The road to despair
30.07.2009
By: Tony Koch
Twenty years after his report on police corruption, a distinguished but disillusioned lawyer is still paying the price, writes Tony Koch
EYEBROWS were raised yesterday as news filtered out in The Australian and on the airwaves detailing Tony Fitzgerald's spray regarding Queensland sliding back into the dark ages of corruption.
In particular, attention was focused on his pointed accusations that the one who had stalled the reform process was former premier Peter Beattie, who was quick to respond, by telephone from his sinecure as Queensland trade commissioner in Los Angeles.
In his speech in Brisbane on Tuesday night, at a function marking 20 years since his report on police and political corruption in Queensland, Fitzgerald said that when the Beattie-led Labor party won government in June 1998, it decided there were votes to be obtained from Joh Bjelke-Petersen's remaining adherents ``in glossing over his and his cronies' repressive and corrupt misconduct''.
``Tacitly at least, Queenslanders were encouraged by Labor's self-described base politics to forget the repression and corruption which had occurred, and the social upheaval which had been involved in eradicating those injustices,'' he said. ``Ethics are always tested by incumbency.''
Fitzgerald's message was clear. He lived through the 1998 Queensland election when Pauline Hanson and One Nation shook the state to its boots, winning 24 per cent of the primary vote and 12 seats in parliament.
The policies of One Nation were explicitly to the right of politics, were ill thought-through and unashamedly racist. The tens of thousands of people who flocked to One Nation -- the majority of whom were previously supporters of the National Party (now the Nationals) and the Labor Right -- were obviously an influential voting bloc.
Beattie won that election by a whisker and was able to govern only with the support of an independent, Peter Wellington. So, in his usual pragmatic manner, he undertook to capture the 24 per cent of vote that was available and unattached to either major party.
Bjelke-Petersen had resigned in high dudgeon from the National Party and had spoken in support of the principles and policies espoused by Hanson. He was in failing physical and mental health at the time.
So Beattie adopted the public persona of social healer, cosying up to Bjelke-Petersen publicly. Most memorable was him showing Bjelke-Petersen around the newly developed Lang Park football stadium in Brisbane, where television cameras filmed Beattie pushing his predecessor around in a wheelchair.
Labor supporters were aghast. But none were as aghast as Fitzgerald.
Beattie was making public statements that portrayed Bjelke-Petersen as ``not all bad'', and even reminding Queenslanders that ``Joh did achieve a lot for Queensland: opening up the coal mines and so on''.
It was Fitzgerald's view that Beattie had no mandate to grant forgiveness, or to ask Queenslanders to ``put the past behind and forget about the corruption''. That part of history was not Beattie's to forgive and forget.
In his speech on Tuesday, Fitzgerald said: ``It soon became apparent to Queenslanders that the coalition was at that time still not fit to govern but it had succeeded in interrupting and damaging the reform process. By the end of the coalition's term in power in 1998, the political situation in Queensland was volatile.
``Wayne Goss had departed from politics, the Labor Party was led by Peter Beattie, and much of the principled willingness to confront Queensland's dark past had been lost, and with it, the momentum for reform.
``I had always known that I might have to leave Queensland to work elsewhere as a consequence of my inquiry, and in 1998 I accepted that that time had come. I resigned (as president of the Queensland Court of Appeal) and took up a position in NSW.''
Fitzgerald complained, in his speech, that the work of his senior counsel assisting at the corruption inquiry, Gary Crooke QC, had never been properly acknowledged. The former commissioner told how he had nominated Crooke for an Order of Australia honour in 1999 or 2000, which was seconded by ex-NSW police corruption commissioner James Wood.
Two other NSW Supreme Court judges who had appeared at Wood's inquiry as juniors to Crooke were referees. Yet Crooke was overlooked. ``Of course, there might not have been mean-spirited political interference,'' Fitzgerald observed, archly. ``It's theoretically possible that there was an exceptionally strong field that year.''
Crooke, who went on to become Queensland's Integrity Commissioner, advising Premier Anna Bligh on the ethical appropriateness of her decision to appoint her predecessor, Beattie, to the lucrative Los Angeles post, did not return The Australian's calls yesterday.
Fitzgerald's frustration -- indeed bitterness -- is understandable. He and his family had paid an enormous personal price for the two years he had spent from 1987 inquiring into police and political corruption in Queensland. For those two years he and his family were under constant threat from underworld figures and several trusted police lived 24 hours a day in his house to give personal protection.
The result of his inquiry: four National Party ministers -- Brian Austin, Don Lane, Leisha Harvey and Geoff Muntz -- were jailed; police commissioner Terry Lewis was jailed for 12 years when a jury was convinced that he headed police corruption in the state; and Bjelke-Petersen was tried on perjury charges, but a jury was unable to agree on a verdict.
The fallout from the two years of public inquiry and his bombshell report ensured the National Party could not hold government because they were so tainted.
In December 1989 the Wayne Goss-led Labor Party won government on the gerrymandered boundaries that had kept the Nationals in power for so long. Goss embarked on the reform process, which centred on introducing the extensive protective and open-government measures recommended by Fitzgerald, including fair electoral boundaries, parliamentary committees, and the establishment of the permanent anti-corruption body, the Criminal Justice Commission.
Fitzgerald came under constant attack from corrupt Nationals and corrupt cops and all their camp followers who accused him of being a Labor stooge and other vile things.
He maintained a dignified silence, and in 1991, accepted the position of inaugural president of the Queensland Court of Appeal.
This was a minefield of trouble, with a significant section of the judiciary and legal profession openly jealous of Fitzgerald for the profile he had achieved and the esteem in which he was publicly held. As well, many politically conservative members of the profession resented Fitzgerald, blaming him for the downfall after more than four decades of non-Labor government in Queensland.
One of the first actions taken by Goss upon his election was to abolish imperial honours. The problem was that the then chief justice John Macrossan was due to get a knighthood in the Australia Day honour's list in January 2000, just a month after Goss was elected.
So it did not happen, and, some would accept, an unhealthy relationship erupted between Macrossan and the Goss government.
The discontent simmered until Macrossan took sabbatical leave, and Goss instituted a restructuring of the Supreme Court, which just was not working to its potential. He also established the Court of Appeal, and appointed Fitzgerald as inaugural president.
In 1996 Goss lost government to a coalition led by the Nationals' Rob Borbidge, a Gold Coast motelier. Borbidge was the best intellectual talent the Nationals had seen in decades, and he was ably assisted by a competent Liberal leader and treasurer, Joan Sheldon.
But before they were even sworn in, stories emerged alleging that National Party members and the insipid Queensland Police Union had been up to no good. The police union offered and gave support to the Nationals in a key by-election at Mundingburra in Townsville that ensured Goss lost government.
In return they wanted the right to get rid of police commissioner Jim O'Sullivan and most of his senior officers, get rid of the CJC, and virtually return Queensland to the pre-Fitzgerald days when cops ruled the roost and were above the law.
But unfortunately for Borbidge, a copy of the memorandum of understanding was faxed to me from the officer of commissioner O'Sullivan with an unsigned notation: ``Nail these evil bastards.'' It was published the next day, and they were indeed ``nailed''. An inquiry was announced, and the Borbidge government was on the skids.
They lasted just one term, but towards the end of their brief rule, Macrossan retired. It was expected that protocol would be followed: that the next senior judge would take over as chief justice. But the Nationals would have no bar of Fitzgerald getting anything, and Borbidge appointed Supreme Court Justice Paul de Jersey to the position.
It must be said that although his appointment was marred by some political controversy, de Jersey has proven to be an excellent Chief Justice. He has not been afraid to speak out against the government of the day when required, and has been to the forefront on several important social issues, including the plight of indigenous people caught up in the justice and penal system.
Fitzgerald was obviously miffed that he had been passed over, particularly because it was in retribution for the work he had done cleaning up corruption in the state.
Beattie, as opposition leader when de Jersey was appointed, offered fulsome congratulations and welcomed the appointment. His shadow attorney-general, Matt Foley, also followed protocol, but made the public accusation that the appointment was made as ``payback'' for Fitzgerald.
However, the de Jersey appointment was not the reason Fitzgerald developed his deep disdain for Beattie. That was purely and simply because Beattie took in on himself to declare that all was well with Bjelke-Petersen, and that corruption was a thing of the past.
Beattie added fuel to the fire when he went further. In 2002 he amalgamated the CJC and the crime commission, which became the Crime and Misconduct Commission. Without public consultation, Beattie's new ``crime fighting'' body was stripped of its legislative responsibility to investigate all complaints against police and other public figures.
Instead Beattie introduced a system whereby the CMC is the central handling agency which then allocates the complaints back to the departments involved in the complaint, and they handle it. That occurs in all but 2 per cent of complaints against police: the most serious.
So the state's feared watchdog was neutered by Beattie, and remains in that castrated state.
Fitzgerald in the meantime has been conducting a business as a mediator in Sydney, but keeping an eye over the border to the north to see how much further things were deteriorating. As he said this week: ``Unfortunately, cynical short-sighted political attitudes adopted for the benefit of particular politicians and their parties commonly have adverse consequences for the general community.
``The current concerns about political and police misconduct are a predictable result of attitudes adopted in Queensland since the mid-1990s. Despite their protestations of high standards of probity ... political leaders who gloss over corruption risk being perceived by their colleagues and the electorate as regarding it [to be] of little importance. Greed, power and opportunity in combination provide an almost irresistible temptation for many which can only be countered by the near certainty of exposure and sever punishment.''
