Jarrod Bleijie: From Elvis impersonator to Queensland Attorney-General

AS an Elvis impersonator in high school, the Attorney-General was no stranger to the public stage. Check out his childhood pictures as you’ve never seen him before.

HE does not so much take the stage, as they say. On this fine autumn morning, before a crowd of 665 schoolchildren, Jarrod Bleijie seemingly glides up the short flight of steps to the microphone.

Stages, and their attendant audiences, are most people’s idea of public evisceration. But not for Bleijie. The moment he hits the boards, a switch flicks on – he lights up, the taut, half-grin electric, the gait smooth, the hands and face highly animated. His voice is velvety, clear, with perfectly timed peaks and troughs. If a giant prize wheel and a spangly dressed female sidekick suddenly materialised on stage behind him, you wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

It is precisely 9.12am on a Friday in the aircraft hangar-sized hall of the Buddina State School (“Honour. Honesty. Pride.”), and the honoured guest speaker – Jarrod Pieter Bleijie, 32, state member for the seat of Kawana on the Sunshine Coast, Attorney-General, Minister for Justice, Elvis devotee, monarchist, old-time rock ’n’ roll dancer, one-time lay preacher, former teenage entrepreneur and father of three – takes the mic for a spin. If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of the surf across Pacific Boulevard filtering into the hall. At any other time you could happily nod off. But not with Bleijie – graduate of Caloundra Chorale and Theatre Company – putting on a show.

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“Thank you, and good morning, boys and girls,” he says. He receives the time-honoured response of well-mannered schoolchildren, the slow, at first uncertain but then semi-cohesive sing-song reply: “Goooood morning, Mr Bl… ”

And that’s where it all breaks down. The pronunciation of the surname. Bleijie. Bleijie. It’s Dutch, pronounced plain old “blay”, the vowels ironed out, the “j” mute. From the mouths of hundreds of children, the name comes out mangled, as comprehensible as a crowd trying to speak underwater with mouths full of marbles.

“I’ve been the local member for five years and no-one gets my name right,” says Bleijie, a line he has probably used many times before and, depending on his political fortunes, will repeat many times again. He is here to take part in the investiture of the grade six and seven school leaders. To say he is right at home, on a stage, behind a mic, surrounded by pupils and teachers, is an understatement. He owns the place. And the crowd.

“Hands up, boys and girls, if you want things to be different?” Hands go up. “Well, of course you do. Here’s a little test. Who can tell me a great leader in the world? Yell it out. Anyone? Martin Luther King. That’ll do. Tony Abbott. Anyone else?” Bleijie beautifully plays the crowd. “I’m really happy someone mentioned me!” he says. “Thank you for that … ”

Later, he will pose for photographs, be swamped by children, their parents flashing cameras and iPhones. There’s almost an urgency about getting a picture taken with the attorney-general, as if some of the secrets of his meteoric career trajectory might rub off on them; a need to be close to someone so young who has gone so far.

Just 14 years earlier, Bleijie himself was graduating from Caloundra State High School, 12km south via the Nicklin Way, so he is not far removed from this environment, and probably younger than many of the children’s parents. (Two of his ministerial staff went through high school with him.) The teachers love him, of course, just as teachers have adored him since he was a tawny-haired boy in primary school, also at Caloundra. A boy who put his hand up for everything. Volunteered for all. Served on more committees than he’d had hot breakfasts. In high school, he was considered virtually a member of the staff. Bleijie redefined the term “teacher’s pet”.

Jarrod Bleijie dressed as Elvis Presley for his high school’s 1996 talent quest, replete in wig, bushy fake sideburns, oversized sunglasses and white jumpsuit.

Today, he is easy, amiable, respectful, impeccably mannered and, aside from his two bodyguards – both in dark suits and dark shades and one wired for sound, a necessary accoutrement since the Newman Government late last year passed the harshest legislation against criminal motorcycle gangs in Australia, and possibly the world – completely approachable. They implore him to join them for morning tea in the foyer of the hall, which he does.

Quietly, surreptitiously, he glides over to the food table and, while engaging in conversation with some local mothers, he sneaks a snack. Not the cakes, the fresh fruit, the sandwiches, the cream biscuits, but a clutch of Cheezels. And then another, before vigorously removing the debris of cheese-flavoured crumbs from his fingers with a handkerchief. Not that long ago, he was young enough to have licked them clean.

But not now. He is the state’s first law man, responsible for legislation and judicial reform that has stunned the nation, and incited vehement criticism from Queenslanders who are old enough to remember an era when civil liberties were the plaything of government, and what happened to democracy when politicians played God.

So who is he, the boy wonder from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast? The BAG (Boy Attorney-General), as he is known in legal circles? The young man with immense responsibilities on his shoulders, and Cheezels on his breath?

* * *

IT TAKES SEVERAL DAYS AND MUCH RUMINATION within the office of the Honourable Jarrod Bleijie, MP, to secure an interview. “The boss is thinking about it,” emails his senior media adviser, Ashley McDermid. And later. “He’s still thinking about it … ” And: “ … he’s not in this game for the spotlight.”

The paucity of biographical information on Bleijie does, it seem, bear this out. While he may be a natural on the stage of public life, he has, for a senior minister, not proactively sought media attention, though since late last year – when a bikie brawl at Broadbeach on the Gold Coast triggered the formulation of the awkwardly named Vicious Lawless Association Disestablishment Act, the Tattoo Parlours Act and the Criminal Law (Criminal Organisations Disruption) Amendment Bill – it has come at him, unbidden, and in a rush.

He agrees to a sit-down and a cup of coffee at a shopping mall not far from the Buddina school, and following the investiture function he’s off, his press staff and minders and security personnel pulled in his wake. Bleijie strides, always in front, at a pace that may suggest the present is not satisfying enough, or that something more desirable – an objective, a solution, a grail – is before him and just out of reach. He is, and has always been, a man in a hurry. In the mall, he is warmly received by his constituents as he quick-steps to the Shingle Inn. He waves and shakes hands. He orders coffee for everyone. Checks his phone. Sits facing a stream of passing shoppers who will, interminably, catch his attention with their winks, their waves, their need to tell him he’s doing a great job. Bleijie will acknowledge them all.

Born in the farming district of Griffith, in south-western NSW, on January 25, 1982, Bleijie and his family then moved to Albury, on the NSW-Victorian border, five years later, following an entrepreneurial uncle – Lindsay Cooper – whose brainchild was the Ettamogah Pub, based on the larrikin artwork of illustrator Ken Maynard. The themed restaurant and pub was a success, and Cooper headed north to the Sunshine Coast not long after to construct another alongside the Bruce Highway at Palmview, which would become “Aussie World”. The Bleijies – Pieter and Christine, and their children Linden, Jarrod and Jessica – would again follow Uncle Cooper north.

When Bleijie, a qualified lawyer, was first elected to state parliament in 2009, he stressed in his maiden speech that he had come from humble roots. “I recall during the election campaign a regular assertion being made that by choosing the legal profession as a career, as I had, and being a practising lawyer I must have been born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” he said. “This assertion is wrong, and those close to me know that I had a very modest upbringing. My father was a fuel tank driver and my mother had one of the most important and difficult jobs in the whole world – being a full-time mum.”

Growing up in the Caloundra area, he had little engagement with the surf culture. (“I don’t swim in the salt water,” he says. “I have a fear of sharks.”) Instead, he immersed himself in school life.

“I actually met him in Year 7,” says former Caloundra State High School teacher-librarian Alison Cassells. “I always did the local primary feeder schools and did a big talk about library induction, and he came up to me at that talk and volunteered his services right away as a library helper from the moment he arrived in Year 8.

“He’d been a library assistant at the primary school. As soon as I gave my talk, he sort of bailed me up and said, you know, I want to work in the library next year. I’ll see you on day one. A genuine heart for service; that was his thing. I think he was just a lovely boy. Very courteous and respectful to begin with, beautifully brought up, but just his enthusiasm and his sense of responsibility and his maturity. This wish to do anything, you know?”

Bleijie was as good as his word. When he arrived at high school in 1996, he sought out Cassells in the library and worked for her there, every lunch hour, for the next four years. He featured twice in the 1996 annual school magazine – not for sporting or academic prowess, but dressed as Elvis Presley in that year’s talent quest, replete in wig, bushy fake sideburns, oversized sunglasses and white jumpsuit.

“It’s no secret I’m a fan of Elvis,” says Bleijie, whose favourite song is Blue Suede Shoes. (Indeed, as an MP he has performed his impersonation, in full regalia, at an LNP function, and his electorate office contains smatterings of Elvis memorabilia.) The following year’s school magazine would also feature Bleijie as Elvis, and as a Mexican in a sombrero. And the next as 007 spoof movie character Austin Powers, all frills and nerdy glasses.

Caloundra High principal at the time, Kerry Emery, recalls the colourful young Bleijie. “I can certainly remember him coming in one day with the Elvis hairdo and the long sideburns and the tight white jeans I think it was, and he came on and did this number [at school assembly],” says Emery. “He possibly was doing something to highlight the forthcoming talent quest. He was always keen to be dressing up. Maybe he’s the Alexander Downer of the Queensland politicians set. I’ve never seen him in fishnet stockings, though.”

Bleijie’s penchant for theatrical attire extended beyond the school fence. “He came to all the parties and that, but he had to be the centre of attention,” says a former friend. “Drag queen shows. He’d get up and do karaoke and dress up in random costumes. He was sort of … not the class clown, because he wasn’t funny, but he had to be noticed. He had to be, like, in charge. If he wasn’t in charge directing things, he had to be like … the centre of attention. He could sell ice to Eskimos.”

She remembers a time when Bleijie arrived at a social event as Dr Frank N. Furter, the transsexual from Transylvania and central character of the lewd Rocky Horror Show. Photos were taken. “He always used to … even when he was in drag, he’d have his chest bared out,” a friend says. Bleijie, with a laugh, acknowledges his youthful passion for dress-ups, but elaborates no further. “I’m not even going there,” he says. “ … Don’t print that [picture], please.”

His passion for theatrics, though, would form just one part of the evolution of an unusual individual, defined by teachers as “different”. Bleijie, in his early teens, would be an ardent monarchist, become obsessed with politics despite being raised in a non-political household, would worship Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, the Liberal Party’s Robert Menzies, then John Howard, and he became an expert in old-style rock’n’roll dancing – swing, jive, the jitterbug, bop. Bleijie, still a teenager at the dawn of the 21st century, seemed locked in the 1950s.

And looking at him – the short back and sides with a small sprig of hair upright at the rear of his head, the neat, conservative suit, the handkerchief in the jacket pocket, he just might have been born out of time, into the wrong era. “You’re going to call me old-fashioned, aren’t you?” he says. “How is a 32-year-old such an old-fashioned person?”

What comes to mind just as readily is former prime minister Paul Keating’s description in 2007 of Tony Abbott: “He’s what I call a young fogey. Howard was the old fogey, he’s the young fogey.”

* * *

BLEIJIE’S POLITICAL AMBITIONS CAME INTO sharp focus shortly after entering high school. When Howard was elected prime minister in 1996, he joined the Young Liberals at the age of 14.

Principal Emery knew precisely where Bleijie was heading. “He was focused and, you know, you could tell that he was going to have political aspirations, and even though he didn’t espouse the values of a right-wing politician you could tell, once he got himself into employment or a qualification, that he was bound to look towards politics in the future.” Alison Cassells agrees: “He was a member of the Young Liberals, then he went, even when he would have been in senior school, to the Liberals’ state conference. He was actively involved from then.” Indeed, it is difficult to comprehend how he got any schoolwork done given his relentlessly busy life in other forums – Rotary and Lions clubs, community committees, political activities and part-time work. Former Caloundra High deputy principal Lyn Gahan says: “I don’t remember him as being brilliant, because he was obviously involved with so many extracurricular activities too, but he was highly academic, just not one of the greatest. He wasn’t dux, or anything else like that. He was so busy outside of school that school wasn’t the be-all and end-all.”

Emery concurs: “Jarrod was never the dux of the school or anything like that [though he would become school captain]. He was not the smartest kid in the school, but he was always a really good kid and stood out in many other ways as well.”

During his later high school years, too, Bleijie supported himself with jobs at both the camping store his parents then owned on Caloundra Road and at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Fellow KFC employees describe him as a “good worker” and a team leader. “He always used to say he’d be prime minister one day, and we all said, Lord help us,” says one co-worker. Another adds: “Even when he was at KFC he had business cards, handing them out to people. ‘I’m Jarrod Bleijie’. It sounded professional but then it didn’t really make any sense. What’s the point of this card?”

“He was always keen to be dressing up,” Caloundra High principal at the time, Kerry Emery, recalls of the young Bleijie.

The KFC family also began hearing a lot from Bleijie about the local federal Member for Fisher, Peter Slipper. “He was very close to Slipper,” the worker says. “He used to campaign for him. He wanted everyone at KFC to go down and campaign when the election was on, to wear shirts and hold up banners.” Bleijie says as a member of the Young Liberals on the Sunshine Coast he was expected to support local elected members. “No, he wasn’t a mentor,” Bleijie says of Slipper. “It was a period of time where … I helped on all elections … and I was chairman of the Young Liberals, so I had a leadership role.”

In the lead-up to the 2001 federal election, however, his involvement with Slipper would provide a sharp lesson in the machinations of political life. Bleijie was helping Slipper with his campaign and was enthusiastically enlisting support for the man who had held the seat as a Liberal since 1993. Using all the contacts he had, Bleijie phoned the Caloundra KFC and asked a co-worker, Anita Rew, then 18, if she would be interested in featuring on a promotional newsletter for Slipper, endorsing the candidate. He also asked if they could use her signature on the leaflet. Rew allegedly refused. Yet the pamphlet appeared not long after in letterboxes throughout the electorate. She and her father lodged a formal complaint with Maroochydore Police.

The Courier-Mail reported on November 10, 2001: “Miss Rew said yesterday she neither wrote nor signed the letters and accused a friend, Liberal Party member Jarrod Bleijie, of misusing her signature.”

It took Sunshine Coast detectives almost a year to investigate the matter. Bleijie, through a lawyer, provided a statement. Police ultimately dismissed the complaint. “That was a disappointing thing that happened there … there was an allegation made, and when people looked at it they saw it for what it was. It was an allegation,” says Bleijie. “I think it was a complete set-up. I provided a statement. I was never interviewed by police or the electoral commission, and it was dead.”

Slipper would go on to become one of the most controversial recent figures in federal parliament. “It’s no secret amongst my colleagues and also my friends in the LNP that although I worked to assist Peter early on, as a party member that was a job I had to do,” Bleijie reflects. “It quickly broke down and, as I said, I spent ten years trying to get rid of him.”

Friend and federal Member for Longman – that other young gun, Wyatt Roy – says he understood Bleijie and Slipper had a falling out “early on”.

“I think it was while he [Bleijie] was president of the Young Libs that there was a falling out with Slipper, which is probably testament to Jarrod’s judgement of character,” Roy adds.

Bleijie, predictably, would slog through a law degree before entering politics proper. He had a stab at a by-election for a division of the then Caloundra City Council at just 19 years of age, and while he didn’t win, polled creditably. He studied law externally through Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. Sources say his performance was “nothing stellar” and that he did not secure a degree with honours. Bleijie was then articled to Sunshine Coast law firm J.J. Riba, under principal Joe Riba.

“He said all the right things; he had a way with people, he had a way of winning your confidence,” says Riba. “He was extremely ambitious, right from the get-go. I’ve never met anyone as ambitious as he was at his age. He wanted to work and he wanted to learn and he wanted to get somewhere. I like those things. There were times when I thought, he’s more ambitious than I am, and that kind of feels wrong. You have to admire it at the same time, and keep your own ego in check when someone is clearly going places like he was.”

While Bleijie’s work mostly dealt with conveyancing, he was eager to know all points of the business, which included a large franchising practice. “He wanted exposure to everything, so he had bits and pieces of a few different things, as much as you could give to an articled clerk,” Riba remembers. “He stayed back. He always stayed back. Always. He was a very, very hard worker.

“I don’t want to embarrass him by saying the exact things he said [regarding his future ambitions], but he had set his sights on greatness. He did not see any limit at all for himself.”

Bleijie’s tenure at the firm was relatively short-lived. He was picked up by another Sunshine Coast law office, Sajen Legal. “I was an articled clerk there [at J. J. Riba] and it was … the boss and I were speaking at the time, there was probably no room for growth, it was a difficult time in the property market as well, it was going back to 2004, I think it was, so that was simply a transfer of my articles to Sajen Legal.”

Joe Riba has a different rendition of events. “I was anticipating a downturn that didn’t really happen,” he says. “Although I was very impressed with [Bleijie], there were other people in the firm who were just more productive because of the skills they had, so I had to let him go.

“He wasn’t very happy about it. He was surprised that I would choose him. He was very surprised and he was upset about it, I know he was, and there was nothing I was ever going to say that would change that, so I let it go. He was not a career lawyer. I knew he would be going into politics and I didn’t think he was someone that would come on, become a partner and work with me.”

Riba’s prediction proved accurate. In 2009 Bleijie was elected as the state Member for Kawana. Just three years later he would be anointed attorney-general, the titular legal figurehead in Queensland. In his maiden speech to parliament he would acknowledge Sajen Legal for providing “many of the tools that will hold me in good stead in this House”.

He would fail to mention J.J. Riba and staff.

* * *

ONE OF THE MORE PECULIAR ASPECTS OF preparing this story has been the sheer number of people who have stressed they not be named for fear of repercussions. One former friend of Bleijie’s says: “As soon as I mention Bleijie, nobody wants to talk about him; I don’t know whether it scares them because of who he is or … I don’t know.” Another interview subject, before providing background information, presents a contract to be signed stating their name will in no way be used in connection with a magazine story on Bleijie. Yet another says she cannot access information on Bleijie’s past on her work computer in case higher authorities trace the request.

In person, though, Bleijie is the opposite of threatening and surprisingly candid in his answers. On several occasions during our interview, he is congratulated by passers-by for his tough stance on crime. One, Neil of Buderim, declares the attorney-general is building a safer Queensland. “Congratulations to this fella,” says Neil, “for doing what will always be unpopular.”

Bleijie has finished his coffee when we get around to talking about his controversial “bikie” legislation, which has invited comparison to the darkest transgressions of the authoritarian National Party regime under former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen during the 1970s and ’80s. Bleijie was five years old when the historic Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption was called, exposing the sins of crooked police and a government drunk with power. He was seven when Fitzgerald handed down his report.

In 2009, Bleijie in opposition decried the Bligh government’s Criminal Organisation Bill – an attempt to respond to the threat from outlaw motorcycle gangs. Bleijie stood in the House on November 25, 2009, and slammed the government of the day, labelling the legislation “draconian”.

Bleijie’s penchant for theatrical attire extended beyond the school fence. “He came to all the parties and that, but he had to be the centre of attention,” says a former friend.

“The bill is a knee-jerk reaction … a campaign to appear to be tough on organised crime,” he said. “But, in effect, this bill removes the fundamental rights and freedoms of the people of Queensland.” It is precisely the sort of criticism Bleijie and his “bikie” laws are now attracting. Yet Bleijie insists the proposed 2009 laws were “different”, and that the incident at Broadbeach last year that triggered the new legislation required an urgent response.

He says, without pause: “I recall he [Premier Newman] was on a trade mission to Japan and we discussed it, on the phone, on the Saturday morning after the incident. In terms of law reform, this is just three pieces of 45 pieces of legislation I have introduced in the House, and we had already introduced the toughest laws in the country in relation to sex offenders, the two-strike policy, toughening sentences and non-parole periods for murder. So we had already put in some pretty tough laws, but this one we decided there was a genuine concern [with] what was increasing at the Gold Coast with respect to criminal gangs, and I think that in terms of where the gangs saw themselves, I think the people that were advocating for these types of laws and the government for introducing these laws were vindicated to the extent I remember a front-page article that said at the Gold Coast – and it was from a criminal gang member, one of the gang members, you know, we own this town, that was a quote. Then the police said the next day, no, we own the town, the community owns the town, and that’s what it was about. Things we were doing weren’t working.”

He is adamant that criminal motorcycle gangs are a threat to good law-abiding citizens. He waves toward a distant space in the shopping mall and says: “ … there could be someone sitting in this coffee shop, there could be ten Bandidos sitting over there, and you know they’re Bandidos because they’ve got the tatts to say it, they’ve got the leather jackets, and the whole point of that is people look at them and know they are the type of person that you don’t mess with, as opposed to a Ulysses or the Vietnam Vets [both considered benign motorcyclist associations] who don’t participate in the criminal activities … ”

I ask him if he or his family – wife Sally, who works from home in a sewing business (the couple met at a rock’n’roll dance class and are longtime parishioners of Kawana Waters Uniting Church), and children Taylor, 10, Madison, 8, and Jasper, nearly 4 – have ever, in the normal course of life, been in the vicinity of a badged motorcycle gang and felt intimidated. “Umm … I wouldn’t say I had direct experience in terms of, er, invasion or anything like that,” says Bleijie. “But they’re trafficking drugs to our kids, they’re supplying drugs, they’re committing armed robberies, crimes, they’re running this operation, this criminal operation, and yet the only public face we see is the ‘teddy bear picnics’ that they do. It was all a cover, and we had to blow the cover.”

He says the much-criticised urgency of pushing the legislation through parliament was to catch gangs “off guard”. The Newman Government’s initiative drew the ire of Tony Fitzgerald himself, and his then senior counsel assisting at the epochal inquiry, Gary Crooke. They wrote that organised crime would not be eradicated by “local political vigilantes enacting extreme laws which ignore evidence, experience and expertise”, and that endorsed “mindless fundamentalism”.

Australian Council for Civil Liberties president, lawyer Terry O’Gorman, says the legislation underlines that Bleijie is not qualified to be attorney-general. He adds: “I think the primary problem with Bleijie is that he is caught up in the government’s huge majority, he has an arrogance that is born from youth, inexperience and that huge majority. You can be young and smart, and I’ve seen some people of his age young and smart, [but] he’s young and arrogant.”

O’Gorman believes the bikie laws are betraying a hubris more sinister than anything seen in the days of Sir Joh. Crooke concurs: “It’s just like the Fitzgerald Inquiry which had to be brought in as a big gun to try to sort out a terrible mess. The ABC said to me, do you see anything as a parallel with the Fitzgerald Inquiry? I said, yes – the abuse of executive power. And that’s what it is. It’s just heedless of any constraint.”

Bleijie is unfazed. He says that despite personal threats to himself and his family, the legislation is already working. But, at 32, is he wise enough to carry the responsibility of Attorney-General and Minister for Justice? Does he have the necessary authority and gravitas that only time can bring to the fore? He fires straight back: “Sir Samuel Griffith was a younger attorney than I was. He beat me by, I think, six months. [He’s close. Griffith was appointed Queensland attorney-general on August 3, 1874, aged 29 years and two months. Bleijie was 30 years and three months when given the job. Griffith beat him by 11 months.] So, ah, one of our great legal thinkers of the day drafted the criminal code, elements of the Constitution and he was A-G at … younger than I was.

“We’ve got history in Queensland. But age to me has never been a barrier to do anything; my view of the world is, I wake up in the morning and just want to get on with the job.”

At the end of the interview, Bleijie rises and the entourage follows. But not before a man slips me a note. It’s from Neil of Buderim. “On second thoughts,” he has written in brown crayon, “do not publish my surname. Given natur [sic] of issue, this would put my family safety at risk.”