Authors: Matthew Condon
Ralph reported that the chopper had landed and the occupants had piled into the police vehicle and headed off in the direction of Amity Point. ‘You reckon they might be coming for you?’ Ralph asked his neighbour.
‘I think so,’ Stopford replied.
(What Stopford didn’t know was that Commissioner Terry Lewis and other senior officers had already met that morning with Deputy Premier and Police Minister Bill Gunn. They discussed the
Four Corners
program and a possible inquiry. According to the diary of the Commissioner’s personal assistant, Greg Early, an attempt would also be made to ‘try and get a … statement from Stopford on Stradbroke Island …’.
Stopford’s son, Jay, was at the local kindergarten in Dunwich and was imminently due back at Amity by bus. Stopford had fled his home and sheltered with a friend who lived on the edge of the village. The friend then drove back to the old post office and learned the police had been in Stopford’s driveway. Now they were sitting in a vehicle off the Amity bus stop. ‘She came back and told me,’ says Stopford. ‘I said, “Listen, we’ve got to get him [Jay] off that bus.”
‘The bus had already left Dunwich. So we intercepted the bus, on what they call the Beehive Road, and we got him off … we got him and then went up to a friend who was living at Flinders Beach [near Amity], and that’s where we hid out. The chopper stayed until the afternoon, I think, and disappeared.’
Being such a small place, Stopford knew the local sergeant. They’d crossed paths several times at social events. ‘I rang him and he said he was being pressured to grab hold of me – he didn’t put it in those words – and bring me in for a police chat with one of the inspectors. He said he was being pressured and that it would be easier all round … he’d make sure I was safe.
‘I asked, “What’s it in relation to?” And he said, “You know.”
‘I got in touch with [lawyer] Terry O’Gorman that night. I snuck into a new friend’s place – his parents owned the corner store – and rang from there.’
The Amity locals immediately protected Stopford and Jay. ‘We would not have survived without the cooperation of the Amity community,’ John Stopford reflects. ‘They weren’t a part of … hiding me out or trying to pervert the course of justice, but I certainly wouldn’t have been able to survive. I didn’t comprehend … I knew something would come, but I didn’t comprehend that they would be so bloody brazen to fly into uncharted waters in a helicopter the morning after.
‘Thank God Ralph had his brains about him and realised, this is a rare event. What’s going on?’
Stopford says he did fear that someone from the Brisbane underworld would be sent to the island to deal with him. An associate told him that he had information that Stopford would ‘wear it and wear it very quick’. He started to consider what he was going to do with Jay.
Stopford says: ‘Through it all, I didn’t give much consideration to that side of the seedy past. It was always the police I knew had more to lose than anybody … I regretted going on the program in those early days. Probably for quite a while there.’
In Canberra, the day after the broadcast, Peter Vassallo went into the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence office at London Circuit, as usual, and suddenly started suffering severe chest pains. ‘Nobody in the bureau knew of my involvement with “The Moonlight State”,’ Vassallo recalls. ‘I had treated the whole thing as a counter-intelligence operation.’
Months of stress had taken its toll. Vassallo was transferred to a hospital in Woden and ultimately cleared, but was granted three months’ stress leave.
On Tuesday 12 May, the
Courier-Mail
reported that Deputy Premier and Police Minister Bill Gunn believed the integrity of the Queensland police had been seriously questioned by the
Four Corners
report. ‘I am meeting senior officers of the police force today to discuss these very serious allegations,’ Gunn said. ‘We are interested in evidence. This is absolutely essential. We want to speak to anyone who has any information. I also believe
Four Corners
has a lot of material that was not broadcast. I would like to see all of that too.’
State Opposition Leader Nev Warburton said an independent judicial inquiry into the allegations needed to be held. The government could not brush off these allegations, he said.
On the same day, Gunn announced a commission of inquiry. He said, optimistically, that he still wasn’t convinced that corruption was occurring. ‘But a series of police ministers have had these types of allegations hanging over their heads,’ said Gunn. ‘They are not going to hang over mine. I am setting out to get something done.’
Gunn initially entertained an inquiry to be held by the Police Complaints Tribunal and its head, Judge Eric Pratt. However, after speaking with Commissioner Lewis and the Premier, he ruled out the idea. Gunn said Sir Terence had agreed with the idea of mounting an investigation. The Police Minister added that he was not embarrassed about having denied the existence of a problem for many years. ‘It is not at all embarrassing,’ Gunn said in his defence. ‘It is a great move. You should be congratulating me.’
Up in Cairns, Vincenzo Bellino, 31, of Ponticello Street, Whitfield, issued a Supreme Court writ against the ABC for alleged defamation.
All the Premier had to say about ‘The Moonlight State’ was that there may be ‘one or two policemen’ who may have not been doing the right thing.
According to the diary of Greg Early, the Police Commissioner’s personal assistant, on Thursday 14 May, he ‘rang Detective Inspector Taylor (Special Branch) re debugging of COP [Commissioner of Police] office, AC Redmond and AC Parker and Licensing Branch as well … spoke to AC Donoghue and Superintendent Errol Walker re custody of files from Records Section, notebooks and diaries from Licensing Branch, locks on doors, a safe and a room for his crew to use. [
Sunday Mail
journalist] Ric Allen rang with seven questions. Saw COP and drafted answers.’
The next day, according to Early’s records, everyone was offering an opinion on the credibility of the
Four Corners
program. Some thought it was a ‘non-event’ and the ABC ‘would end up with egg on its face …’
Early said he telephoned Bill Gunn at his electoral office ‘and he said the inquiry must go on so that the ABC can be discredited and that if it did not go on the ABC would have some credibility’. The diary entry for that day continues: ‘[Ross] Dickson does not know which way to go and he admitted to a friend last night that he has nothing. A couple of police have been a bit stupid and they’ll have to pay.’
To Bethany
On Saturday 16 May 1987, having made no public comment in the five days since the broadcast of ‘The Moonlight State’, and the subsequent announcement by Police Minister Bill Gunn of an inquiry, Lewis had some urgent politicking to do.
He first visited Transport Minister Don Lane in Brisbane, and then telephoned the Premier at his property, Bethany, 210 kilometres north-west of Brisbane and just outside Kingaroy. ‘I said [to Joh], “Look, can we come up? I want to just tell you something.” So I went up [to Bethany].’
The splendid rural retreat, over 600 hectares first purchased by the Premier’s grandfather, Hans Poulsen, featured an old Queenslander and a newer, brick residence, built by Sir Joh for his bride Florence after their marriage in 1952. The brick house was set back from the road and was veiled by trees. Lewis had some important information to impart to the Premier.
Conspiracy theories behind the announcement of the inquiry were flourishing. Lewis says, firstly, the whole thing was part of Bill Gunn’s strategy to seize the premiership. He says at the time he was also feeling threatened by his own deputy, Ron Redmond, whom he believed was simultaneously eyeing the position of Police Commissioner.
Lewis adds that around this time he had heard a rumour that Gunn and Redmond had been at a function and Gunn, standing next to the Deputy Commissioner, declared to the room – here’s your next police commissioner. (A witness to the event agrees that Gunn made the announcement.)
Meanwhile, a source that Lewis refuses to name, told him that Tony Fitzgerald, QC – the prominent lawyer whose name was being bandied around to potentially head the inquiry – had political leanings towards the Labor Party, and Lewis felt it his duty to inform Bjelke-Petersen. ‘He [the source] rang me and said, look, he said … he’s [from] a famous legal family, a very famous one, a lovely bloke … he said, “I know Fitzgerald personally … I know he’s a red hot Labor supporter, I know he hates Joh and he [Joh] … is absolutely mad if he leaves him to run this commission. He’ll get Joh”,’ Lewis recalls.
‘So I got in the car, I went to Kingaroy, because they were having a Cabinet meeting at Roma the next day, and I went up and I said, “Look, Mr Premier, I can’t tell you who said this but I was told …”
‘And at that stage I’m not sure if it went in this ear and out the other. He was thinking of bloody Canberra and he went to Roma the next day and Gunn put this submission through, whatever it was, and of course away it went from there.’ (With the support of National Party President Robert Sparkes, Bjelke-Petersen had, earlier in the year, instigated a campaign to tackle the perceived socialism of the Hawke Labor government and win the Office of the Prime Minister. Known as the ‘Joh for PM’ campaign, the aim was to dismantle Medicare and, among other things, introduce a flat-tax system.)
‘Joh lost track of things and Gunn was aware of that, he raised it when Joh was overseas, and then he’d just got back … and Joh’s mind was on other things. It’s a pity I couldn’t tell him who it was. But whether it would have changed his mind, I don’t know.’
Lewis also had his doubts about Bill Gunn. ‘He didn’t have the mind for thinking that a minister should have,’ Lewis reflects. ‘See … you’ve got to have trust and you’ve got to be able to talk to people which I had with [Tom] Newbery totally, even old [Russ] Hinze, I used to drive him nuts … and Glasson was alright but Glasson was, he was a nice fellow but not as strong as some men … but Gunn wasn’t terribly trustworthy in that sense, I didn’t think so.’
Lewis is adamant that during this period Bjelke-Petersen was distracted. ‘He had that fixation about going to bloody Canberra,’ Lewis says. ‘I said to him a couple of times when we were talking about different things, “Oh, you know, Premier, Canberra’s a different place to here. You wouldn’t have a lot of friends there …”
‘It couldn’t happen, even if he was God, well not quite God I suppose. But he wasn’t, he didn’t have an electorate. Then would the Party have him? And then if they had him, would they immediately make him Prime Minister? It just, it couldn’t have happened. But he couldn’t see that … he was, in many ways, a smart man, but in other ways he wasn’t …’
Lewis says he could tell immediately that Bjelke-Petersen was distracted during that last-minute visit. ‘I could see that he wasn’t taking it in, because somebody said something, he said, “Oh, the plane’s ready to take me to Roma”,’ recalls Lewis.
‘I thought, oh, shit. He had the chance then to stop the Fitzgerald Inquiry and put some … an unbiased person there … if you’re going to have a Royal Commission, you’ve got to pick an experienced … a judge is the logical person. I’ve thought of it ever since, and after I went away I was … on the way home I was disappointed …’
No Complaints
It took just short of a week for Commissioner Lewis to finally offer some response to the allegations unleashed by the
Four Corners
investigation. While Lewis had been aware that Masters had been making queries throughout Queensland since early in the year, he hadn’t seemed overly concerned about Masters’ ultimate report. Similar reports had come and gone. This time, however, the disquiet was not going away.
Lewis sat down with his assistant Greg Early and they nutted out some answers to questions put to them by
Sunday Mail
journalist Ric Allen. The headline above the ‘exclusive interview’ banner read: LEWIS REPLIES.
‘The Police Commissioner, Sir Terence Lewis, yesterday was full of praise for his officers after a week of criticism,’ the story said. ‘I’m proud of my policemen and women and their continuing efforts to fight crime,’ he said. ‘Neither I nor any of my senior officers believe the Queensland police force is corrupt. In the event of any judicial inquiry, I’ll be happy to testify.’
Lewis was asked what sorts of controls did he have in place as Commissioner to prevent corruption. He answered that he had four deputies who were ‘completely autonomous in receiving and having complaints investigated’. He added that there was also the safeguard of the Police Complaints Tribunal, run by Judge Eric Pratt. ‘It is of note that since the inception of the tribunal in 1982, not one complaint of police corruption about an officer has been lodged,’ Lewis said. ‘It is amazing, to say the least, if a corrupt police officer can evade this net.’
Allen also went back into history, querying Lewis’s rapid elevation from an Inspector in Charleville to Commissioner at the end of 1976, following the resignation of former commissioner Ray Whitrod.
His answers were curt. ‘My promotion to my present rank was in 1976 and any questions about it were ten years ago,’ Lewis responded. ‘I do not recall what questions were then raised nor the answers which were then given. I did not seek that promotion.’