Authors: Matthew Condon
On Thursday 26 November, a parliamentary Party meeting was held at 10 a.m. The Premier was dispatched as leader of the Party and Mike Ahern was installed as new leader over Bill Gunn and Russ Hinze. Bjelke-Petersen only got eight votes.
According to Bjelke-Petersen’s recollection of the moment, he said he received a visit in his office from Health Minister Ivan Gibbs after the leadership ballot. He remembered that Gibbs was upset. ‘I’m terribly sorry to have to tell you, Joh, but the boys have all decided to dump you and support Ahern.’
Bjelke-Petersen was shocked. ‘Ivan, surely you don’t mean what you’re saying,’ he responded. How could this happen?
‘Well, Joh, there was so much excitement and cheering and clapping at Ahern’s meeting that we all got carried away with it and voted to support him,’ Gibbs supposedly said. ‘There were no speeches – we just got swept off our feet.’
In his biography Joh recalled: ‘By the end of the week it was obvious to me that the end had come but I stayed on for a few more days. Each day Ahern would say he was about to become Premier, but I kept sitting there in the chair, like a kind of ghost, haunting him.’
Joh continued to taunt, refusing to resign his commissions as Premier and Executive Council member. He said he wanted to discuss his future with his family on the weekend before making any decisions on announcing his retirement. He proceeded to barricade himself in his office in the Executive Building in George Street. It was as if the overwhelming decision by National Party politicians to allow Ahern to take over the Premiership hadn’t happened.
On the night of Friday 27 November, Russ Hinze’s press secretary, Russell Grenning, was present outside the Premier’s locked office door with Hinze. ‘It was bizarre … Russ went … and banged on the door,’ Grenning recalled. ‘Joh wouldn’t open the door and Russ was bending down, talking to him through the keyhole with tears running down his face, saying, “Joh, come out mate, it’s all over.”’
The wily political fox was not out of the game yet. Bjelke-Petersen did indeed go home to Bethany that weekend and talk with his family. They urged him to ‘leave the whole ugly business behind’.
Meanwhile, ALP State Secretary Peter Beattie was on official business in Canberra when he got a call from a ‘businessman that had links with several political parties’.
The businessman told Beattie that despite Bjelke-Petersen’s apparently hopeless position, there was a chess move left open to him. Bjelke-Petersen could recall parliament, then have his few remaining partners cross the floor of the house and join the Labor and Liberal parties. It could be ‘a mortal wound’ to Ahern’s new leadership.
Beattie did a quick calculation and didn’t believe this arrangement would deliver the magic number 45 in the legislature. According to Beattie’s recollections in his memoir
In the Arena
, the businessman told him: ‘If Mike Ahern gets in, you’re out for a million years.’
Wrestling with his conscience, Beattie phoned Bjelke-Petersen and told him point blank – he wanted ‘an equitable and fair electoral redistribution’ before even considering putting this possible move before the Labor Party.
‘I slept little that night,’ Beattie wrote. ‘Every molecule of my flesh crawled at the thought of doing anything to help Bjelke-Petersen. There was so much for which he had to answer.’
Back in Brisbane, Beattie was still uncomfortable about the whole deal. He arranged to meet ‘Top Level’ Ted Lyons in his office in the T&G Building in the city. It was a place that for years had been the weekly meeting spot for Lyons and Terry Lewis, where they enjoyed a drink and talked politics.
‘I’ve urged Joh not to resign,’ Lyons told Beattie.
‘Sir Edward, he’s been run out,’ Beattie replied.
Lyons explained that a parliamentary solution was possible. ‘Sir Edward,’ Beattie said, ‘we’re not in the business of propping up Joh.’
Lyons urged Beattie to see Joh in person and they met in the ‘rarely traversed corners’ of Bethany outside Kingaroy. ‘In the afternoon we met in a field,’ Beattie remembered. ‘Joh Bjelke-Petersen sat in the back seat of my car, and I sat in the front. His eyes were slightly bloodshot from strain and fatigue, but otherwise he presented more or less the same aspect as usual. He was relaxed. It was not an act.’
In exchange for the ALP’s support, Sir Joh said he would give the Party more facilities and staff, and drop the outstanding eight defamation actions he had against members of the Party. He was non-committal about a fair distribution.
‘My heart sank,’ Beattie said. ‘I knew that it was over.’
Bjelke-Petersen returned to his Bethany homestead, and Beattie to Brisbane. At one point, it was later revealed that Bjelke-Petersen telephoned Buckingham Palace in London and sought the intervention of the Queen.
It didn’t happen, and Sir Joh had no cards left to play.
That Sunday, Bjelke-Petersen also had words with new National Party leader Mike Ahern. The message was simple. Resign as Premier, or miss out on a generous retirement package. ‘The time for playing games is over,’ Ahern said.
‘On the Monday morning [his pilot] Beryl Young flew in to take Flo and me down to Brisbane,’ Bjelke-Petersen recalled. ‘I sat up the front with Beryl, and Flo sat in the jump-seat between us, and on the way down to Brisbane we talked about what I should do.
‘Both of them agreed I should wash my hands of it all.
‘Before we landed in Brisbane, I told them I would do as they suggested – I would resign as Premier.’
Citizen Joh
On the afternoon of Tuesday 1 December, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen visited Government House in Paddington for the last time and submitted his resignation. He had been Premier of Queensland for a little over 19 years.
‘The National Party of today is not the Party I took to the election last year,’ Sir Joh said in his resignation speech that day at around 5 p.m. ‘The policies of the National Party are no longer those on which I went to the people. Therefore I do not wish to lead this government any longer … I’ve decided to resign as Premier and retire from parliament, effective immediately.’
‘Goodbye and God bless,’ the old man said.
It was an extraordinary end to a long career. ‘For more than 19 years he was centre stage and for almost all of that time, he dominated it,’ the
Courier-Mail
wrote in its editorial. ‘Until the last he kept his audience in suspense. And, when he went, it was the old Joh Queenslanders have come to know – aggressive and unrepentant …’
That night, Bjelke-Petersen and his family shared a meal at Denisons Restaurant in the Sheraton Hotel in the city – a building he had once officially opened as Premier. Before the food arrived, he said grace. ‘This is what I look upon as a new phase,’ he told a reporter. ‘It’s really and truly exciting.’
(The restaurant, however, had earlier received a bomb threat. While patrons’ bags were searched, members of the public were encouraged not to sit near the Bjelke-Petersen clan.)
Sir Joh may have been out of the top job but it didn’t diminish his presence in the media spotlight. The day after he resigned, he was back in the news, and this time over a pet project that, whether in office or out of it, he simply could not let go – the world’s tallest building in Brisbane.
Former local government minister, Russ Hinze, suggested in state parliament that the 107-storey Central Place project was to be scrapped. ‘I have very grave doubts that you’re going to see the tallest building in Queensland,’ Hinze remarked. Outside of parliament, he further said the project was ‘absolutely dead’. He added, however, that there was nothing to prevent developer John Minuzzo and his company Mainsel Developments Pty Ltd from constructing a major building on the site in the Brisbane CBD.
The former premier immediately countered, saying that a Cabinet team, which had included Mike Ahern, had given approval for the world’s tallest building. ‘The Government must honour its word and its pledge and its undertaking, otherwise its reputation goes. If Governments are honest and have any integrity, they will honour the pledges of previous premiers,’ Sir Joh told the
Couier-Mail
.
‘I’m not interested other than there’s a billion dollars’ worth of jobs and materials,’ he added.
Premier Ahern told Bjelke-Petersen to keep out of state government affairs. ‘The Queensland Government will decide about the world’s tallest building, not Citizen Joh,’ Ahern said.
In the end, the issue of the controversial project made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where Justice Paul de Jersey ruled that as the law stood, it would be unlawful to construct.
Justice de Jersey remembers it as ‘the most interesting civil case I’ve ever had’. He adds: ‘It was also interesting because … there was a real urgency about a decision in the case for some reason or other.’
The Mouse Pack
Six months after the start of the Fitzgerald Inquiry, it was time to take a deep breath and assess its impact. For an investigation that was pencilled in for only six weeks of hearings, by Christmas of 1987 it was already shaping up as a culturally and politically transformative juggernaut. It had seen off the longest serving Premier in Queensland’s history, it had stood down its longest serving police commissioner. It had gone a long way towards deconstructing generational corruption that had infected virtually every corner of society. Queensland was facing the prospect of having to reinvent itself.
Newspapers reported that the inquiry had been a heavy blow to the police force, with suicides among the ranks, imploded marriages and careers in tatters. Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald warned that those against his inquiry were behind a nasty propaganda campaign to discredit his hearings.
The
Courier-Mail
wrote: ‘He [Fitzgerald] says stories have been spread around the force urging officers to stick together, because police can only rely on each other; not to help the inquiry because it is ruining police morale; and not to dob in mates or their career could be finished.
‘Mr Fitzgerald has warned police not to be fooled by their corrupt colleagues.’
The article alleged that some police officers felt their colleagues were not getting a fair go at the inquiry. Many police objected strongly to prostitutes giving evidence, because they held grudges against the police. ‘The officers behind this propaganda are known in the force as the “Mouse Pack”. According to police sources, these officers are juniors to the more celebrated “Rat Pack”.
The first six months had naturally been a destabilising period for the force as a whole. Week after week, the daily diet of police scandals in the media rolled out like some salacious, serialised penny dreadful. And officers across the board – corrupt or not – waited for their ‘notice of allegations’ – that slip of paper on commission of inquiry letterhead that informed them that they were soon to be named in evidence, and they best attend the hearings.
The family of former assistant commissioner, Tony Murphy, said it was a terrible time. ‘Every morning he’d have to go and get the [news]papers – “I’m in it again.” It was a horrible feeling to have things said about you that weren’t true,’ they said. ‘On the news every night. We were all waiting for him to be called. His solicitor got a bit cranky with Tony. He kept saying, “I want to give evidence.” He wanted to set things right and he never had that opportunity.’
Police morale hit rock bottom. ‘For those who have been innocently named, it may be more than 12 months before their names can be cleared,’ the
Courier-Mail
attested. ‘But for others who have been quite rightly named, the biggest worry for them is: how much have they got on me?
‘For the rest of the force, they are wondering who they can trust. ‘‘It’s very disheartening,” said one junior officer. “The policemen who you were told to look up to, you now realise are bad, bad people. A lot of them used to be the success stories of the police force, the people young officers modelled themselves on.
‘‘‘Well, nobody believes in success stories anymore.’’’
Another senior officer lamented: ‘While I’ve been out risking my life doing my job, I discover some of these bastards around me have been sitting around getting paid off. They deserve all they get.’
As for Lewis, he says he had several discussions with Don Lane about the progress of the inquiry. ‘I spoke to Lane a few times and said, “Look, for goodness sake, tell the Premier or somebody to … exercise some control over the inquiry,”’ says Lewis. ‘Because at that stage they were just going to go on forever, which they did … I thought he [Lane] might have some way that he could say, not stop it or interfere with them, but just to keep it within some sort of manageable … territory.’
Hunting the Predators
Kym Goldup, a fifth-generation Gold Coaster, could have done anything with her life. When she first graduated from the University of Queensland she considered becoming a forensic scientist. Instead, she joined the Queensland police and by March 1983 was sworn in as a constable. After a month at the city station in the Brisbane CBD, she served another month in the Traffic Branch before being seconded to Mobile Patrols on the Gold Coast – her home turf.
Early in her career, Goldup expressed a fascination with sexual offences, and acquitted a course with the Rape Squad. With her academic background, she was considered the perfect fit for the Juvenile Aid Bureau (JAB), founded by former commissioner Frank Bischof and headed up for a number of years by Terry Lewis. She started working for the Gold Coast branch of the JAB in 1984, investigating cases of incest. It was here that she got her first real insight into paedophilia. ‘I didn’t know at the time but there was a group of detectives in Juvenile Aid who were investigating things to do with paedophiles and the Brett’s Boys [male brothel in Brisbane] thing,’ Goldup recalls.