Having conquered Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen turned his attention to the nation as 1987 dawned in Australia.
But you would never know it from the Queensland cabinet minutes from that year, released on 1 January. Nor could you guess at the impact the Fitzgerald inquiry would have on the state for decades to come.
Instead, the documents released after 30 years reveal the “hillbilly dictator” desperately attempting business as usual in an environment that was anything but.
Having won government in his own right the year before, Bjelke-Petersen used the first day of 1987 to announce his intention to run for prime minister.
By February, in what has become known as the Hervey Bay resolutions, the Queensland Nationals’ president, Robert Sparkes, decreed the state party’s support for the move.
By April Queensland Nationals MPs had withdrawn from the federal Coalition but Bjelke-Petersen’s campaign was already beginning to run off the rails.
Privately, Sparkes had fallen out with Bjelke-Petersen, and the then Labor prime minister, Bob Hawke, and his government did all they could to capitalise on the disunity within the federal Coalition, while the then Liberal leader, John Howard, learned firsthand why “disunity is death”.
Hawke called a snap election, catching Bjelke-Petersen unawares. The Queensland leader was forced to announce his candidacy from Disneyland. He hadn’t even nominated as a federal candidate before he left and, his supporters dwindling in number, struggled to find enough pro-Joh candidates for a ticket.
“Joh for PM” became “Joh for Canberra” before fizzling out to nothing. But Bjelke-Petersen had bigger problems. The white-shoe brigade of property developers, a group of developers predominantly found on the Gold Coast, had begun to attract notice from outside the state. Cracks in the institutionally corrupt government he had overseen were widening to chasms and friends were few and far between.
It was during his ill-timed trip to the US that the ABC, following on from the work from the Courier-Mail journalist Phil Dickie, aired The Moonlight State, a Four Corners exposé of corruption in Queensland.
Acting premier Bill Gunn faced the media on 12 May to announce an independent inquiry into the allegations. On 25 May, he took it to cabinet, as a secret submission, with the result that the QC Tony Fitzgerald was appointed to head the inquiry. Bjelke-Peteresen wasn’t there. It was the only reason the inquiry went ahead.
By the time the premier returned to Queensland, the wheels were in motion and deemed too far along the track to be halted. But that didn’t stop Bjelke-Petersen continuing on as if Rome wasn’t burning.
It was in 1987 that the white shoe brigade, who found that a well placed brown paper bag could help pave the way to approvals, came to prominence.
Russ Hinze, the “minister for everything”, who would resign in disgrace in February 1988, and who died before corruption charges could be levelled against him, used his ministerial power to rezone land to ensure developments, opposed by local councils and communities, could go ahead.
Hinze was also known as the “minister who could get things done” and that included approving the Sanctuary Cove resort, developed by Mike Gore, a well-known supporter of Bjelke-Petersen. The Bjelke-Petersen government passed a special act of parliament to ensure it became a reality. The Sanctuary Cove Resort Act allowed for an additional 210 hectares of land to be released for 500 residences and an 18-hole golf course.
Objections from local councils over other developments were overcome through rezoning. The cabinet minutes show that is how north Queensland received its Trinity Beach resort and how Brisbane ended up with the Myer Centre.
The redevelopment of the historic Port Office site, in Brisbane’s CBD, came up repeatedly during 1987 cabinet discussions – and then during the Fitzgerald inquiry.
But by August, when the cabinet was considering the world’s tallest building proposal for Brisbane, Bjelke-Petersen was rapidly losing allies. The man who would take his position as premier, then health minister Mike Ahern, who had already battled Bjelke-Petersen over his response to the HIV crisis, noted this period of time marked “the beginning of the end”.
Ahern spent much of 1987 fighting Bjelke-Petersen over his insistence condom machines be removed from the University of Queensland and Griffith University. He also challenged Bjelke-Petersen’s attitude that HIV should be allowed to wipe out local Indigenous communities.
The minutes also reveal that the premier, along with two departmental heads, travelled to Romania to meet communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. With his bid to head to Canberra to stop Labor’s “socialist policies”, including Medicare, having failed, Bjelke-Petersen sought to embrace Ceausescu in a bid to sell 2m tonnes of coking coal to Romania.
The country had no money, so it was proposed that coking coal, used in steel production, would be swapped for oil, steel, machines, fertiliser and trains. It appeared to fail because of a lack of interest from local coal producers. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed by firing squad in 1989 after the communist regimes of eastern Europe were overthrown.
Bjelke-Petersen and his delegation then headed to London as he tried to stop the Hawke government locking up tracts of rainforest as national heritage land, a move the premier opposed because of the restrictions it would put on mining and agriculture. As his government crumbled around him, Bjelke-Petersen also moved to fight a widening of the Great Barrier Reef marine park for the same reason.
As 1987 drew to a close, Bjelke-Petersen found himself with a rapidly diminishing circle of allies. He headed to the governor’s house in an attempt to sack members of the executive who opposed him. Sir Walter Campbell refused. Instead, he managed to sack three of his biggest critics, including Ahern, from his ministry.
But his victory lasted only seven days. He held his last cabinet meeting on 30 November 1987. There was no hint of what was to come in the minutes. The next day, under pressure from the public and members of his government, Bjelke-Petersen resigned as premier, ending a 19-year political career that still reverberates around Queensland three decades later.
