EXCLUSIVE Queensland's Donald Trump - how a ruthless Aussie pollie wrote the playbook for the US President

Daily Mail​

22-06-2025

As US President, Donald Trump uses federal agents, police and threatens National Guard intervention against opponents - but it's a blueprint first drawn up in Australia.
Queenslanders who lived through Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen's 21-year reign over the state will recognise the right-wing premier's fingerprints all over that playbook.
Bjelke-Petersen began life as a farmworker on his father's rural property near Kingaroy, 220km north-west of Brisbane - but went on to dominate state politics for a generation.
New Stan docudrama 'Joh: The Last King of Queensland ' drops on Sunday - featuring Rake star Richard Roxburgh as the notorious politician- and has drawn astonishing parallels between the Trump and the controversial premier.
'You look at Joh and you think [he was a] once-in-a-generation character,' Queensland author and journalist Matthew Condon told the filmmakers.
'And then you look at Trump - and some bells start to ring in terms of what we've gone through a generation or two before.
'The template was already here with a peanut farmer at the bottom of the world.'
The comparisons to Trump are frequent throughout Bjelke-Petersen's time in power from 1968 to 1987, when he was known as the 'law and order' premier - a catchcry often now repeated by Trump.
In 1970s, at the height of South African apartheid and battles over Indigenous land rights, Bjelke-Petersen welcomed an all-white Springboks rugby squad to Queensland, sparking protests across Brisbane.
Police were deployed to disperse protesters gathered outside the team's Tower Mill Hotel, where excessive force was used.
Actor Roxburgh, playing the National Party leader in speech recreations for the film, relives the politician's famous insistence: 'I declared a state of emergency.'
It was reported that he brought in country cops housed in military camps, and gave the force 'the green light to do what they needed to do without repercussion'.
'He gave police carte blanche to do whatever they wanted,' said one commentator.
Lindy Morrison OAM, member of indie rock band The Go-Betweens, accused police of 'bashing people in the head'.
'We were trapped. It was massively brutal,' she said.
Lawyer Terry O'Gorman, who was also there at the time, said police 'in effect took it into their own hands'.
'They chased protesters in the dark,' he added.
Bjelke-Petersen also railed against union strikes and the city's punk music scene, prompting graffiti in Brisbane reading 'Pig City'.
Bjelke-Petersen proudly embraced his ties to the police and described it publicly as a 'jolly good relationship'. Others claimed he ran it as his private militia.
And like Trump, he had a penchant for describing anyone who opposed him - notably ousted former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam - as socialists and communists.
He was described as 'not liking protests, hippies, unions, the unemployed, and gays - and used his police force against them'.
But Bjelke-Petersen was of the attitude that it was 'law and order - if you don't like it, you know what you can do.'
He was described in Stan's docudrama as everything from 'innovative' and 'mundane and boring' to a 'power-hungry, hillbilly dictator' who 'wrote the playbook for Trump'.
Bjelke-Petersen was finally ousted from power in 1987 after an unsuccessful tilt to be prime minister, which John Howard described as 'showing appalling judgement'.
He died aged 94 in 2005, and in the Stan docu-drama, Queensland MP Bob Katter recalled his final meeting with the onetime political powerhouse.
'I carried him to bed the last time I saw him,' he said.