Latest news with #JohBjelkePetersen
ABC News
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
While the US protests against Trump, a new documentary reflects on Queensland's 'last king'
Upon learning the results of the 2024 US election, Australian director Kriv Stenders was "pumping the air", but not for the obvious reason. What: An eerily timely look back at the chaos and carnage of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's near-20-year reign as premier of Queensland. Starring: Richard Roxburgh Directed by: Kriv Stenders. When: Streaming on Stan now Likely to make you feel: like this is all very familiar... The born-and-bred Queenslander wasn't looking forward to the promised chaos of a second Donald Trump term. But he was excited about what it meant for his latest project, Joh: Last King of Queensland. The film tracks the industrious rise and spectacular fall of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the controversial premier who ruled the state from 1968 to 1987 before being ousted from office following the exposure of widespread corruption within his government. Through a range of voices — from Indigenous activist and poet Lionel Fogarty, to Nationals leader David Littleproud, to Bjelke-Petersen's own children — Stenders pieces together a vision of one of Australia's most divisive political figures. And while, for some, Bjelke-Petersen is a distant memory in Australia's political history, Stenders says there's never been a better time to revisit the past. "The film is a cautionary tale really, saying, 'Just be aware that you know this has happened before and it could happen again,'" he told ABC Entertainment. Raised in a farming family in Kingaroy, north-west of Brisbane, Bjelke-Petersen entered politics as the Member for Nanango in 1947. Steadily climbing the ladder within what was then known as the Country Party, he was voted in as premier of Queensland by 1968. A child of 60s Queensland, Stenders came of age knowing nothing but the business-forward, conservative values of the Bjelke-Petersen government. "My childhood and my early adult life were kind of basically lived under Joh's shadow. As I got older, especially as I became a teenager, I realised that it was actually an oppressive regime," he told ABC Entertainment. While crowing about his fierce protection of Queenslanders from the ills of socialism, poker machines and rude movies, Bjelke-Petersen prioritised the state's economic growth above all else. He held onto power through electoral gerrymandering and wielded a corrupt police force like a weapon against dissenters. While he might have excelled at boosting business, his quest for total power came at the cost of Indigenous and democratic rights, as well as Queenslanders' civil liberties. In 1971, he declared a state of emergency to clamp down on anti-apartheid protests around the South African Springboks' rugby union tour. When his directives were ignored by demonstrators, he unleashed dozens of police officers on the public, ending in bashed heads and broken bones. By 1977, his government had rushed through an amendment to the The Traffic Act that effectively banned street protests, unless you could procure a very rare permit from then-police commissioner Terry Lewis, who was later jailed for corruption. As Bjelke-Petersen declared: "Protest marches are a thing of the past." "The oppressiveness of Joh's police state was really quite scary," Stenders says. "It was a way of threatening and controlling the populace." But for Stenders, who was already deep into the Brisbane music scene and would eventually direct the music videos for sunshine state icons The Go-Betweens, there was a silver lining: the local punk scene was thriving. The political climate inspired bands like The Saints and The Parameters. The latter's 1983 single 'Pig City' — itself a rallying cry against the police corruption within Bjelke-Petersen's government — is featured in the documentary. "[Music] was a form of activism. It was a really exciting time, there was something to rail against, there was something to fight against," Stenders says. "Brisbane was a bit of a wasteland back then; in a funny kind of way, the artistic community was closer and stronger because of it." By the late 80s, following a disastrous tilt at prime minister — which ended in a messy (and temporary) federal Coalition party split — Bjelke-Petersen's actions were catching up with him. Between December 1986 and January 1987, Brisbane's Courier-Mail published articles reporting around 20 illegal brothels were operating in the Fortitude Valley area of Brisbane, apparently unchallenged by police. On May 11, 1987 a Four Corners report revealed that police in Brisbane had been ignoring and even condoning illegal gambling, organised prostitution and drug trafficking, with some taking payments of up to $100,000. A day later, an independent judicial inquiry into the allegations that senior police were being paid to protect organised crime was announced — later known as the Fitzgerald inquiry. As the inquiry began to link the corruption back to his government, Bjelke-Petersen announced he would resign on August 8, 1988: the 20th anniversary of his swearing in as premier. But, by November 1987, the National Country Party leadership had spilled, ousting the once-powerful premier who refused to leave his office to face the press, Parliament or even his own party. To get into the mind frame of Bjelke-Petersen in his final days, Stenders reached out to Australian actor Richard Roxburgh to embody the then-disgraced politician through arresting deliveries of Bjelke-Petersen's own speeches. The director was fixated on the concept of a defeated but still fighting Bjelke-Petersen in the last days of his "power", preaching his accomplishments to an empty room. "I thought, 'Let's all sit around his last three days in office, barricading himself in like Hitler, basically reflecting on his life.' That mechanism just unlocked the film for me." Roxburgh, who recently worked with Stenders on political drama The Correspondent, dived head first into an "enormous amount of documentary footage" to capture Bjelke-Petersen's mannerisms, taking care to never fall into parody (Gerry Connolly already had that bit on lock, anyway). "Anytime you play a character, no matter what the kind of public evaluations of that person, you have to find the things that that person believed so deeply in," Roxburgh told ABC Entertainment. "With Joh, he was deeply religious. Yet there was a side of him that could go down these kinds of darker corridors that we learn about. "It's finding the checks and balances that he had with his own psychology, the way that he could justify a lot of the things he did within the frame of his religious belief and his absolute certainty." "He was a politician but he was a human being," Stenders agrees. "It is very easy to categorise him as a monster or as a clown, but that's dangerous because it gives them the remit to not act like human beings." It's been almost 40 years since Bjelke-Petersen was in power, and 20 years since he died, aged 94. But Stenders says there's never been a more pertinent time to rediscover the red flags from throughout his reign. "The big elephant in the room is obviously Trump," he says. "Trump is a populist leader that very much has drawn exactly from Joh's playbook in everything that he did in terms of his manipulation of the media, his use of force, even to the point where he refused to leave office." One of the catalysts for Stenders taking on King of Queensland was his firm belief that, in order to change power, first you must understand it. "The film was really an attempt to unlock the enigma of Joh and to say, 'Hey, listen. We actually did have a Trump here.' This is actually also within our capability, this is within our bandwidth of creating this kind of leader," he says. In regards to LGBTQIA+ rights, Indigenous rights and abortion access, Stenders says the "ghost" of Bjelke-Petersen is still alive today. "Joh may be dead and buried, but his influence is certainly still being felt on a weekly, monthly level in Australian politics." Revealed - Joh: Last King Of Queensland is streaming on Stan now.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
King or crook?: the enduring legacy of Queensland's political strongman Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen
'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
