Senator John Cherry
Portfolio: Electoral Matters & Public Administration
| Dated: 10 May 2005
Location: Parliament House - Canberra
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Adjournment speech - Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson |
Senator CHERRY (Queensland) (8.22 p.m.)Last month, Queenslands longest-serving Premier, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, died aged 94. Sir Joh became Premier of my home state when I was three and reigned until I was 22. To him I owe the credit for the political environment in which I grew up and my determination to fight government hypocrisy, corruption and mismanagement. Indeed, my first major political act was organising a protest against my universitys decision toward him an honorary doctorate in 1986. There has been much written on Sir Joh in recent months. The ABC in Queensland has dedicated hundreds of hours of air time to Johs achievements and detractors, even delaying Play School to broadcast his funeral live. I must confess that given a choice I would have preferred to watch Play School.
At the outset, however, I state that I supported the decision of the Queensland government to hold a state funeral for Sir Johan honour appropriate for a former Premier. I also supported the decision of 16 of the 18 cabinet ministers and former Premier Wayne Goss to not attend funeral and the decision by several hundred opponents of his regime to peacefully protest Johs policies on that day. Ironically, protesting was something which was not allowed very much during Johs era. I still remember his ban on street marches and picketing and his constant harassment of unions and other opponents. During the height of the SEQEB dispute Sir Joh, despite his claim to Christian piety, allowed his police to ban the whistling of hymns on picket lines as a provocative political protest. My father-in-law, Neville Jones, who was involved with a group called the Concerned Christians, got caught up in the madness over the issue of a home-made fold-up cross. The cross was made to fold up so that the Concerned Christians group could move on quickly when the police found their prayers to be provocative acts. However, the police confiscated Mr Joness cross, arguing that it was an offensive weapon. A bevy of lawyers were soon clamouring over themselves, desperate to take on the case to get the cross back. In the end, some more senior official in the police department realised that a PR disaster was looming and the offensive weaponthe home-made folding crosswas returned to its owner.
The use of the power of the state against individuals was part of the darker side of the Bjelke-Petersen regime. Who can forget the hounding of school teacher John Sinclair over his campaigning to stop sand mining on Fraser Island? Who can forget Justice Douglas, passed over for a well-deserved judicial promotion because of a rumour he might have once voted Labor? And we should not forget Ray Whitrod, the reforming police commissioner with the odd view that the police should uphold the law, quietly removed in favour of the corrupt Terry Lewis. Phil Dickie, the Walkley award-winning journalist whose expose of police corruption helped usher in the Fitzgerald inquiry and the downfall of the Bjelke-Petersen regime, wrote in the Australian on Anzac Day that the legacy of the Bjelke-Petersen regime still lives on in Queensland:
Even after a series of Labor governments, the state still lags significantly behind the best and much of the rest of Australia in the provision of social as opposed to physical infrastructure. Consumers, public health and the environment continue to have all the protection of legislation full of loopholes that is rarely enforced.
Even premiers who had their political start marching against Bjelke-Petersen seem to have never really accepted that parliament may have a role beyond passing the governments legislation, that the citizenry may have a right to information or that communities may legitimately object to the governments plans for them.
Some of the recent actions of the Beattie government, while lacking the scale of rank corruption of the Bjelke-Petersen, certainly approach him in terms of hypocrisy. The rise and fall of the former Queensland Information Commissioner and his deputy, the watchdogs of freedom of information in Queensland, are a case in point. Last year, the former Information Commissioner, David Bevan, acting in accordance with his act, overruled the Premiers refusal to release details of the contracts on tens of millions of dollars of public subsidies paid to the Berri fruit juice company. The Premier responded by saying that he would change the law. A few months later, the Information Commissioner, David Bevan, was quietly removed from his position.
His replacement, Ms Cathi Taylor, is a former ALP member, a former employee of the Premier, the partner of a department director-general and personal friend of the chair of the selection panel, the Premiers own director-general. Her first act as Information Commissioner was to sack Mr Bevans long-standing and respected independently minded deputy, Greg Sorensen. No, Sir Joh would have been proud of that.
Of course, the Bjelke-Petersen regime survived as long as it did courtesy of its gerrymanderits electoral weighting of country electorates. Unfortunately, I can report to the Senate that gerrymanders are still alive and well in Australia. Take Western Australia, for example. Western Australia has the worst electoral weighting in Australia, with country voters bunched in electorates as little as a quarter of the size of larger city electorates. Last month, thanks to a former Liberal upper house member, Alan Cadby, it appeared that this was going to change. For the West Australian lower house there appears to have been a deal done so that there will be electoral parity, albeit with an electoral allowance for very large seats in remote Western Australia.
But for the upper house it looks like the electoral weighting will continue, thanks to the self-interest of the Green MPs in the West Australian parliament. Seventy-four per cent of Western Australias population live in the metropolitan area, yet the 26 per cent who live outside the metropolitan area currently elect half of the members of the upper house, with an upper house MP for every 19,200 voters compared to 55,150 voters for every metropolitan MP. Yet in a bizarre decision the Greens are now insisting that this be entrenchedin fact that it should be made worse. The current allowance for five members for the largest region in each zone compared with five for smaller regions is now being attacked by the Greens, who want to have the same number in every zone regardless of the number of the voters. Their spokesperson, Dr Chrissy Sharp, is calling for six regions, each electing six members as the first stage towards the Greens shift towards bioregions as a basis for government. This will apparently will be good for the environment. I quote from her press release:
We realise that without adequate political representation, the wide environment of WA and the people responsible for managing it, will be neglected.
That is why we support continued malapportionment in the Upper House: to provide for a Parliament that is better grounded in natural resource management.
I do not now how the number of votes allocated to sheep in far Western Australia is going to determine how good the natural resource management is, but that is her rationale. What absolute and utter twaddle! The truth is that the Greens believe they have a chance of winning back the two country seats they narrowly lost in this years election if the quota is reduced. Dee Margetts, a former senator, and Robin Chapple, managed to fluke seats with votes of around 4.4 per cent in 2001 but fell short in 2005. With a lower quota they will probably return to the parliament at the next election.
To dress up naked self-interest as being good for the environment is the sort of self-serving twaddle that the Bjelke-Petersen regime would have been proud of. It is worth noting, of course, that the Greens and the National Party in Western Australia managed to exchange preferences. Indeed, the last Green, Dr Chrissy Sharps successor, was actually elected by National Party preferences ahead of a Christian Democrat candidate. Hypocrisy in politics is something which all of us should seek to ensure is not put ahead of good public policy.
I will finish today with a quote from another colleague of mine in the Democrats, Liz Willis, who wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald on Anzac Day, again thanking Joh Bjelke-Petersen for her political education. She said:
Joh Bjelke-Petersen was a hard-working and driven man and he made those of us who were on the other side of his political fence work even harder, unwittingly steeling and skilling up his political opponents.
The Queensland political scene is now populated by many who may never have been driven to politics had they not encountered the effects of the strongarm politics of his government in their jobs in law, community services, media and education or in their daily grind as foot soldiers in the army of the unemployed.
I am not angry we were denied the rich, varied and comparatively relaxed life that young Queenslanders now enjoy. I am proud to have lived through that time and also proud that Brisbane and Queensland emerged from being national jokes to be the desirable locations they are today.
I do wish to pass on my condolences to the Bjelke-Petersen family at this stage. I think that is appropriate. It is very sad to lose a father, a grandfather and a great-grandfather. I also wish to add my condolences to the many victims of the Bjelke-Petersen regime over the last two decades in Queensland. They are still alive and living with their pain in Queensland todaythe SEQEB workers, including one of my cousins, who lost all of their superannuation months from retirement because of a political act of the Bjelke-Petersen regime. They are the victims and they should not be forgotten. Certainly at this time we should note what was bad about the regime and make sure it does not come into our public life, whether it be gerrymanders in Western Australia, accountability mechanisms in Queensland or shameless pork-barrelling, as we saw in the last federal election.
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