Adrian Lee is a Solicitor-Advocate in London, specialising in criminal defence, and was twice a Conservative Parliamentary Candidate.
Fifty-five years ago, on the 8th, August 1968, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, one of the most unconventional and controversial twentieth-century conservative leaders, became the Premier of Queensland, Australia. Nicknamed the “Hillbilly Dictator”, many of his political opponents believed that his lack of polish and education indicated that he would not last very long, but Bjelke-Petersen tripled his party’s vote and reigned supreme in Queensland for the next nineteen years.
Bjelke-Petersen, known to the Australian public as “Joh” or later “Sir Joh”, was born on 13th January 1911 in Dannevirke, New Zealand. Joh’s parents were Danish, his father Carl being a Lutheran minister. The family left New Zealand for Australia in 1913 and purchased a small dairy farm near Kingaroy, Queensland. They were poor and worked the farm without assistance.
Young Joh contracted polio, leaving him with a lifelong limp. His elder brother was more academic, showing less interest in agriculture, whilst his father constantly suffered from poor health. Joh felt that this left him doing most of the work. He left school at 14 and devoted himself to farming.
Joh moved out of his parent’s house and set up home in a cowshed. Hugh Lunn recalled in the final paragraph of his 1978 biography:
“As I stood up to leave him, I asked him if the 15 years alone in a cow bail had taught him much. “Yes”, he said, “…that was a hard life and I learned what you have to do to succeed. Gee whiz, you can learn more in a place like that than at Oxford University. My word you can.””
Joh was a successful farmer and bought an adjacent piece of land to start peanut farming. Sometimes he would sleep in the fields next to farm machinery to have an early start the next day. The machinery purchased for clearing the land did not go to waste when the task was complete, as Joh established another business as a contract clearer for neighbouring farms. Eventually, after gaining his pilot’s licence, he undertook crop-dusting too.
Bjelke-Petersen joined the Country Party and was elected to Kingaroy Shire Council in 1946. One year later he was elected to the Queensland Legislative Assembly as the Member for Nanango, a seat he would hold for forty years. In 1952, Joh married typist Florence Gilmour. They had four children and Florence served as Australian Senator for Queensland between 1981 and 1993. Following Joh’s knighthood in 1984, the couple were known as “Sir Joh and Lady Flo”.
The Country Party existed to protect farmer’s rights. Formed in 1915 by the Queensland Farmers’ Union following a dispute with the Liberal Government, the party’s electoral base was mainly rural. Their opponents were the Australian Labor Party (ALF), which had dominated Queensland politics since 1932. Australians called Queensland “the Red North” and the ALF created state enterprises in competition with commercial businesses.
Eventually, the Queensland state owned canneries, sawmills, hotels, mines, smelters, cattle stations, abattoirs and even a sugar mill. Unsurprisingly, Queensland lagged behind other states in terms of economic development.
In 1957, following a split in the ALF, the Country Party won, with the Liberals as their junior coalition partner. Joh was a cabinet minister under Premier Frank Nicklin from 1963 and was elected unopposed as deputy party leader to Jack Pizzey when Nicklin retired in January 1968. On 31st July, Pizzey suddenly died of a heart attack, but it was the Liberal Leader, Gordon Chalk, who had served as the coalition’s Deputy Premier, who became the new Premier.
As the Country Party held 27 seats to the Liberal’s 20, this situation did not please Bjelke-Petersen, who threatened to pull out of the coalition unless he became Premier. Chalk resigned and Joh entered office.
Joh was controversial from the start. Three weeks after becoming Premier, his government awarded six-year leases to two companies, Exoil and Transoil, to prospect for oil on the Great Barrier Reef. The problem was that Joh was a major shareholder in both companies. Surprisingly, he survived this scandal by narrowly winning a confidence vote and went on to triumph at the 1969 Queensland election.
Much has been written by Bjelke-Petersen’s critics of his electoral boundary gerrymandering. It is correctly stated that the system overrepresented rural voters. However, the boundary system was originally introduced by the ALF government in 1949. The benefits of this to Labor can be seen in the 1950 state election results, where the ALF received 46.9 per cent of the vote and won 45 seats, whereas the Country-Liberal alliance received 49.2 per cent but only took 31 seats.
The Country Party later won because of Labor’s division, not gerrymandering. It is true that revisions were later made by Joh’s party, but the main reason for his success was his political agenda’s popularity with working-class voters.
Many voters warmed to his folksy rambling style, which became known as “Johspeak”. He spoke in blunt terms:
“The choice is between our system, everything that’s made Queensland what we are, and then, the others, the downhill road to socialism and communism, make no mistake about it and we don’t want that, do we?”
Joh was outspoken on everything. He supported U.D.I. in Rhodesia, called Amnesty International “an arm of communist propaganda” and referred to Friends of the Earth as “Friends of the Dirt”. Publicans were prohibited from serving convicted drug dealers and child molesters, and condom vending machines were outlawed in public toilets.
When the Springboks toured Queensland in 1971, the state faced mass anti-apartheid demonstrations. His government reacted by declaring a month-long State of Emergency and erecting barbed wire around the cricket grounds. Protestors were subsequently subdued by Police with batons. Two by-elections were, coincidentally, held on the same day as the riots and the Country Party won both. In 1977 Joh declared:
“The day of street marches is over. Don’t bother applying for a march permit. You won’t get one. That’s government policy now.”
When Gough Whitlam considered turning Australia into a republic, Joh took the precaution of having the Queen formally declared as “Queen of Queensland”.
Despite his rhetoric, Joh’s tenure had a beneficial effect on the economy. He turned Queensland into Australia’s lowest tax state. Inheritance tax was abolished. Stamp duty concessions were extended to small businesses, family property transfer, first home buyers, and mortgages. Tax exemptions were introduced for small businesses employing apprentices. Tourism was encouraged and airports were opened across the state. Queensland’s GDP grew at 5 per cent each year, whilst the other federal states grew on average by 3.9 per cent.
In 1986, Joh won his biggest majority by taking 49 out of 89 seats. He launched a “Joh for Canberra” campaign, in a bid to get elected to the Federal House of Representatives. His principal policy was a 25 per cent flat tax, but the campaign ended in disaster. Journalists had been investigating Police corruption in Queensland, especially bribes accepted from illegal brothel owners to turn a blind eye.
The scandal broke in Spring 1987, just before Federal election and Joh’s campaign ended. It emerged that the State’s Police Commissioner and the cabinet minister for Police had accepted six-figure bribes. Joh’s support melted away within his party and he resigned. He always maintained that he had no suspicion of corruption in Queensland before the scandal broke, but there were further allegations made of a Hong Kong businessman contributing $100,000 to an election slush fund. Joh’s reputation was tarnished forever.
After leaving politics, Joh lived in seclusion at his original farm, where his son and daughter-in-law established bed and breakfast cottages. Bjelke-Petersen lived until 2005, passing away at 94.