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The Jury’s Still Out on Sir Joh

There are people in Australia who still believe that arguably the two greatest myths ever perpetrated on the Australian public are true. The first one is that Lindy Chamberlain killed her baby daughter Azaria. The second is that former Queensland premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was bone honest. The Lindy Chamberlain case has been resolved; the dingo definitely took the baby. Lindy has been pardoned and compensated for her years behind bars, for the greatest miscarriage of justice in our history.

Sir Joh? Now that’s a different story. Although it was painfully obvious that there was something terribly wrong in Queensland while he was in power, he was never convicted of anything and it would be fair to say that the jury’s still out. And if it’s one of Sir Joh’s juries, you can bet that any verdict that ever comes out of it will be suspect. Sir Joh was accused of the lot: bribery, corruption, running a crooked government and an even more corrupt police force. And, of course…jury tampering.

Almost from the day that Bible-bashing Joh Bjelke-Petersen and his National Party swept to power in Queensland in 1967, the odour of corruption spread like a plague across the Sunshine State, which was like a ripe mango just waiting to be plucked by developers with brown paper bags full of cash. And Joh and his cronies were only too happy to help them out.

The first indication of things to come happened just a few weeks after the Nationals gained office, when the Premier granted oil companies leasing rights on the Great Barrier Reef. This had always been considered a sacrilege and the oil companies’ applications to explore the reef had been overwhelmingly rejected. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that Joh had shares in the oil companies.

Then, one at a time, dozens of Brisbane’s treasured heritage-listed buildings were reduced to rubble overnight – literally. Citizens were woken in the early hours of the morning by wrecking crews smashing down some of the city’s most famous buildings to make way for blocks of apartments or high-rise office buildings. Under the previous state governments such a thing could never happen – the buildings were protected. But under Joh’s regime, where a bag full of fifties could solve anything, nothing was safe.

In 1975 Joh saw an opportunity to cause trouble for the incumbent Whitlam federal Labor Government – and he took it. When a Queensland Labor senator died, Joh broke with established political convention and ignored the Labor Party’s nominee as a replacement, instead appointing a man known for his hatred of the Whitlam Government, a stooge named Albert Patrick Field, a furniture polisher with little knowledge of politics.

When the government tried to pass the federal budget, the new senator conveniently went on leave, thus giving the Coalition control of the Senate. As a direct result the Supply Bill could not be passed and it was the beginning of the historic sacking of the Whitlam Government.

Joh used electoral boundary redistributions to stay in government and while Joh’s Nationals won seat after seat at the elections, there were in fact fewer and fewer Queenslanders voting for him. He won one election with less than 40 per cent of the vote. In another it was said that he won only 20 per cent of the vote in the city but had a clean sweep in the country seats due to the wider electoral boundaries and his big appeal in the bush. After all, he was a peanut farmer by profession.

Joh also had another of his stooges installed as Police Commissioner. In November 1977, Inspector Terry Lewis – who was the boss at Charleville, a bush town in Western Queensland with 35 officers under his command – found himself in the top job. It was Joh Bjelke-Petersen himself who apparently gave the final nod.

It all happened so fast that few had time to protest. What had transpired personally between the new Commissioner and the Premier prior to the appointment can only be subject to speculation. But detractors could read nothing into it other than corruption. And time would prove them 100 per cent correct.

Under Terry Lewis, corruption ran rampant at every level. Crooked politicians, illegal casino bosses and brothel proprietors, drug traffickers and corrupt police did little to hide their activities. But sadly for the now Sir Joh, his dimwitted police commissioner was always going to be a liability.

Voted Father of the Year in 1980, Terry Lewis moved into a mansion worth $500,000 – a staggering amount of money back then for a public servant’s salary. In 1986, after constant lobbying from his family and supporters, Terry Lewis became Sir Terence – the only police commissioner in Australian history to receive a knighthood.

By July 1987, Queensland’s Fitzgerald Inquiry into corruption heard that Sir Terence was collecting around $120,000 a year in kickbacks from organised crime, which ran Queensland’s illegal casinos and brothels. After the Commission’s findings Sir Terence was sacked, convicted on 14 counts of corruption and jailed for 14 years.

After he banned street marches and failed miserably with his ridiculously naive ‘Joh for PM’ campaign, Sir Joh was on the slide. When the Fitzgerald Inquiry saw to it that four of his corrupt Cabinet ministers were jailed, Joh resigned as Premier in December 1987 to save face. But that was not to be the end of it…not by a long shot.

In 1990, the Fitzgerald Inquiry recommended that Sir Joh be charged with two counts of perjury and one of corruption. It was alleged that in 1986 Sir Joh received $100,000 from Mr Robert Sng so that Sng’s company would receive favourable consideration as the developer for the Brisbane Port Office site. It was also alleged that Sir Joh knowingly lied to the Fitzgerald Inquiry about the donation and that he didn’t receive the cash personally from Mr Sng.

Sir Joh’s trial, during which the defendant constantly ‘exercised his right to remain silent’ and didn’t give any evidence or call witnesses on his own behalf, lasted 16 days. As the jury retired to consider its verdict – it seemed blatantly obvious that Sir Joh was guilty – it was revealed that the jury foreman, 20-year-old Luke Shaw, was an active member of Joh’s National Party and a campaigner with the Friends of Joh, a group openly raising funds for Joh’s defence. The Crown applied for a retrial but it was dismissed.

The jury was out for 61 hours over five days and in the end could not break a deadlock of 10–2 in favour of a conviction. The judge called for a mistrial and an investigation into the selection of the jury in the first place. It stunk to high heaven of corruption but in 1993 it was found that there was no case of deliberate jury tampering to answer to. Sir Joh was never brought to trial again.

In 2003 at age 92, Sir Joh filed compensation claims on behalf of himself and his family against the Queensland Government for $350 million, for stress and emotional and financial hardship. It was rejected. Sir Joh died on the 23 April 2005 in a Kingaroy Hospital, aged 94. He was given a state funeral.