associated to belongings, a mortgage with out obligation to repay or an extreme cost for the sale of property”.
However Bjelke-Petersen was too grasping and too needy – or too vengeful – for any of this, and the settlement made the tv information and finally put Bond out of the tv enterprise.
Karma additionally appears to have intervened after Bjelke-Petersen cajoled a big mortgage out of a international financial institution, with the inner documentation displaying this as a steadiness of inducements and menaces choice considerably at variance to the relevant credit standing. However appreciation of the Swiss franc then introduced the Bjelke-Petersen household enterprises near penury.
Final King does notice Bjelke-Petersen’s poor understanding of conflicts of curiosity, in his making an attempt to place it over that it was completely OK for his spouse, Florence, to carry the preferentially issued Comalco and Utah shares.
In essence, sufficient proof with sufficient in the way in which of judicial proceedings was mendacity for Final King to not depart the query of Bjelke-Petersen’s private corruption hanging.
Final King deserves a notable place within the voluminous memorabilia round Sir Joh.
The life and occasions (and crimes) of Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen are certainly pertinent to the present state of the world and Final King ought to be wheeled out at common intervals and be a curricula staple to remind us.
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Phil Dickie is a Gold Walkley winner and creator of bestselling e book The Highway To Fitzgerald: Revelations of Corruption Spanning 4 A long time. His reporting on the Bjelke-Petersen authorities is credited, together with an ABC 4 Corners program, with sparking the Fitzgerald corruption inquiry
