Authors: Matthew Condon
Similar to Dwyer, Parker said he kept in touch with Herbert often through Peggy Herbert, who phoned as ‘Mrs Eaton’.
He said Herbert was meticulous with the payments. ‘There’d be a number of bundles on the dining room table – four or five envelopes,’ Parker told the inquiry. All were initialled, and given to Licensing Branch officer Harry Burgess, Allen Bulger, Neville Ross and a couple of others. ‘I’d give an envelope to Bulger and the remainder I’d give to Burgess who would distribute them to other people,’ Parker added.
His payments from Herbert ranged from $2000 to $6000 a month, with a boost during the Christmas period. More extraordinary evidence was to come. He said Herbert had told him that he was ‘great friends’ with Commissioner Lewis and he was also a ‘business partner’ of Transport Minister Don ‘Shady’ Lane. ‘He [Herbert] told me that he had to pay half of what he got to the top and higher and that he had to pay a portion of proceedings to Don Lane for any massage parlour or escort agency that opened in his electorate,’ Parker told the inquiry.
‘He [Herbert] told me that Don Lane was involved in the business and that it had mushroomed. He gave me the impression that he and Don Lane were very, very close friends.
‘Don Lane had been to see him [Herbert] to see if he could arrange for Herbert’s two sons to be placed on the electoral roll in Bowen Hills, because the election was very close and he needed the votes. One lived in Sydney and the other at Dutton Park [in Brisbane].’
Herbert would go on to tell his biographer: ‘Don Lane was a Cabinet minister, we wanted to know what he said in Cabinet. Don Lane would invite me down to Parliament House for dinner (and) he used to come over and see us.’
Parker said Commissioner Lewis also referred to Lane as ‘Big Don’. He admitted he had never seen Lewis or Lane with Herbert. (A long-time associate of Jack Herbert, who regularly socialised with The Bagman and saw police come and go from Herbert’s various homes, says Herbert often hinted at the money ‘hierarchy’ behind The Joke. ‘Don Lane got the biggest share,’ the source says. ‘Jack told me that in a roundabout way. I worked out that Don Lane was the top, he was the total organiser and everyone answered to him.’)
Parker was asked by Gary Crooke who was receiving money ‘at the top or higher’, as Herbert had indicated to him. ‘He [Herbert] would hand me the money and he would say he had to see Terry a couple of nights later or “The Boss” was coming over to see him on a social visit,’ Parker told the inquiry. ‘He implied he was looking after the Commissioner. On one occasion, his [Herbert’s] wife was going out and he said she was on her way to see Hazel [Lewis].’
Parker said he had had a discussion with Sir Terence after Burgess gave his evidence about Dwyer and himself to the inquiry. ‘… I spoke to the Commissioner, and he said “Big Don suggested that Herbert should leave the country”,’ Parker said.
Lane’s lawyer said the evidence was merely hearsay and that his client vigorously denied the allegations by Parker.
Lewis says Parker spoke to him after giving evidence and said ‘that he doesn’t know what he said or what he did’. He remains incensed by the commission’s treatment of Parker, and the activities of the Licensing Branch as a whole. ‘Well, they knew the Licensing Branch would be … well obviously they must have known that some of the bastards were doing what they were doing,’ Lewis says.
‘And Herbert probably told them that they were shagging and getting a quid and doing that. And … and some of the challenges, well even now … there were no real detectives rolled over, there were just these bloody bums that did little or nothing.
‘Parker was a very, very, very ill man and they brought him to the inquiry … [Parker came] to see me later, much, much later, and … said how they misused him and tried to get him to come in and give evidence against me. But he … at the hospital he would have admitted anything.’
Parker, a Queen’s Police Medal winner for distinguished service, used his appearance before the inquiry to ask his fellow Queenslanders for forgiveness. ‘I’d like to say I held a position of trust in the Licensing Branch and as Assistant Commissioner (Crime) and I betrayed that trust and I’d like to apologise to all Queenslanders and to all Queensland constables,’ he said.
Over in London, Jack Herbert, in hiding, was furious at the testimony of Burgess, Dwyer and Parker. His son John, who worked for Qantas, had been bringing to London photocopies of inquiry transcripts for Herbert to pore over. He said he never called Commissioner Lewis ‘a shark’. He denied Lane was taking any money from massage parlours in Fortitude Valley. ‘I was incensed by what Burgess and Dwyer and Parker were saying about me,’ Herbert said in his memoir. ‘That’s when I made up my mind to go back [to Australia].’
Meanwhile, suspended Police Commissioner Terry Lewis claims he was offered an indemnity from prosecution by the commission. He says it was offered by counsel assisting the commission, Gary Crooke. ‘Well, they wanted me to give it against [Premier Sir] Joh, that was obviously the point and I said … no good offering me one because I haven’t got any evidence to give,’ Lewis says.
‘And if I’d been a smartarse, I suppose, I could have said yes, I could give evidence against [some]one, like they thought up evidence against me … who would you like me to give it against?’
Lewis says he has no regrets over declining the alleged offer. ‘How could you go and give false evidence and say I was a crook and I knew these people were crooks?’ Lewis adds. ‘At least nobody can say that I said I was a bloody crook and I know they rubbished me ever since, one way or another.
‘It killed Hazel and buggered out my life.’
A former senior inquiry staff member says Crooke would not have been offering indemnities to Lewis. ‘There’s often a miscue between the speaker and the person spoken to,’ the staffer says. ‘I can imagine Gary saying something like – if you’re prepared to really come out and tell us the whole story and implicate everybody, I’ll ask the Commissioner whether there’s any possibility of …
‘Now if you want to hear that as an offer of an indemnity, you can. So conversations like that could have easily happened. I just … don’t think it would have gone very far with Gary with that.
‘I wouldn’t say he’s [Lewis] telling lies but I’d certainly say he’s probably misunderstood the conversation, if any conversation took place.’
Exorcising the Demon
When Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen reluctantly announced, after his failed bid for the Australian Prime Ministership, that he would retire as Queensland Premier on 8 August 1988, he pulled the trigger on his demise. After months of damning evidence about crooked Queensland police, protection money, prostitutes, sex parties, drugs and violence, the state’s polite veil had been torn back. The picture of Sir Joh and his followers upholding the wholesome, hayseed image of a decent, old-fashioned Queensland, and the filthy reality of Fitzgerald’s findings, was starting to blur.
By nominating his departing date so far in advance, it gave his colleagues and the public pause to think – do we want almost another full year of this?
In early November, after Joh’s proclamation, the media was already discussing the ‘post-Joh era’, and surveys pointed towards Health Minister Mike Ahern as the preferred Premier over Deputy Premier and Police Minister Bill Gunn.
Bjelke-Petersen resented this debate over his political corpse. He struck back. At the National Party’s annual state conference in Townsville in the first week of November, he criticised National Party president Sir Robert Sparkes and even hinted that his Premiership might extend beyond the agreed date the following year.
‘You will have no one – truly – that would have the input I have,’ Sir Joh said of his own leadership abilities. ‘I would have access to every television station. That is a question you people will have to look at.’ He added: ‘The Party is coming apart very quickly.’
The Premier had every reason to be worried. A Morgan Gallup Poll in the
Bulletin
magazine put his electoral support at just 23 per cent. The Party’s internal war between Sparkes and Bjelke-Petersen wasn’t helping.
The
Courier-Mail
’s political editor, Peter Morley, wrote of the Townsville conference: ‘There should be no misunderstanding about this conference – the State’s two heavyweight knights may have always enjoyed a love-hate relationship, but this time they are locked in a death struggle. Each is determined that the other has to go for the Party’s sake.’ He concluded that the once rock solid Nationals were ‘coming apart at the seams’.
As the conference convened – at Sir Leslie Thiess’s Breakwater Casino – back at the Fitzgerald Inquiry in Brisbane, Transport Minister Don Lane was accused of taking bribes. He denied ‘in the strongest possible terms the hearsay assertions of wrongdoing made against me.’
On Thursday 5 November, the anticipated heavyweight fight between Sparkes and the Premier did not materialise. Instead, Bjelke-Petersen fell ill – he claimed he was suffering laryngitis – and flew back to his Kingaroy property, Bethany. ‘I will leave you alone this time,’ he told Sir Robert.
In the Premier’s absence, the Party did something astonishing. It decided to embrace the late 20th century, eschewing, according to one newspaper report, its ‘fundamentalist cloak’. It moved to legalise prostitution, urged the government to legalise condom vending machines and pledged its support for AIDS education to school children. It also agreed to sex education during school hours. It was an astonishing philosophical turnaround for the National Party.
Peter Morley wrote: ‘Highlighting the fact that there is no fight without Joh, the organisation shredded some of its fundamentalist policies. It was a cleansing process where delegates, encouraged by his 8-8-88 retirement commitment, showed signs of responding to community views – not Sir Joh’s.’
When the conference disbanded, Sparkes revealed that his relationship with the Premier had completely broken down. ‘It would appear that adequate communication with Joh is not possible at this point in time,’ he told reporters.
Predictably, the Premier rejected the reforms called for at the Townsville conference as ‘hoo-ha’.
Journalist Quentin Dempster described the National Party’s hypocrisy as ‘monumental’. ‘This mob is so desperate to stay in power that it will do anything,’ he wrote. ‘It is even prepared to turn decent.’
A Child Goes Missing
As the Fitzgerald Inquiry continued to roll on smoothly, its daily revelations sending shockwaves throughout Queensland, an unpredictable incident also stunned commission staff and the media. The young son of John Stopford, one of the key figures who gave an interview to Chris Masters for his ‘Moonlight State’ report, had suddenly disappeared.
The boy, Jay, aged five, was reported missing on Thursday 12 November, when he failed to board the bus from his school in Dunwich to his home at Amity Point on North Stradbroke Island. Police believed he may have been abducted by his mother, Stopford’s former de facto wife Wendy Ann Dillon, also known as Wendy Butler, based on descriptions of a woman seen with Jay around the time he vanished.
Stopford contacted his lawyer, Terry O’Gorman, who in turn went straight to the Supreme Court where custody of the child was granted to Stopford. Was the disappearance connected to the underworld? Or were the police behind the disappearance? Stopford had blown the whistle on corrupt police to
Four Corners
, and after the show had gone to air Queensland police had sent a helicopter to the island to bring Stopford in. Now his child was gone.
The matter was mentioned by Tony Fitzgerald who didn’t think the abduction was linked to the hearings, but still felt the boy needed to be returned to his father. ‘… nothing has been brought to the attention of the Commission which indicates that there is any connection between the Commission and any events which have occurred involving Mr Stopford’s son,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘There is no reason to doubt that ordinary law enforcement resources are sufficient and committed to the task of investigating what has occurred, and there is nothing to indicate that it is a matter in which the Commission should become involved.’
By chance, Stopford was talking to a person staying in the caravan park at Amity Point who knew Jay’s mother and had recently seen her entering a housing commission property not far from Sydney’s Long Bay prison complex at Malabar, south of Randwick in the city’s east.
O’Gorman in turn phoned Nigel Powell, who had also appeared on the
Four Corners
program, and asked him if he would accompany Stopford to Sydney to find the child. ‘My memory is that Wendy took him [Jay] out of school there and was with a couple of other guys at the time,’ Powell recalls. ‘The inference was that they were police. She was put up to it. That was the story I got.’
Powell agreed to help Stopford. ‘John turned up in this old Falcon with a mate,’ he says. ‘We drove all the way through to Sydney. Neither John nor his mate had a driver’s licence and I said I’d get behind the wheel when we got on the outskirts of Sydney. Within two minutes of entering the Sydney metropolitan area we were pulled over by police.’
They were allowed to continue on their way and they eventually found the supposed flat of Wendy’s near Long Bay prison. Powell had a look around, leaving Stopford in the car. ‘There was some kid’s stuff there in the flat, I could see that through the window,’ he says. ‘Early the next morning we went to the Federal Police offices near Redfern. They were reluctant to get involved. I told them we had a court order and that this was in their jurisdiction. Eventually they came with us and got Jay. I didn’t want to linger. I didn’t want any problems. We drove straight for the Queensland border.’