Goss government’s ‘fractious’ relationship with anti-corruption body revealed

Queensland’s then second-term premier, Wayne Goss, didn’t know what was coming. And he wasn’t alone.

Cabinet minutes from 1994, publicly released for the first time this New Year’s Day, show a government that had turned the page on the corruption and cronyism of the Bjelke-Petersen era, having delivered much-needed reforms coming out of the Fitzgerald Inquiry.

But Goss’s second term showed the post-reform public goodwill would be difficult to maintain, as the realities of governing set in.

James Cook University law lecturer Anthony Marinac and Queensland Attorney-General Deb Frecklington look over the 1994 Goss government cabinet documents.Credit: Cameron Atfield

“Here is a government that is 12 months away from losing an election that nobody expected them to lose, so it’s only in retrospect that we can see how important 1994 was,” James Cook University law lecturer Anthony Marinac said at an embargoed briefing on the cabinet documents last month.

For Marinac, who was tasked by the Queensland government with summarising the Goss documents, the biggest surprise was the Goss government’s “fractious” relationship with the Criminal Justice Commission, which has since morphed into the Crime and Corruption Commission.

Cabinet directed then-attorney-general Dean Wells to write to the CJC to express its concerns about “the propensity of the commission to generate further public inquiries with Commission of Inquiry powers and broaden scope of investigations” and “the need to limit inquiries to specific matters where precise allegations have been made, and to avoid canvassing the policy framework and social context of government administrative processes”.

Those concerns came out of the CJC’s broadening the scope of its investigation into failures at the Basil Stafford Centre.

“It was unthinkable at the time for a government that was so closely associated with Fitzgerald implementation to suddenly find itself the target of a Fitzgerald institution,” Marinac said.

“But it had to be that way because the CJC was set up as an accountability institution, and what do accountability institutions do? Well, they hold a blowtorch to the government. And who was in government? Wayne Keith Goss.

“Accountability was a lot more fun when it was directed at Bjelke-Petersen, and a lot less fun when it was directed at the Goss government.”

Queensland Premier Wayne Goss (right) in 1994 with his chief of staff, future prime minister Kevin Rudd.Credit: Jim Rice/Fairfax Media

Attorney-General Deb Frecklington, at the State Archives for the cabinet papers release, was equally taken aback.

“Such a decision from a government so praised for the implementation of the Fitzgerald-era reforms may raise a few eyebrows,” she said.

A crime wave, particularly home invasions, were dominating the media and Marinac said the documents showed cabinet was “not directly responsive to the public hysteria”.

Frecklington said time was a “real leveler” and there were plenty of parallels between 1994 and 2024, most notably around crime.

“They [the Goss government] were in their second term, they were closing their eyes to the issues that were facing Queenslanders, particularly around youth crime, particularly around the detention centres,” Frecklington said.

“There were the native title issues, there were the regional Queensland issues that I think were they were slightly blinded to, if I can put it that way, and these cabinet minutes are a testament to that.”

But Marinac said one had to look elsewhere for signs of electoral disaster on the Goss government’s horizon.

“The first rumblings came with Brisbane Labor lord mayor Jim Soorley, who faced his own election early in 1994,” he said.

“He’s often underrated as a Queensland politician of that era, but he had a real knack for understanding suburban Brisbane, and in 1994 he spoke a lot about koalas.”

Why? The issue now synonymous with the downfall of the Goss Labor government – the proposed South Coast Motorway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, right through koala habitat in Daisy Hill.

The tollway would come at a great monetary cost – $500 million – and an even greater political cost.

“The suburban mums and dads of Mount Cotton and Shailer Park probably didn’t register as potential radicals, but Soorley seemed to understand that koalas mattered to them and he campaigned on that basis,” Marinac said.

“Goss? Not so much. The eastern corridor remained the preferred route and in retrospect, I would pick out as the start of the end of the Goss government the 25th of June, 1994, when in The Courier-Mail there was a publicly funded ad with a photo of a dead koala, her dead joey and a big headline that said: ‘Don’t kill us, Mr Goss’.”

The Goss government was re-elected with a one-seat majority in July 1995, with the seats of Albert, Greenslopes, Mansfield, Mount Ommaney, Redlands and Springwood all falling to the Coalition. Those defeats were widely attributed to opposition to the proposed new motorway.

Further north, Labor’s Ken Davies won the Townsville seat of Mundingburra by just 16 votes.

But when it was discovered 22 military personnel based at Lavarack Barracks, who had flown to Rwanda on a peacekeeping mission, were denied the chance to vote, the Court of Disputed Returns threw out the results and ordered a byelection.

Labor dumped Davies, replacing him with Townsville mayor Tony Mooney, before Liberal Frank Tanti won Mundingburra by a margin of 2.79 per cent – helped in part by Davies, who ran as an independent, not directing preferences to his old party.

The National-Liberal Coalition formed a minority government with the support of independent Gladstone MP Liz Cunningham, handing the premiership to Rob Borbidge in February 1996.