First female Police Commissioner has earned her stripes
A girl from a tiny town on the Atherton Tablelands, the daughter of migrants, has become our first female police commissioner and, as Matthew Condon writes, she’s earned her stripes
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BACK in 1983, the drive from the tiny town of Innot Hot Springs, up on the Atherton Tablelands in far north Queensland, to the big smoke of Brisbane in the southeast corner of the state was a test of endurance.
Leaving the town – 153km southwest of Cairns and famous in the late 1800s for its hot springs with “curative virtues” against gout and liver diseases – you’d hit a portion of the Flinders Highway for a while before turning onto the Capricorn Highway, which in turn would feed you onto the Warrego Highway towards Surat and Miles. Then you’d swing east and hit Toowoomba before coming down the range and landing in Brisbane. The journey, even negotiated at a decent clip, would cover 1997km and take, non-stop, just over 21 hours.
This was the trip a young Katarina Carroll took with her father, tobacco grower Ivan Bosnjak, in 1983 on her way to commence training at the Queensland Police Academy. The family called Innot Hot Springs home, and now Katarina was flying the coop and heading on a career path that, to her parents, was far from certain.
As a child of Croatian immigrants, a career in the police force was not a notion her parents had happily entertained.
“All parents want you to succeed, but they were mortified when I joined the police,” Carroll told the Stand Out Life podcast this year. “They had escaped from the former Yugoslavia to a refugee camp in Germany, and they emigrated to Australia, so they came from a really tough environment … a communist country without free speech allowed … police had a very different meaning to them from where they came from.”
It was on that epic, transformational drive south, however, that father Ivan was “educated about what a wonderful police environment” she was about to enter. Neither of them could have known what her future held.
“I did a social work course at James Cook University (in Townsville) until I was old enough to join the police force,” she went on. “When I went in, it was like, ‘What? You went to university to do social work and now you want to join the police?’
“When … my dad drove me … to Brisbane to the academy … it was a good time to have a discussion about why I wanted to join. We got over the humps pretty quickly.”
Queensland Commissioner Katarina Carroll has seen the worst of our police service
This week, the State Government announced that Carroll, 55, would succeed Ian Stewart as the next Queensland Police Commissioner, commencing duties in July upon Stewart’s retirement.
She will be the Queensland Police Service’s first female commissioner, just as she has been, since December 2014, the first female commissioner of Queensland Fire and Emergency Services.
To get to the top, she had the initial challenge of training for a police force that was riven with corruption and misogyny, and was still four years away from imploding under the scrutiny of the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption.
As a young constable, she worked in the then notorious Licensing Branch, where she went undercover as a prostitute in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, befriending sex workers and gathering information on the vice scene.
She remembered the impact of the Fitzgerald Inquiry (1987-89) in those early years of her career.
“It was a very sad time to go through because of what a handful of people did, and the impact on the organisation,” she told The Courier-Mail’s Qweekend magazine in 2014.
“But I think for us younger ones, it was a very good time to come into the organisation because we’d only been in for a few years and I saw a better organisation come out as a result, but I also saw the pain of what a lot of people went through.”
Meet Katarina Carroll, the veteran cop in charge of security at the G20
Carroll quickly rose through the ranks, working variously for the drug squad, the Joint Organised Crime Taskforce, and on internal investigations. One colleague, who declined to be named, told Insight that even in the early years, Carroll stood out as an exceptional talent.
“I remember her when she was working with crime operations and she was a good officer, diligent,” he said. “She was an energetic and ambitious young officer, and not ambitious in a bad way. She has always been a lovely woman to deal with on a personal level. I found her a very decent person. She would have had to have made some tough personal positions to get where she has in the police force.
“And I suspect she has, over the years, been very good at not burning too many bridges along the way.
“In those early years, my generation of police officers would never have imagined that one day there would be a woman as commissioner. I personally think it’s well overdue.”
After Carroll’s success in charge of logistics and security for the G20 Summit in Brisbane in 2014, she moved across to the QFES, which then had a broken culture riddled with sexism, bullying and misconduct.
In four years, she has turned the organisation around.
Former Queensland police detective and instrumental Fitzgerald Inquiry figure Jim Slade is now chairman of the Cedar Creek Wolffdene Rural Fire Brigade. He has witnessed Carroll’s reforms first-hand.
“What she has achieved within the QFES is absolutely incredible,” Slade says. “She’s got the place working as a team. I didn’t think that was possible. She wiped out all of the problems and has created a much healthier workplace.
“She’s a very effective leader. She surrounds herself with intelligent people who share her deeply held ideals about looking after the community. She works away in the background without making a big deal about it, but she has evolved into an incredible leader.
“Again, she has very strong standards in relation to the community. She believes, in the end, that the organisation and the community have to become one.”
Slade says Carroll, who wasn’t available to be interviewed by Insight, also has a reputation for taking care of her staff.
“She really looks after people in her organisation. She’s a fixer. She just works through things. And she’s a very, very good listener.
“She can sit in a meeting and not say much at all, and then at the end ask the most pertinent questions based on what has been discussed.
“I think the QPS is very, very lucky to have her.”
Former Queensland police officer and Fitzgerald Inquiry whistleblowerNigel Powell says he is happy the QPS finally has a female commissioner.
“The issue for her is if she can keep one foot inside the police department and one foot outside,” Powell says. “And to be able to see that the QPS needs cultural reform as well. That’s not going to be easy, given the connection between party politics and policing. She needs to see the place where she has worked most of her life with a fresh mind.
“Surrounding herself with people she can trust will be the most valuable thing she can do.”
Fitzgerald’s final report noted that by the 1980s, women constituted just 5.4 per cent of the police force. In 30 years, that figure has risen to 30 per cent.
In her recent podcast interview, Carroll emphasised that it was her duty to assist women in the police force – or in any organisation in which she might find herself – despite the critics.
“Don’t worry about the knockers,” she said. “Will they ever go away? I don’t think they will ever go away.
“Be true to yourself … you know, it hasn’t been an easy road, of course it’s been a tough road … I think you’ve got to accept that and do it for all the right reasons.
“I think I have a responsibility to encourage young women. I think there is the terminology to ‘pull them up’. It’s important that once you get to a position of leadership, you assist others.”
Given the nature of the position of police commissioner – it comes with power, enormous responsibility and constant media scrutiny – detractors will inevitably come out of the woodwork.
But right now, Carroll, who is married with two children, certainly has the support of former Queensland police officers who suffered under the old corrupt regime and saw first-hand the degradation of a noble organisation.
Many say they are grateful to have been able to witness the elevation of a woman to the top of the Queensland police.
“I’ll tell you what,” Jim Slade says, “for 2019, she is the person to bring the QPS forward and into the future.”
While the popularity and population of Innot Hot Springs may have faded over the decades, its most famous resident has probably been entrepreneur Charles Spranklin, proprietor of the Springs Hotel near the three bubbling waterholes on Nettle Creek who also built a cordial factory and shipped bottles of the restorative Innot water to Europe.
The most famous, until this week.
matthew.condon@news.com.au
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