King or crook?: the enduring legacy of Queensland's political strongman Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen

The Guardian

21-06-2025

'Sir Joh will be remembered, and he will long be remembered. But not for what he wanted to be remembered for.'
This was my prediction when Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen died in 2005, heading up one of a number of obituaries.
Propelling my pen was a sense of obligation to do justice to the stunted opportunities and deliberate and casual cruelties inflicted on the state and many, many, Queenslanders under Australia's most blinkered, authoritarian and corrupt postwar regime.
The balance in the initial flood of obituaries was about two-thirds more adulation than condemnation.
Cranes on the skyline and huge holes in the ground carried more weight than stamping on civil liberties and corruption.
There is much better balance in newly minted television documentary Joh: Last King of Queensland, airing on Stan this weekend.
Its signature touch is having Sir Joh present as actor Richard Roxburgh delivering characteristic monologues to answer or more typically homily his way around any questions or criticisms of his conduct. Vignettes from family, friends, political luminaries, journalists, historians and opponents and a wealth of available footage keep the narrative going.
Back then, Joh's quite deliberate – even trained – incoherent rambling was all too frequently excessively tidied up by reporters and then judged by commentators as evidence of his political acumen.
Of course, it also opened up opportunities for us reporters. Once, on a slow news day when he was still speaking to me, I asked Joh whether he was contemplating sending the then Liberal leader, Sir Llew Edwards, off to a coveted London posting.
Nothing in his 'Well, you know Phil …' constituted a direct denial so yes, there was a story.
It is easy to caricature much of Bjelke-Petersen's reign. Presumably Sir Joh had a hand in the wording of the citation for his 1984 knighthood, which noted he was 'a strong believer in the concept of parliamentary democracy' who had made 'many improvements in the parliamentary process'.
This not long after the Liberals had abandoned the Coalition due to Joh's refusal to countenance parliamentary committees and while the legislative assembly continued to turn in new records for the brevity of its sitting sessions.
In truth, Sir Joh (1968-1987) was the last and second-longest lasting of a string of strongmen Australian state premiers – Robert Askin (New South Wales: 1965-1975), Henry Bolte (Victoria: 1955-1972), Sir Charles Court (Western Australia: 1974-1982) and Thomas Playford (South Australia: 1938-1965).
All were conservative and variously notorious for riding roughshod over Westminster traditions and disregard of civil liberties, abuse of the electoral system, and tolerance or participation in corruption.
Even considering Askin's organised crime associations, Bjelke-Petersen was to surpass them all. Of many biographies, my vote for both best and best titled goes to Evan Whitton's The Hillbilly Dictator.
That Queensland suffered for longer and graduated into such a relic of poor governance was, in Sir Joh's only valid defence, in part because a long string of Labor governments had demolished an inconvenient upper house and thoroughly gerrymandered the electorate.
The Coalition government which fell, somewhat surprised, into government in 1956 ignored the pungent smell of corruption around Frank Bischof and appointed him police commissioner.
In 1963, in the National Hotel royal commission, a future chief justice of the high court of Australia was successfully hoodwinked into a finding of negligible police corruption. Tony Fitzgerald, looking at many of the same names in much more senior positions 24 years later, found otherwise.
Sir Joh, initially an impassioned critic of Labor's gerrymander, went on to embrace the innovation of making islands of Aboriginal communities within other electorates.
Policing became political, increasingly aimed at opponents of the regime.
A notable shortage of real communists (Queensland police had nearly beaten Australia's only ever Communist member of parliament to death in 1948) did not deter the anti-communist rhetoric Joh aimed at the Labor party, unions, university students and Aboriginal activists.
Sir Joh long denied even the possibility of corruption in the police force, well beyond the optimum point to beat a hasty retreat to 'I knew nothing'. It is hard to reconcile this with the Fitzgerald inquiry's ability to acquire the records of any cabinet meeting of interest but one – the one that saw Terry Lewis appointed as commissioner of police.
All of this is relatively well canvassed in Last King. My only quibble is that it leaves the question of whether Sir Joh was personally corrupt unnecessarily unresolved.
When Sir Joh died, so did the defamation writ that he had issued years before for my publishing the details of the corruption charges that had been prepared against him in relation to brown paper bags of cash delivered to his office. True, he never faced these particular charges, but allegations of lying to Fitzgerald about the brown paper bags was the essence of the trial that brought him within a Young National juryperson of becoming the first Australian premier to be consigned to a term in prison.
The special prosecutor judged Sir Joh too old to face a second trial before a fresh jury – unfortunate for the sake of history, and also in that it would have deterred Sir Joh from launching a ludicrous $338m claim against Queensland and Queenslanders for personal damages arising from the Fitzgerald inquiry.
Other tribunals, however, were able to make definitive rulings.
An outstanding A Current Affair program in 1989 detailed the largesse given to Bjelke-Petersen by construction magnate Sir Leslie Thiess. Thiess immediately sued for defamation and lost, the jury finding that Sir Leslie had bribed Sir Joh on an extravagant scale, defrauding his own shareholders in the process.
Bjelke-Petersen's pioneering role in the bribe by way of defamation settlement racket was then highlighted by the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal. When Alan Bond let it slip that threats to his business were a feature of a 1986 $400,000 payment to Sir Joh in settlement of a 1983 defamation case, the tribunal delved deeper into whether Bond was a fit and proper enough person for a sizeable lump of the broadcast spectrum.
Backing up the tribunal, the high court outlined Bond's proposal to pay Bjelke- Petersen the $50,000 Channel Nine's lawyers thought was a reasonable or at least defensible sum, with the $350,000 balance to meet his demands to come as 'a payment overseas related to assets, a loan without obligation to repay or an excessive payment for the sale of property'.
But Bjelke-Petersen was too greedy and too needy – or too vengeful – for any of this, and the settlement made the television news and ultimately put Bond out of the television business.
Karma also seems to have intervened after Bjelke-Petersen cajoled a large loan out of a foreign bank, with the internal documentation showing this as a balance of inducements and menaces decision somewhat at variance to the applicable credit rating. But appreciation of the Swiss franc then brought the Bjelke-Petersen family enterprises close to penury.
Last King does note Bjelke-Petersen's deficient understanding of conflicts of interest, in his trying to put it over that it was perfectly OK for his wife, Florence, to hold the preferentially issued Comalco and Utah shares.
In essence, enough evidence with enough in the way of judicial proceedings was lying for Last King not to leave the question of Bjelke-Petersen's personal corruption hanging.
Last King deserves a notable place in the voluminous memorabilia around Sir Joh.
The life and times (and crimes) of Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen are indeed pertinent to the current state of the world and Last King should be wheeled out at regular intervals and be a curricula staple to remind us.
Phil Dickie is a Gold Walkley winner and author of bestselling book The Road To Fitzgerald: Revelations of Corruption Spanning Four Decades. His reporting on the Bjelke-Petersen government is credited, along with an ABC Four Corners program, with sparking the Fitzgerald corruption inquiry
Joh: Last King of Queensland premieres on Stan on 22 June