State of emergency: this election will show whether Queensland really is 'different'
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Version 0 of 1. In the 1970s and 1980s, claims that Queensland was different from the rest of Australia abounded. Over the not quite three years of Campbell Newman’s premiership, interstate observers might have been forgiven for assuming that Anna Bligh was a temporary modernising blip and that the Sunshine State had reverted to type. Whether seeming eccentricities like declaring war on bats or allowing councils to opt out of water fluoridation, or the more serious and even spectacular wars on bikies, doctors and the judiciary, the Newman government pushed a lot of envelopes that would remain sealed in other states. While the brown paper envelopes stuffed with $100 notes are a thing of the past, it appeared to many that the spectre of Joh Bjelke-Petersen had not just been evoked, but had risen from his Bethany grave. Defence lawyers were branded as conspirators, the environment scorned and trashed, development lauded to the skies, and dissenting voices treated as enemies to be silenced. Respected clinicians were vilified in parliament during the virulent doctors’ dispute, the independence of courts and arbitrators stripped away by rushed legislation, and consultation openly dismissed as futile. How could all this happen, and what did it mean? Was Queensland, the state that only a few short years ago gave the nation a governor-general, a prime minister and a treasurer, doomed to repetitions of the absurd and undemocratic? In answering these, and other questions at the outset of a January election whose only precedent is a century old, it’s well worth revisiting the debates that dominated the Bjelke-Petersen era. Joh’s Country party administration, rebranded as the National party, steadied its shaky start in 1971 when a “state of emergency” was declared for the Springboks’ rugby union tour, and country cops charged demonstrators in Brisbane’s Albert Park. Rewarded by subsequent by-election victories, including the election in inner city Merthyr of “Shady” Don Lane, a former special branch detective later to be jailed after the Fitzgerald inquiry, “Jackboots” Bjelke-Petersen had found a formula for electoral success. Combining a permanent state of emergency with the notorious electoral zonal system, or gerrymander, in 1974 the “bible bashing bastard” outsmarted Gough Whitlam, reduced state Labor to a cricket team of 11 members, and sailed on triumphant throughout the 1970s, banning street marches and bulldozing the state’s heritage and environment in the sacred cause of progress. Stern and strong, tongue-tied but folksy, Bjelke-Petersen reigned over a state whose foundational legacies had been decentralisation, an economy oriented to agricultural and then mining exports, and a weak urban professional class as well as a largely rural working class union base in the Australian Workers Union. Historians, such as Raymond Evans in his distinguished History of Queensland, point to the shadows of Brisbane’s violent past: convict trauma, South Sea Islander slave labour, land grabs and frontier war. Institutions and civil society had always been weak in the Sunshine State, with the judiciary treated as a field for grace and favour appointments, the upper house abolished by Ted Theodore’s Labor government in 1922, and the police politicised from the get go. A recipe, then, for a colourful and populist style of governance, oriented against Canberra – and for a narrative of continuing struggle towards a dour Protestant Promised Land of Progress. Some were determined to deny Queensland’s difference. Forces for change emerged in the state’s moribund Labor party during the 1970s and 1980s. Labor’s trade union clique, the “Old Guard”, were notorious for spending their days at boozy lunches at the iconic Breakfast Creek Hotel. But a new guard emerged: civil libertarian senator George Georges, young lawyers like Wayne Goss and Peter Beattie, and progressive western suburbs academics, exemplified by University of Queensland historian Denis Murphy. Veterans of the 60s’ anti-Vietnam movement, such as English lecturers Dan O’Neill and Carole Ferrier, were also prominent in the struggle. A caveat was entered by the then-young philosophy lecturer (and later long-serving MP and attorney general) Deane Wells in his book The Deep North, but the consensus was that only electoral and institutional manipulation kept the Nats in power. The seeds of a modern “situation normal” Australian eastern state were just waiting to be watered. I was 19 and in my second year of uni when Bjelke-Petersen’s regime finally (and farcically) fell. I, and many others of my generation, shared the ideals of Labor and the civil liberation protest movements, and were nurtured on the effusion of musical and cultural creativity that bubbled up when the pressure of Bjelke-Petersen came off, so well documented by Andrew Stafford in Pig City. Modernisers and reformers had their moment in the sun during Wayne Goss’s premiership. As Julianne Schultz describes in Disruptive Influences, many who were later to make a national mark – like Kevin Rudd and University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Glyn Davis – cut their political and professional teeth on the Goss project. As Schultz also relates, reform wasn’t as easy as implementation of the recommendations of the Fitzgerald inquiry that catalysed Joh’s downfall, and the imposition of public service managerialism. The economic sands, and the landslide of Keating’s recession we had to have, shifted under the foundations of the Goss regime. The shrinking of traditional agricultural and underground coal mining industries – and the disappearance of the post offices, railways stations and bank branches that had been the hubs of many a small town – saw a rather shambolic return to a Nationals-led Coalition government in 1996, itself to collapse under the weight of One Nation in 1998. Peter Beattie, to my mind one of the most consummate politicians of the last few decades, turned minority government and electoral scandal into a Labor landslide in 2001, after a symbolic swim in a shark pool before the campaign. Beattie’s genius was to reconcile the old and new Queenslands, pursuing a technology- and creativity-led industry strategy at the same time as he cosied up to Joh – Beattie famously escorted Joh around Lang Park, and praised him effusively on the occasion of his state funeral. Bligh’s somewhat more sophisticated style came undone after a narrow victory in 2009, with a backflip on privatisation (always hated in a sprawling and decentralised state) costing her legitimacy, despite her sterling leadership during the disastrous floods of 2011. Long time MP, now health minister, LNP founder and opposition leader in three elections, Lawrence “The Borg” Springborg couldn’t quite get the conservatives over the line. His arcane reference to making public service jobs “de-necessary” was perhaps a portent of things to come under Campbell Newman. The Borg, a son of the Southern Downs, was just too country for Brisbane voters, who needed to be swung en masse for Labor to be defeated. Enter, somewhat later, Newman, a long time lord mayor of Brisbane, who had worked closely with Beattie, and cultivated a non-partisan “can do” image. Newman had no seat in parliament, but this apparently didn’t bother the LNP, who elected him leader anyway. Despite a closely contested fight for the seat of Ashgrove with popular former environment minister Kate Jones, Newman swept the LNP to power in 2012, winning a stunning 78 of 89 seats, and reducing Labor to a rump of seven. From seemingly unprecedented dominance to a roll of the dice for an early election that betrays a nervousness about both his chances in Ashgrove and his government’s across the state, it’s a story I’ve told in part at The Monthly. I’m interested here in tracing the origins or his distinctive style of government in Queensland’s difference. Writing at the outset of the campaign, Guardian journalist Joshua Robertson argued the election would be about the environment, bikes and privatisation. So far, one week in, it hasn’t been about anything much (inviting comparisons with a certain recurring Seinfeld character). No doubt these issues and more will surface as the shadow war segues to intense conflict. It’s here, though, that these three hotly contested areas of public policy point to the tensions between Queensland’s difference and its incorporation into Australian modernity. From sand mining on Stradbroke Island to the preservation of the pristine rainforests of north Queensland, through the rise of coal seam gas and the tearing up of Labor’s Wild Rivers legislation, the environment has been central to Queensland’s story. As Evans and other historians of Queensland have emphasised, from the colonial origins of whitefella settlement and dispossession onwards, the environment has figured in the dominant culture as something to be tamed, to be slashed, to be exploited for its agricultural and mining potential. So enduring is this mindset that Beattie’s controls on tree clearing were often cited by farmers as horrendous impositions on property rights, and assumed a proportion in state politics quite remarkable given the moderation of the legislation. The last few years of LNP government have seen the dismantling of environmental checks and balances, and constant advocacy of the interests of mining companies over those of local communities and ecologies. Some of the government’s first acts were dismantling of climate change projects and agencies. The figurative slash and burn of the early white farmers is back in Newmanland. The bikies legislation, whether we consider its absurdities – such as the now discarded pink jumpsuits for prisoners – or its massive infringements on the rights of free association and free speech, is redolent of a distaste for the rule of law and for personal and communal liberties. The bizarre spectacle of the notoriously combative and youthful attorney general, Jarrod Bleijie, waging war on the judiciary and senior members of the bar over the appointment of Tim Carmody as chief justice, symbolises the disdain for legal and political liberalism that is at the core of National’s philosophy. It also harks back to an authoritarian Labor party, distrustful of independent social institutions and the separation of powers. Dissent is to be broken, regardless of the niceties of the law and of consultative checks and balances in parliament. Here it’s important that the ALP has recovered its Goss era concern with integrity, accountability and the rule of law, strongly emphasising these themes throughout its time in opposition. Finally, privatisation was always a step too far for state Labor, and the bizarre “Strong Choices” ads are a sign that the LNP recognises its unpopularity. A far flung state always relied on public infrastructure and spending, whether its aim was developmental or ameliorative. The ironic outcome of the Labor modernisation project was the forgetting of Queensland’s difference, and an assumption that the public would cop the logic of treasury finance and merchant banking, an assumption that cruelled Bligh’s term almost before it had begun. So, is Queensland different? Yes, in the past. Will it be different into the future? In many, many ways that is a question that will be answered, at least provisionally, by this election, far more fascinating than its anodyne beginnings would suggest. Whether the Labor party can prevail, or at least run the LNP close, will reveal how resilient “new Queensland” is as against the “old Queensland” of unfettered development, contempt for greenies and free speech, and for the basics of liberal democracy. Newman appeared to represent an urban, if not urbane, style of governance, but that has been exposed by his combative premiership as chimerical. Yet the ALP itself still bears the cross of privatisation, no matter how emphatically it rejects it as fundamentally mistaken by its leader, Annastacia Palaszczuk. Those outside the state should not be indifferent to Queensland’s difference. Consider that the state has given the nation both Kevin Rudd and Quentin Bryce but also Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer. What happens in Queensland this election will matter not just to Queenslanders, but to all Australians. |