Tuesday 5 January 2016

Opinion: Queensland alcohol management laws in no way similar to Bjelke-Petersen regime


  • January 5, 2016 12:00am
  • The Courier-Mail

Protests were quickly stamped out during the Bjelke-Petersen years.
I LOVE the Brisbane band Powderfinger. Their song These Days is an iconic piece of common man’s art made immortal by Australian film Two Hands.

In a twist of lyrical fate, it seems these days former Powderfinger bassist John Collins is bummed out about life in Brisbane’s entertainment district.

Collins said last week the Palaszczuk Government’s very sensible – and still very generous – alcohol management laws, which will result in last drinks being served at 2am, would send us back to the days of Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Collins’ argument is that an inability for a potentially violent drunk to get a drink at 3am will somehow keep big international music acts away from Brisbane.

With due respect, John, that’s crap. If inner Brisbane earns a reputation for public safety through tougher alcohol laws, bands and patrons alike will flock there in droves.

It’s even more tragic that Collins spoke just prior to yet another innocent young man suffering yet another life-threatening assault in the Fortitude Valley.

As reduced grog trading in Newcastle and Kings Cross has clearly shown, Queensland’s new alcohol laws will dramatically cut street violence.

But it’s Collins’ reference to the Bjelke-Petersen era of the 1970s and ’80s, and his cavalier comparison of Palaszczuk’s Government to those dark and awful days, that really worries me.

In no way – let me repeat, in no way – is Palaszczuk like Joh Bjelke-Petersen. And nor was her LNP predecessor Campbell Newman, whose sins, real or imagined, were nothing like Bjelke-Petersen’s.

If you’re under 40 or moved to Queensland after 1990 you may scoff at my insistence. If so, read the recently released cabinet documents of 1985. Hollywood couldn’t write a script where politicians seriously considered banning gay men from public swimming pools.

Let me assure you: you had to live through the 1980s to know how dark the Sunshine State really was.

To the parliamentary purist, Bjelke-Petersen’s greatest sin was his abuse of the Westminster system. True, he didn’t begin Queensland’s long tradition of ramming legislation through Parliament at midnight. Nor did he invent the so-called “gerrymander” of weighted electorates. That ignominy belongs to Labor.

But Bjelke-Petersen crafted this abuse to an art form. How else could Joh remain premier despite his Country Party winning as little as 20 per cent of the vote? And let’s not forget the notoriously biased Speakers, the refusal to create a public accounts committee, or the shrinking number of days Parliament actually sat.

If you think it absurd that Australian conservative adviser Lynton Crosby should receive a British knighthood – seemingly for getting the Tories elected – then you’ll fall over to learn Bjelke-Petersen received the highest gong, a GCMG, in 1984 for – wait for it – “services to parliamentary democracy”. While debate continues over whether Joh nominated himself, the old joke that Bjelke-Petersen thought “Westminster” a type of carpet never grows old.

Proposed new alcohol management laws are nothing like the Bjelke-Petersen years.

But none of that diminishes Bjelke-Petersen’s attacks on Queensland’s most vulnerable groups. A populist in the most destructive vein, Joh built political momentum not on unity but on division.

By carving Queensland into “us” and “them”, Bjelke-Petersen – for ugly, naked political gain – made public enemies out of the left wing of the Liberal Party, Labor, trade unionists, the gay community, free speech advocates, anti-uranium protesters, indigenous people – anyone who dared to question the decision-making of a man who gladly admitted taking his mandate directly from God.

To oppose Joh was to oppose Queensland. And that meant the full force of the law. Where peace marches interstate were family friendly events, any like gathering in Brisbane was met with brutality. The notorious Queen Street Mall Act made protest illegal, and hundreds were arrested for merely standing outside Parliament House.

Thousands more had Special Branch police files kept on them for “crimes” no greater than writing a letter to a newspaper. Almost certainly I was one of them.

The Triffid’s John Collins, whose comments have trivialised the grim reality of life under Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

That’s why irrational dictatorship is so intolerable. Who can’t but gasp in horror recalling how police raided abortion clinics and seized women’s private medical histories, or how condom vending machines were ripped from Griffith University toilet walls, or how sex education was banned in schools, or how wacky cancer “cures” and dodgy hydrogen cars could receive state endorsement?

Then there’s the midnight destruction of Brisbane’s architectural landmarks, the development-at-all-costs mentality that savaged the natural environment, and the bastardisation of convention that allowed Joh to appoint Albert Patrick Field to the Senate in 1975 to bring down the Whitlam federal government.

Rather than laud Joh as some sort of anti-Labor leviathan, LNP figures today must surely curse his name for damaging, for generations of Queensland voters, the good name of conservatism.

That’s why I pray that, in my dotage, Bjelke-Petersen doesn’t become rehabilitated in some awful revisionist history. We can’t afford Joh to be transformed into a lovable rogue like Labor’s Billy Hughes or, heaven forbid, Ned Kelly.

Let’s put those shameful years behind us — and leave them there.

Paul Williams is a senior humanities lecturer at Griffith University.

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