Extract from The Politics
'Joh: Last King of Queensland' ... a life of political conflict, corruption and controversy.
With all that’s happening in politics in Australia and globally, it seems a strange time to resurrect the memory of one of our most bizarre and disruptive leaders. Especially one who lost power nearly four decades ago, and who died two decades ago, in 2005.
Rest in peace, Sir Joh (Johannes) Bjelke-Petersen, aka Queensland’s Christian-right “hillbilly dictator”, because your life was one of political conflict, corruption and controversy. And yet your ghost of influence lives on, haunting Australian politics with echoes of a mining and property developer-friendly morals crusader who crushed community dissent with police power while turning a blind eye to rampant corruption in the force. Your own deal with the devil.
Old king coal
Stan streaming service’s new documentary Joh: Last King of Queensland was a must-watch for me. His regime dominated my school years, brief university days and early journalism career in the sunshine state (otherwise known as Australia’s “police state”) as Queensland premier from 1968 to 1987. But I wondered how relevant Joh’s story retold would be for Australians who haven’t grown up with a Queensland state of origin tag, particularly younger generations of voters. In the age of Donald Trump, it’s not like the world is so short of populist hard-right politicians with weird and controversial ways that we have to bring back dead ones.
Clearly the film-makers recognised this challenge, describing their feature-length documentary as a “timely examination of progress, power, corruption and Joh’s complex legacy”. Much is made of a quotable quote from veteran Queensland and subsequently NSW political journalist Quentin Dempster, a prominent Joh-watcher, to the effect that “looking back, Joh wrote the playbook for Trump”.
Maybe so, in parts. But there’s a world of difference between the religiously observant, upwardly mobile country bumpkin Joh, who made his early money land clearing and aerial crop dusting, and Trump, the sleazy New York property developer turned reality TV star turned two-time American president.
Sus Russ
Joh certainly was a prototype for today’s ultra-conservatives, with US-style MAGA movement overtones: virulently anti-leftist, anti-abortion, anti-intellectual, opposed to Indigenous land rights, aiming always to make Queensland great, fight the Canberra-based “deep state” equivalent, and protect right-thinking Queenslanders from the machinations of “southern homosexuals”. If he could have built a great big beautiful wall at the border with NSW he would have — except he needed tourists and migrants from the dreaded southern states to enrich the Gold Coast property developer “white shoe brigade” that helped keep him in power and lined his ministers’ pockets.
My personal favourite minister was the late Russ Hinze, a Gold Coast local who I investigated extensively for the south-of-the-border National Times and later for The Sydney Morning Herald. Hinze died before corruption charges could catch up with him.
Dubbed the “colossus of roads and Queensland’s heavyweight multi-minister for everything”, the outsized Hinze personified ministerial conflict of interest. As roads minister, he was the state’s biggest gravel producer, and once had a highway off-ramp relocated to be adjacent to the drive-in bottle-shop at a pub he owned. As local government and planning minister, he was a major property developer. As racing minister, he ran one of the state’s biggest racehorse studs. And as police minister, he was one of the state’s biggest crooks.
Follow the money
In 1986 I confronted him at his sprawling estate in the Gold Coast hinterland with corporate affairs department records I’d unearthed which showed hundreds of thousands of dollars in “loans” from prominent Gold Coast property developers to his private companies. These had been systematically “written off”, turning them into “gifts”.
Hinze accused me of having leaked information from the Australian Taxation Office, apparently because he’d been declaring the blatant bribes as income. It subsequently emerged through the groundbreaking Fitzgerald corruption inquiry — which ultimately played a key role in bringing down Joh, Hinze and top police figures — that his accountant had mistakenly filed the bribe payments information with corporate affairs, putting it on the public record, when it was meant to go to the always confidential tax office. Oops.
Queensland was like that back in the day. Sunny one day, rotten to the core the next.
Aspects of the regime’s downfall could be attributed to a bitter feud between Hinze and Joh’s svengali-like adviser on financial and business matters, the late Sir Edward “Top-level Ted” Lyons. As Hinze and Lyons leaked and counter-leaked against one another, they exposed too many secrets, puncturing once-tight defences.
Every inch the star
The quest for relevance and relatability is also why the Joh film-makers cast celebrated actor Richard Roxburgh, star of the morally outrageous ABC television show Rake. Roxburgh has also played ultra-corrupt cop Roger Rogerson, imprisoned foreign correspondent Peter Greste, and now Joh in all his mangled English glory. (His Lutheran minister father, of Dane heritage, raised his children speaking Danish as their first language, despite living in Queensland and for a brief period New Zealand, where Joh was born in 1911.)
It’s surprising how many vestiges of Joh remain to this day. Not the corruption, to be clear, but the conservatism, some of the style, and even some of the characters.
Clive Palmer, the Trump-trumpeting mining billionaire who plays politics with his money, was a key supporter of the messy and eventually aborted “Joh for Canberra/Joh for PM” campaign in 1987, and had a stint as media director for the Queensland Nationals under Joh. Gina Rinehart, also a Trump fan, is linked to Joh’s legacy via her father, the late Lang Hancock. Hancock was a close friend of Joh’s and a generous donor to the Queensland Nationals during Joh’s time.
Bob Katter, the eponymous Katter Australia Party’s sole federal MP, was a state MP and a minister in Joh’s governments. Senator Pauline Hanson, founder of the self-titled Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, genuflects to the iconic conservative memory of Joh and his wife of more than 50 years, Lady Flo (Florence) Bjelke-Petersen, who actually did go to Canberra as a Nationals senator (1981-93). Barnaby Joyce — once a Queensland Nationals and Liberal-National Party (LNP) federal senator (2005-13) well after the Joh era, before becoming a NSW federal MP (2013-) — is the obvious inheritor of Joh’s country-bumpkin campaigning mode.
Country club
The Queensland LNP, now a dominant force in Liberal-National coalition politics, is strong to this day because of Joh’s legacy.
Above all, Joh showed Australia what coalition government looks like when norms are inverted and the Nationals are top dog and the Liberals the underdog, made possible by a long-standing electoral “gerrymander” that meant a country vote was more powerful than a city one. Hold that thought. We don’t need to repeat that experiment again.
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