Authors: Matthew Condon
The Canberra did extremely well for decades, despite its detractors, and was known as a city haven for country folk. But 57 years after its opening, and rebadged the Capital Hotel, there seemed to be some confusion in terms of the Premier’s announcement that the site was set to house one of the planet’s top-ten tall buildings.
The day after Bjelke-Petersen’s news made the front page, Brisbane’s
Telegraph
newspaper reported some bewilderment over this ambitious project. On the one hand, John Minuzzo, then 46, declared that the Capital would be demolished. At the hotel however, functions manager Robert Glover said the building was in the middle of $4 million worth of renovations, and that the demise of the establishment was news to him. Mr Glover said management knew nothing of the plans for the hotel to be sold and razed. He said it seemed ‘strange’ that the O’Brien’s, who had owned the hotel for only eight months, would spend millions on a facelift if it was to be sold.
Mr Minuzzo stood firm: ‘Mr O’Brien gave me an option to buy the hotel and may not have told his employees. The State Government has seen the option, it was attached to our application.’ Shop tenants in the building were similarly left scratching their heads.
Gavin O’Brien, the proprietor of Drysdale Auto Books, fronting Edward Street, was forced to place an advertisement in the
Courier-Mail
to inform customers that he had a lease on his shop that extended until March 1988. He reportedly said he had not been told of any redevelopment. ‘Our only information has come from what we read in the newspapers. If the hotel is supposed to be coming down in September, the tenants would have to have time to look for other premises, which takes time.’
Another tenant said he was similarly in the dark. Still, developers and the government said the new Central Place (the proposed name for the development) would go full-steam ahead, and any criticism of it was just ‘sour grapes’ from rival developers.
In fact, Minuzzo’s name had been bandied about in parliament a year earlier in relation to a controversial development on the Gold Coast that had embroiled local government Minister Russ Hinze. During a debate over amendments to the
Local Government Act
in September 1985 – the government wanted to cut red tape for the approval of development projects – Minuzzo featured prominently.
Opposition Leader Nev Warburton had drawn attention to projects on the Gold Coast being developed by a group known as Oasis Holdings. He informed the House that the company was owned by developers Bruno and Rino Grollo. The projects included a $50 million hotel in Surfers Paradise and a $35 million shopping complex in West Burleigh. At the time, Warburton said the project manager for both developments was John Minuzzo. ‘On my understanding,’ Warburton had told parliament, ‘John Minuzzo previously went by the name of Enzo Minuzzo. To say the least, he has had some difficult times before Melbourne courts in recent years.’
Warburton went on to inform parliament that Minuzzo, through the early 1980s, had appeared in court on three separate occasions charged with various offences, including the conspiracy to defraud operators in the sale of land and counts of bribery and conspiracy to breach the Criminal Act. ‘I do not think I need to say a great deal more about the sort of people who are being attracted to the State of Queensland by the National Party Government,’ Warburton said.
Now, as one of the world’s tallest buildings was being touted in 1986, Warburton had another crack at the government in parliament. During Questions Without Notice on 2 September 1986, Warburton asked the Premier about a personal letter he had written to Mr Tony Nevins of Mainsel Investments Pty Ltd. Part of the letter read: ‘I’m glad that you, Izzy and John are investing heavily in Queensland projects. That has been good to see.’ It was signed ‘Joh Bjelke-Petersen’.
Warburton addressed the Premier: ‘Are the two persons referred to in that letter by their Christian names Mr Izzy Herzog and Mr John Minuzzo, who was previously associated with the Grollo brothers, Bruno and Rino, heading the company known as the Grollo Group?’
The Premier fired back: ‘When will the Leader of the Opposition come up with something positive and do something constructive? He is always down in the gutter … it is quite a job to keep people like the Leader of the Opposition out of the gutter.
‘The two people referred to by the Leader of the Opposition have nothing to do with the Grollo brothers. Once again the Leader of the Opposition is on the wrong track. However, at the moment, I cannot help him any more than I have.’
Warburton wouldn’t let it go: ‘I refer to Mr Minuzzo and Mr Herzog, who I understand are still involved in the West Burleigh shopping complex application … prior to his recent meetings with Mr Minuzzo regarding a major proposed Brisbane development [Central Place], had he previously had discussions with Minuzzo in 1984 or 1985 concerning a Gold Coast project, and was he aware at the time of those meetings of Mr Minuzzo’s background and his appearances before Melbourne courts?’
‘Negative yet again,’ Bjelke-Petersen replied. ‘… the same tactics of trying to scrape up mud and dirt. The people he has referred to have come up to Queensland from Melbourne and are investing many hundreds of millions of dollars in this State. They are doing something constructive and very positive.’
The Lord Mayor Sallyanne Atkinson was troubled by a number of aspects of the project. The Premier’s almost fanatical insistence that the building go ahead was one of the first instances of the state government usurping a role traditionally performed by council. ‘How things were in the 1980s was that the state government ran the state and the Brisbane City Council ran Brisbane,’ says Atkinson. ‘There were no Cabinet ministers in Brisbane. They were all out in the country. It was total bliss.
‘I went off and dealt with Russ Hinze, who did call me “girlie” and “pet”. I put up with that because after the initial hiccups … I got on with Russ. It was a good working relationship.
‘Until then, I regarded the Brisbane City Council as the planning authority. I was outraged that the state government would ride roughshod over us – there was a matter of principle involved.’
The issue soured her relationship with Premier Bjelke-Petersen. ‘I was at a dinner at Lennons and I was at a table with [Coordinator General Sir] Syd Schubert and a couple of senior people, and Joh started attacking me about my stand on the world’s tallest building,’ Atkinson remembers. ‘I’d sort of never seen that side of him before. We must have been at the top table, and then he got up and left. I remember turning to Syd Schubert and saying, “You should have protected me on that.”
‘It was quite out of character for Joh, who had always acted like the nice old country gentleman … to be really nasty.’
She also encountered developer John Minuzzo in her office in City Hall. ‘He was like a character out of a movie. I can remember him coming into my office and virtually throwing himself on the floor and beating his little fists, saying, “I want this”,’ she says. ‘He couldn’t have it. You don’t get everything you want in this life.’
Atkinson recalls: ‘[Liberal MP] Angus Innes rang me at home very early one morning and said, “You’ve got to stop it.”’
She observes of the time: ‘There was a bit of a culture around in Brisbane that we had to prove ourselves, that we were bigger and better than everybody else. The temptation to have the world’s tallest building was there.’
Nobody could have known that not only would the saga of Central Place run for years, but would reach disastrously into the office of the Premier and wreak havoc.
A Tremor in the Valley
Anne Marie Tilley, brothel madam extraordinaire, had settled into an easy groove with her businesses flung across Brisbane, and was doing a roaring trade. Life was good. But she couldn’t shake a premonition she was feeling, that perhaps life was too good.
Late one night, in one of the Fortitude Valley clubs, she bumped into Licensing Branch officer Nigel Powell. She knew Powell from around the traps. She was aware he’d been gathering information on her and her de facto husband Hector Hapeta for years, but no prosecutions had been forthcoming.
Nigel was straight. She had always considered him a bit of a ‘dork’. Tilley knew he was smart, but what hope did he have when she and her empire were protected by the likes of men like Graeme Parker?
Powell, on this occasion, offered a simple question to Tilley that resonated with her for a long time afterwards. ‘How do you keep all of this going?’ Powell was referring to the highly lucrative empire she had helped create.
‘I don’t know. Go ask Harry Burgess,’ Tilley replied.
Tilley says many of the corrupt police had begun to get too comfortable. ‘I actually did complain to Jack [Herbert] once that they [the police] were down in the parlours too much,’ she remembers. ‘It was only a period of maybe a couple of weeks but they were coming in every night, standing around, drinking.
‘I said, “You guys, give us a break. People aren’t walking in because you’re standing here.”
‘I asked Jack, “Can you tell them to lay off a bit, to go away?”
‘He said, “I’ll fix that.”
‘I think a couple of them [the police] didn’t think they were invulnerable, but they were a little more intuitive than others. A couple of people, one of them, said to me: “This is going to blow up one day, hey?”
‘I said, “Yeah, probably.”
‘That was a couple of years before anything happened.’
It Was Madness
Within the government, questions were also being raised about Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s unique style of leadership. Cabinet ministers and backbenchers alike were seriously wondering if his increasingly dictatorial and arcane methods belonged in a modern Queensland. What might have appealed to a Country Party–style squattocracy in the 1960s – this no-frills, male-dominated way of doing business with a nod and a handshake – was now chafing against a contemporary, multicultural populace aching to move forward with the times.
Mike Ahern says Bjelke-Petersen stuck with the tried and true method that had seen him rise to the top and stay there – he made promises to all and sundry, and they owed him in return. ‘He would promise them Cabinet positions and some of them were absolutely inappropriate … the positions that they had,’ Ahern recalls. ‘But they were beholden to him. That was his power.
‘In an ideal world you come into politics with an ideal plan. A zeal to do something. He didn’t have that. He came in to be an operator, to show people that he could make decisions.’
Some of those decisions were ludicrous.
Ahern remembers the Premier granting a developer rights to build a resort in the vicinity of an oil refinery at Pinkenba, at the mouth of the Brisbane River. ‘Around every power facility is what you call a “kill zone”,’ Ahern says. ‘It’s not known on the map as the kill zone but obviously you’ve got all that flammable carbohydrate around you and must have an exclusion zone there. And it’s Crown Land or a reserve or some bloody thing … and you don’t let anyone build in there.’
On another occasion, Ahern was summoned to Caboolture for a major announcement by the Premier. A group of businessmen wanted to build an airport. They showed Joh the plans, and he immediately approved the proposal. ‘They rolled it out in front of him [and said] we want to build this airport,’ says Ahern. ‘He had a look at it and he said, “Yes, I know exactly what you’re doing.” He approved it.
‘The Queensland government had no right to approve an airport, that’s a Federal Government matter, they had no money in a budget or anything like that and he didn’t tell anyone. He didn’t have any notes on a file, he didn’t brief his secretary. He had no one with him. He just did it. So they came to me afterwards and they said, we spent $400,000 here on his say and [now] we’re all embarrassed.
‘It was madness. I mean … absolute power, or what you perceived to be strength … no tenders, no negotiations on infrastructure, no zoning issues, no studies on the environment to see whether they were appropriate things, whether there were endangered species …’
It was no secret, either, that Deputy Premier Bill Gunn had waited patiently for years for the top job, and was getting restless. Bjelke-Petersen had in fact told Lewis that Gunn would take over as Premier when he retired from the position.
‘Gunn got impatient,’ recalls Lewis. ‘I said [to Gunn] there’s no way in the world I’d go round the state and sort of nominate or recommend him to be the Premier almost immediately.
‘I got on well with my men, there’s no two ways about that, and he knew Joh did, and he knew that the police vote in the country could be very useful because a lot of people were friendly with their local policemen [and] their local Sergeants or whatever, and they’d all talk together … they thought Joh was a good bloke.’
Lewis says he doesn’t know if the Premier fully appreciated Gunn’s ambitions. ‘I think he was a pretty trusting fellow old Joh, I think he would have thought, oh well, you know, Gunn knows he’s going to get it,’ says Lewis. ‘You might think Joh was a bit naive and he may have been, too. I really don’t think he thought Gunn would stab him in the back, I don’t think that for a minute.’
Lewis says he didn’t particularly trust Gunn. ‘You can’t just run and ring him [Bjelke-Petersen] up and say, look, Mr Premier, I think your Minister is a bit of a shit,’ he says. ‘But you can let him know in subtle ways, I guess. I did let him know somewhere along the line that Mr Gunn, you know, wanted to be the next Premier.’