Fitzgerald inquiry: Reform which followed separated it from dozens of prior inquiries

HOW has Queensland and its systems of accountability and checks on power and its abuse, fared almost 30 years since Tony Fitzgerald handed down his final report into corruption?

• Fitzgerald inquiry: Where it all began
• Fitzgerald inquiry: Where are they now?

THEY were the two best shows in town.

One was the phantasmagoria of the World Exposition 1988, held on the southern bank of the Brisbane River from April to October.

The other was the grinding, often sinister weekly soap opera that was the Fitzgerald inquiry into police and political corruption, which had been vivisecting much of Queensland life as we knew it and was playing out over in Court 29 of the District Court on the river’s north bank in
the CBD.

Expo 88, our coming of age, our introduction to the world, was opened with much fanfare on Saturday, April 30. Long-term premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen would not snip the ribbons. He had been punted by his party five months earlier.

The inquiry, however, had been making painful and shocking progress since its first public hearings on July 27 the year before.

Expo 88, our coming of age, our introduction to the world, was opened with much fanfare as the Fitzgerald inquiry rolled on.

That both events – they would prove watershed moments in Queensland’s history – should be happening simultaneously, divided only by a stretch of brown river water, appears with hindsight, to possess a delicious symbiosis.

On the south bank we were growing into the future just as we were, on the north bank, excising our dark past.

Expo would wind up on October 30 that year with a concert on the River Stage. It would feature a performance by The Seekers. They would sing The Carnival Is Over.

Yet the inquiry would continue for almost another year, ultimately holding 238 public sitting days, hosting 339 witnesses, tendering 2304 exhibits and amassing 21,504 transcript pages.

Police commissioner Terry Lewis and some National Party government ministers went to jail, along with some members of the criminal element.

The state’s longest serving premier had been unseated within its context.

People wait to purchase a copy of the Fitzgerald report at the Government Printing Office in Brisbane.

More importantly, Fitzgerald’s comprehensive final report delivered a series of significant recommendations that would, if implemented, quite literally steer the state in a direction that effectively required it to sever itself from the provincial, insular and endemically corrupt past that it had suffered under for decades. Just as Expo 88 coincidentally revealed in stark relief, it was time to move into the present.

The recipient of Fitzgerald’s historic, game-changing report, then premier Mike Ahern, recognised its colossal importance early, and had agreed to implement its recommendations “lock,
stock and barrel”, and he was right to do so.

But how has Queensland and its systems of accountability and checks on power and its abuse, fared almost 30 years to the day since Fitzgerald handed Ahern his leather-bound final report?

The legacy of the inquiry remains important and influential and its most important achievements are now largely taken for granted: the setting up of what we now know as the Crime and Corruption Commission; the Electoral and Administrative Reform Commission; oversight parliamentary committees; laws in relation to Freedom of Information; whistleblower acts and the like.

Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald hands his report to then premier Mike Ahern.

These instruments were anathema to what Queenslanders had been used to. But the influential – and perhaps equally enduring – flip side to their installation was the schism they created between the past and the present. This wasn’t just a line in the sand. It was an untraversable ravine.

It separated Fitzgerald’s reform from the dozens of prior inquiries that had failed to gain any traction before it, most notably the National Hotel inquiry into police misconduct in 1963-64. That inquiry had former corrupt police commissioner Frank Bischof and his bagmen in its sights but not only did it not lay a glove on institutionalised corruption, it would embolden crooked cops to finesse and master their dark arts, and they would go unchecked for another 23 years, or until Tony Fitzgerald came along.

Part of that, too (and perhaps with a little leg-up from Expo), was the gradual lifting of the seemingly ever-enduring national view that Queensland was a joke, a laughing stock, the Deep North, the redneck backwater of Australia. Through the professionalism of the inquiry we had taken a long, hard look at ourselves, and come through the other side and into the modern world, reborn.

The feeling was, certainly among expatriates that had fled Queensland during the worst and most excessive abuses of the Bjelke-Petersen regime, that it was now safe to come home.

Long-term premier Sir Joh-Bjelke-Petersen (pictured announcing his resignation) would not snip the Expo 88 ribbons. He had been punted by his party five months earlier. Photo:Ted Holliday

Yet, on the 20th anniversary of the finality of his own inquiry in 2009, Fitzgerald said: “Access can now be purchased, patronage is dispensed, mates and supporters are appointed and retired politicians exploit their connections to obtain success fees for deals between business and government.”

Five years later, he offered a submission regarding the Crime and Misconduct and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2014, arguing for permanent vigilance, especially in relation to the then LNP government’s “huge parliamentary majority”.

“Queensland uniquely lacks both constitutional protection for individual rights and a second house of parliament and, as history confirms, is particularly vulnerable to political excess.”

He alleged that the LNP had “antipathy towards the Inquiry reforms”, and described the Bill at hand as “a gross abuse of power”.

And just this week, one of the Fitzgerald inquiry’s senior counsels, Gary Crooke, expressed his “despair” over the Palaszczuk Government’s cash-for-access to ministers, despite the Government’s protestation that it had done much to reform that fraught area of political donations.

“It would be my single greatest disappointment that they are so bankrupt of their responsibilities,” Crooke reportedly said. “They know that it is wrong to do this fundraising by selling the trappings of government for the benefit of a political party.”

It is also true, as Crooke said, that the Palaszczuk Government, when in Opposition in the run up to
the 2015 election, had metaphorically signed up to what it called the “Fitzgerald Principles” and that through its elected term has repeatedly cited Fitzgerald and the need for constant vigilance.

But despite the continuing debate and periodic attacks on Fitzgerald himself every time he offers his views, his reforms have largely held fast over time. It was, and remains, epochal work.

It does, however, beg the question: Did we ask too much of Fitzgerald? Was such transformative reform possible, given the enormity of the generational corruption?

The proof is in the pudding. Fitzgerald’s legacy stands, and we’re all the better for it.