Post 3 Remembering where we’ve come from: 40 Years of Corruption in Queensland

 It has been said, and not entirely in jest, that Sydney is the most corrupt city in the western world, except of course for Newark, New Jersey and Brisbane Queensland.                                                                       Evan Whitton, 1986

Discovering Meaning and Ambition in Work In 1973 I landed in Canberra starting what became my dream career in Gough Whitlam’s public service. I saw politics and government produce magic there. It was the culmination of my tumultuous years of 1960’s activism as a university student representative, anti-war marcher, feminist groups participant and social justice seeker. Now I could make those ideals become reality for other people through public service. So this is what politicians did – come up with good ideas and then make decisions to implement them through the public service! Or sometimes the ideas came from us. It was public policy heaven in the think tank I worked in.

The Public Interest Came Alive Canberra produced a cavalcade of new benefits and pensions and policies and programs including supporting mothers benefit, disability pensions, Medicare, child care, fee-free universities, hospital funding increases and community health centres, housing programs and city beautification programs, natural environment and built heritage preservations, arts and cultural programs, no-fault divorce.

 It was life-defining for me. I began to  understand what the public interest was and how many services were needed for a just society and how easy it was for government to do good works. I was hooked on government policy-making, planning and research work, continuing my part-time studies in sociology and politics and then completing a Master of Public Administration course at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

But Something was MissingI learned my craft and became exhilarated with what I could achieve in life. But I was also naïve. I found it hard to understand that government could and did fail and that corruption could exist.  I thought of Australia’s governance practices as universally honorable and generous instead of the mixture of good and bad policies and practices that it really was. In my mind corruption occurred in faraway countries. We had some but it seemed to be relatively minor and mostly identifiable and controllable. In fact it was the opposite: huge and uncontrollable in Queensland. I suddenly discovered the unthinkable.

The forensic chronicling of corruption in the Queensland Police Force in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s by Matt Condon hit me like a thunderclap when I read his books Three Crooked Kings (2013), Jacks and Jokers (2014) and All Fall Down (2015). The immoral clarity of the deep and long-term institutional corruption that hit Queensland in its vital organs of government bounced off the pages and into my innocent psyche like a nuclear bomb. Corruption had paralysed the rule of law and good governance in Queensland.

Horror of the Forensic Descriptions of Corruption  Of course I had read some news reports from The Commission of Inquiry into Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct (the Fitzgerald Inquiry) in Queensland from 1987 to 1989 and knew that it found huge previously unimagined corruption. But what made me reel with anger was Condon’s detailed descriptions of the creeping culture of slow but steadily increasing involvement with criminals, bribery trails to top police officers, loyalty to other police overtaking the law itself, ringleaders and accomplices spreading far and wide, eventually pushing out its own clean police commissioner and openly displaying contempt for the system of justice in Queensland.

Condon wrote his extraordinarily detailed horrific story from interviewing Terrence Lewis for hundreds hours and reading his policeman’s diaries from the 1950s and then finding and interviewing hundreds of other participants in the tangled web. Amazingly Lewis had offered his diaries and volunteered to tell his story because he still thought himself innocent of the charges he’d gone to jail for. He still thought himself a rule-abiding policeman and hoped Condon would see that from his diaries and vindicate him. However Lewis stopped co-operating when he saw the second book and realised Condon was using a different lens of scrutiny and had constructed ugly explosive images of what Lewis and his other crooked kings and jacks and jokers had done.

Reality Did Bite Thirty Years Later  The Fitzgerald inquiry resulted in the deposing of the Premier Joh Bjelke-Peterson, two by-elections, the jailing of three Ministers and Police Commissioner Terrence Lewis, many senior and junior police officers, and the end of 32 years of the National Party governing Queensland.  When Bjelke-Petersen was deposed by his own party, he tried unsuccessfully to have the Governor sack his ministers who had removed him as leader. He was also later tried for perjury but the court and prosecution had actually allowed a corrupted jury to be selected and the case ended in a mistrial.

In his admission that he couldn’t remove the corruption in the Queensland Police Force after seven years as Queensland Police Commissioner, Ray Whitrod wrote in 1988 that lawyers and judges were involved too “If the principal guardians of the rule of law, the lawyers, remain indifferent why should the other good citizens of Queensland … become involved in a campaign for integrity”

Shockingly the Bjelke-Petersen Government used the Police Force’s Special Branch in the 1970s and 1980s to enforce laws against protests, sometimes outnumbering the protestors or using provocateurs to incite violence so the protestors could be arrested, and often investigating and harassing political opponents. Special Branch destroyed its records before Fitzgerald could subpoena them.

What was the Damage? In my view the penetration of corruption in the Queensland Police and the Queensland Government of the time amounted to corruption of democracy itself.  Condon’s books describe an organisation similar to what we think corrupt developing country police forces look like: operating outside the law, using death threats to maintain solidarity and having criminal connections. The hostility and resistance to a new tertiary qualified Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod appointed in 1969 and the successful quashing of unfriendly court decisions and commissioned inquiries illustrate the many subterranean activities of “fixing” problems as they arose. No-one knew how extensive was this corruption. Even those practices identified in the Fitzgerald Inquiry were not all followed up.

“One hour and ten years behind” was how my Canberra friends described the Queensland I came to in late1989 just as Fitzgerald finished and Queensland voted in a new Wayne Goss Labour Government after 32 years of Country and National Party Governments. Goss implemented some reforms but his successor Peter Beattie stopped going further, prompting Tony Fitzgerald to go live in NSW in disgust.

Outside Condon’s books and the Fitzgerald Inquiry, there was extensive anecdotal information about corruption in the NSW and Victorian police too. But what distinguished Queensland Police’s corruption was its penetration of government, its deep links to criminal networks and the indifference of the system of justice, lawyers and judges, and the public. For thirty years the people got the politicians and the failing police force they deserved.

 Matt Condon the Hero  I listened to two speeches Condon made about his books. On 22 November 2016 he told us he had been invited by the present police force central office staff to talk to them. When I asked how he was perceived as a critic and whether there were any feelings of shame he said no. They saw the events and activities he described as being far away from them, a long time ago, having no bearing on how they conducted their police business now.

Unfinished Business: Condon Revived Two Cold Cases  Interestingly this police response came at the same time as two cold cases from Condon’s books had resurfaced. One was before the courts at the same time as his books were out, from 2014 to 2016. Babara McCulkin and her two daughters Vicki and Leanne disappeared on 16 January 1974 from their Highgate Hill Brisbane home. In October 2014 Vincent O’Dempsey and Gary Dubois were charged with their abduction and murder and in 2016 and 2017 they were found guilty of the murders. Forty two years later Queensland Police investigated what their predecessors should have done in the 1970’s. On 2 June 2017 Queensland Attorney-General Yvonne D’Ath announced that the State Government would re-open the coronial inquest into the 1973 Whiskey Au Go Go Fire (in which 15 people died).

On 20 January 2017 Yvonne D’Ath referred the even more notorious cold case, the 1972 death of brothel madam Shirley Brifman, to State Coroner Terry Ryan to determine whether a public inquest will be held, 45 years later. The Queensland Police Service promised to “co-operate fully”. As at September 2018 there is still no outcome. Questions had been raised by her daughter Mary Anne Brifman about whether her mother committed suicide as police said. Brifman was found dead in a police safe house in Clayfield Brisbane on 4 March 1972 just weeks before she was scheduled to testify against senior police detective Tony Murphy in a perjury prosecution. Condon wrote “Mary Anne said her mother was told in short – take these or your children will be hurt”.

How Much More is There?In the Weekend Australian 1-2 September 2018 a story outlined how secret files have added to claims that police fabricated evidence and prematurely closed the inquiry into the Whisky Au Go Go fire leaving some culprits to go free “The result of the perjury was not innocent – there were a series of murders as result” and “Fabrication of evidence was something we all took for granted”

This Horrible History is Worth Retelling: Why? This story is not just a history lesson which teaches us that we must understand corruption in order to not repeat it. This story starkly shows us that we have governance rules for a purpose and that we can’t just blindly expect that our “governors” govern correctly. If our prime police force guardians can be corrupted to these depths, how are they going to keep us safe? If they so easily penetrated and bribed our political masters in government, how can we trust the government to make good decisions? We must ensure monitoring mechanisms, review and inquiry mechanisms, whistleblower protections, freedom of information processes and corruption investigators as being central to government. Pardon the Latin but Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers? We need guards for the guardians.

What’s the Big Idea? Don’t be Naïve.  Many people in Queensland are apathetic even disdainful of discussing good governance. “Politics” is a dirty word. “His move is political” or “she’s political” are conversation and thinking killers. Corruption has many forms and new forms are being discovered in all three levels of government. For example there are now many open and unashamed self-interested abuses of proper decision-making declared to be “in the public interest”. They challenge even clear thinkers into questioning how to connect the dots of self-interest. Just look at the ABC Four Corners program of 18 September 2017 on the Gold Coast City Council where conflicts of interest should be declared but apparently are often not. And read about the August 2018 Queensland Parliament dismissal of Ipswich City Council for the former Mayor’s alleged corruption in land development decisions and spin-offs to bureaucrats.

Publicising the Big Idea is Possible.In 2017 I went to a fascinating walking tour play, the Story of Brisbane, just outside the Brisbane Powerhouse. I immediately thought how interesting and important it is for Brisbane to remember its experience of recent modern corruption and repression in Brisbane. I suggested they might do a similar play based on the epochal period of corruption described in Matt Condon’s books. But they didn’t like the idea much. I hope you will remember and won’t be naïve or apathetic.

Barbara McCulkin Leanne & Vicki