Legacy of Beattie's cowshed dance with Joh
27.04.2005
Tony Koch on the roots of the relationship between the Queensland Premier and
his predecessor from Kingaroy
IN his dotage, Joh Bjelke-Petersen would turn up regularly at the premier's building in Brisbane. He would speak to staff, go to the top floor occupied by Peter Beattie and ask to be taken home to Kingaroy.
The Labor Premier would regularly dispatch his driver and limousine to take the National Party premier of 19 years to his home three hours to the north.
A year ago, television footage of Mr Beattie wheeling Sir Joh around the newly developed Suncorp Stadium brought howls of outrage from the Labor ranks, just as a meeting between the two nearly 20 years ago raised Labor eyebrows.
On November 25, 1987, Sir Joh's leadership was under great threat from health minister Mike Ahern after his failed ``Joh for PM'' campaign and several months of damaging evidence from the Fitzgerald corruption inquiry.
On that day, he sacked Mr Ahern and four other ministers, including his loyal deputy, Bill Gunn, who set up the Fitzgerald inquiry. Sir Joh attempted to convince Governor Walter Campbell to call an election, but he refused.
According to a manuscript compiled by then state ALP secretary Mr Beattie -- and six months later turned into the television documentary Dance With The Devil -- he received a telephone call at 9.55pm on November 25 from former journalist turned goldminer Dennis Reinhardt, who put a plan on behalf of Sir Joh to foil Mr Ahern's expected challenge.
The plan, which was to be discussed at a meeting in Kingaroy a few days later, was so way-out, so politically unpalatable, that Mr Beattie wrote: ``I knew that if my Kingaroy meeting became public, large sections of the party would not understand and may never forgive me. It was a tough decision -- a decision that could finish me politically forever, but it had to be done.''
On Saturday, November 28, Mr Reinhardt drove Mr Beattie to Kingaroy where they met Sir Joh, drove through some paddocks, parked behind a cowshed and talked for 90 minutes in the car.
The proposition was that Sir Joh would recall parliament on the Tuesday. With Labor support, he would form a caretaker government, giving him time to reform the party, and call an election he expected to win on the gerrymandered boundaries.
He desperately wanted to stay in power to officiate at the 1988 Expo in Brisbane.
Mr Beattie says he entertained the idea, with the trade-off for Labor being an early election, a fair electoral boundary redistribution and an abandonment by Sir Joh of eight defamation writs he had issued against Labor MPs and Mr Beattie.
``He was bitter about National Party president Sir Robert Sparkes and Ahern and how they had treated him and betrayed him, but there was more to it. He thought Ahern would not be able to provide the strong, positive leadership that brought things like Expo to Queensland. He was worried about moral decline under their new policies,'' Mr Beattie wrote.
Sir Joh was happy to drop the eight writs and offered more staff and facilities to the ALP and Liberals for their support on the floor of parliament. But no fair redistribution was offered.
Before leaving to meet with Sir Joh, Mr Beattie had run the idea past Labor heavyweights, including state president Ian McLean, former leaders Tom Burns and Neville Warburton, and federal secretary Bob McMullan.
But it was all to amount to nought. On Tuesday, December 1, the National Party caucus met and ousted Sir Joh, installing Mr Ahern with an overwhelming vote.
The view of Sir Joh's biographer, Rae Wear, is that ALP assertions that the ``cowshed meeting'' established a rapport that meant Beattie treated Joh with kid gloves was ``drawing too long a bow''.
``It is politic now to be generous to Bjelke-Petersen, and Beattie senses that,'' Ms Wear said. ``There is a lot of revision of history going on at the moment. Bjelke-Petersen is seen as a great Queensland character and Beattie is responding to that, rather than any rapport developed back at the cowshed in 1987.''
Tony Koch, with Des Power, edited the manuscript of Dance With The Devil.
