death of a cane toad

By Quentin Dempster

Johannes Bjelke-Petersen always seemed to have a problem with the concept of conflict of interest.

Although the senate of the University of Queensland infamously awarded the former premier an honorary doctorate of laws and his 1984 knighthood citation from Buckingham Palace declared he was a strong believer in the Westminster parliamentary tradition, the record shows that Bjelke-Petersen was deeply corrupt.

Politicians taking money from supporters, developers and urgers for their political slush funds is part of the adversarial game. Where a direct link can be made between money received and favourable decisions granted by government that is bribery and/or corruption.

The record shows that although there was much evidence over the years of slush funding by Bjelke-Petersen and his chief crony, Sir Edward 'Top Level Ted' Lyons, no direct bribery or corruption charges were ever laid.

Significantly though, a Queensland defamation jury found in 1992 that industrialist Sir Leslie Thiess had in 1981-84 bribed Bjelke-Petersen generally 'on a large scale and on many occasions'; specifically, to procure Government contracts involving Winchester South, Expo '88, a Gold Coast cultural centre and three prisons.*

In 1989 the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, then under the chairmanship of Deirdre O'Connor, found that in 1986 Bjelke-Petersen had placed then Channel 9 owner Mr Alan Bond in a position of 'commercial blackmail' when Bond improperly agreed to pay $400,000 as an out-of-court defamation settlement.

Bond had let the cat out of the bag in a 1988 television interview with Jana Wendt on A Current Affair: "He [Premier Bjelke-Petersen] made it under no doubt that if we were to continue to do business successfully in Queensland then he expected the [defamation] matter to be resolved."

And in Bjelke-Petersen's 1991 'hung jury' perjury trial 10 jurors (excepting juror Luke Shaw) believed that the former premier had 'knowlingly lied on oath' to the Fitzgerald inquiry (into police and political corruption) by denying the circumstances surrounding his receipt of $100,000 in cash from property developer Robert Sng.

The Westminster convention on ministerial propriety holds that Her Majesty's ministers must so order their affairs that no conflict arises or appears to arise between their private interests and their public duties.

Johannes Bjelke-Petersen was a walking breach of ministerial propriety.

And his conflicts of interest started at the earliest period of his public life. In 1957, Bjelke-Petersen incorporated Artesian Basin Oil Co. Ltd. with an authority to prospect for oil in the Hughenden district granted by a ministerial colleague, Earnie Evans. In 1962, he lost a High Court appeal against the Australian Taxation Commissioner's ruling that he pay tax on profits he derived from the sale of 51 per cent of the company to American interests.

Bjelke-Petersen became Premier on 8 August 1968 and three weeks later companies in which he had shares (Exoil NL and Transoil NL) were given oil prospecting leases on the Great Barrier Reef.

Bjelke-Petersen rejected out of hand complaints about his business activities and the obvious conflict of interest coming from within the then Country Party and eventually some sections of the media.

Those seeking to draw attention to his lack of personal integrity were invariably denounced as politically motivated and anti-private enterprise.

A corrupt politician is nothing new to Queensland, Australia or other jurisdictions of course.

To me what was the most disturbing aspect of Bjelke-Petersen's cult of personality and the hypocrisy it masked, was the fate of honest police.

Believing that Bjelke-Petersen was a highly moral man who promoted himself as a practising Christian, some police officers foolishly approached him privately to tell him that their superiors, including then police commissioner Terry Lewis, were in league with organised crime. These officers and their associates found themselves in grave jeopardy with their careers soon destroyed. In going personally to Bjelke-Petersen they exposed themselves to threats and reprisals. Bjelke-Petersen did nothing to help them.

Only when he was distracted by his Joh for PM campaign on which he had embarked at the urgings of a 'White Shoe Brigade' of Gold Coast property developers, did the people of Queensland get lucky in 1986. Instead of flatly rejecting Chris Masters' Moonlight State Four Corners program, Acting Premier Bill Gunn set up a commission of inquiry eventually headed by Tony Fitzgerald QC.

The demise of Bjelke-Petersen (in all but the eyes of his most zealous supporters) swiftly followed.

Through it all Queensland has emerged as a stronger state with restored democratic institutions, a more corruption-resistant police force and judiciary, a fairer electoral system.

Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was a corrupt populist who exploited the superficiality of much of the media and, for many years, the incompetence of his political opponents.

Queensland is stronger for having endured and survived him.