In reality, such a quixotic project was nothing new from premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. His leadership was littered with them. And he famously measured the strength of the Queensland economy by counting the construction cranes hovering over the Brisbane CBD. A downtown building that was within reach of the famous Sears Tower in Chicago, which stood at 442 metres and 108 storeys. This was Queensland. Reach for the sky.

The report continued: “The developer is Mr John Minuzzo whose Mainsel Investments group plans to complete the project within four years. The complex will cover Turbot St land owned by the Railways Department as well as the Capital (formerly Canberra) Hotel, at the corner of Ann and Edward streets, which will be demolished.”

Sir Joh said excitedly, “It’s a huge one.” He added the project would incorporate a major hotel and office space. The premier also stated that the Railways Department would be a tenant. While Bjelke-Petersen was not ordinarily recognised as the sentimental type, he must have felt at least some sort of distant twinge at the prospect of the demolition of the old Canberra Temperance Hotel that sat on the site of the prospective tower. For it was there, in Brisbane’s famous “dry” hotel, that he and his new bride, Florence, had their wedding reception in 1952.

Fifty-seven years after the original hotel’s opening, there seemed to be some confusion in terms of the premier’s announcement that the site was set to house one of the planet’s top ten tall buildings. The day after Bjelke-Petersen’s news made the front page, Brisbane’s Telegraph newspaper reported some bewilderment over this ambitious project. Minuzzo, then 46, declared the Capital would be demolished.

At the hotel, however, functions manager Robert Glover said the building was in the middle of $4 million worth of renovations, and the demise of the establishment was news to him. The Capital was owned by developer Peter O’Brien and his wife, Gael. Glover said management knew nothing of the plans for the hotel to be sold and razed. He said it seemed “strange” that the O’Briens, who had owned the hotel for only eight months, would spend millions on a facelift if it was to be sold. Minuzzo stood firm: “Mr O’Brien gave me an option to buy the hotel and may not have told his employees. The state government has seen the option, it was attached to our application.” Shop tenants in the building were similarly left scratching their heads.

Still, developers and the government said the new Central Place would go full steam ahead, and any criticism of it was just “sour grapes” from rival developers. In fact, Minuzzo’s name had been bandied about in parliament a year earlier in relation to a controversial development on the Gold Coast that had embroiled local government minister Russ Hinze. During a debate over amendments to the Local Government Act in September 1985 — the government wanted to cut red tape for the approval of development projects — Minuzzo had featured prominently.

Opposition leader Nev Warburton focused on projects on the Gold Coast being developed by a

group known as Oasis Holdings. The company was owned by developers Bruno and Rino Grollo. The projects included a $50 million hotel in Surfers Paradise and a $35 million shopping complex in West Burleigh. Warburton said the project manager for both developments was Minuzzo.

“On my understanding,” Warburton told parliament, “John Minuzzo previously went by the name of Enzo Minuzzo. To say the least, he has had some difficult times before Melbourne courts in recent years. On February 23, 1982, The Age reported that eight men appeared in the Melbourne Magistrate’s Court on charges of conspiracy to defraud operators in the sale of land [between 1973 and 1977] … [One of them was] Enzo Minuzzo, developer and real estate agent of Toorak.

“In [another Melbourne newspaper] the Herald of October 22, 1982, under the headline ‘Fraud Charge Six for Trial’, it was reported that six businessmen were committed for trial on bribery and fraud charges. Again Enzo Minuzzo pleaded not guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud and one count of conspiracy to breach the Criminal Act.

“The saga goes on. In The Age of May 12, 1983, it was reported that three men were convicted of conspiracy to defraud the T & G Society of $568,000 in a land transaction … and were jailed for two years … the magistrate said that the three men were motivated by naked greed when they went into the scheme. One of those men was Enzo Minuzzo … to be fair to Mr Minuzzo, I must state that the Full Court of Criminal Appeal later quashed the conviction on the grounds that the trial judge had misdirected the jury on a point of law and failed to give the jury an adequate summary of the facts. I do not think I need to say a great deal more about the sort of

people who are being attracted to the state of Queensland by the National Party government.” Do you hate developers?” Hinze had earlier interjected.

Now in 1986, Warburton had another crack at the government in parliament over the building development and the developers behind it. Bjelke-Petersen bit back: “When will the leader of the opposition come up with something positive and do something constructive? He is always down in the gutter … it is quite a job to keep people like the leader of the opposition out of the gutter. The people he has referred to have come up to Queensland from Melbourne and are investing many hundreds of millions of dollars in this state. They are doing something constructive and very positive.”

Brisbane lord mayor Sallyanne Atkinson was troubled by a number of aspects of the project. The premier’s almost fanatical insistence that the building go ahead was one of the first instances of the state government usurping a role traditionally performed by the council.

“How things were in the ’80s was that the state government ran the state and Brisbane City Council ran Brisbane,” says Atkinson. “There were no cabinet ministers in Brisbane. They were all out in the country. It was total bliss. “I went off and dealt with Russ Hinze, who did call me ‘girlie’ and ‘pet’. I put up with that because after the initial hiccups … I got on with Russ. It was a good working relationship. Until then, I regarded the Brisbane City Council as the planning authority. It was outrageous. I was outraged that the state government would ride roughshod over us. There was a matter of principle involved.”

The issue soured her relationship with Bjelke-Petersen. “It was sometime around that time where I was at a dinner at Lennons [Hotel] and I was at a table with [co-ordinator general Sir] Syd Schubert and a couple of senior people, and Joh started attacking me about my stand on the world’s tallest building,” Atkinson remembers. “I’d sort of never seen that side of him before. We must have been at the top table, and then he got up and left. I remember turning to Syd Schubert and saying, ‘You should have protected me on that’. It was quite out of character for Joh, who had always acted like the nice old country gentleman. It was out of character for Joh to be really nasty.”

Atkinson also encountered developer Minuzzo in her office in City Hall. “He was like a character out of a movie. I can remember him coming into my office and virtually throwing himself on the floor and beating his little fists, saying, ‘I want this’,” she says. “He couldn’t have it. You don’t get everything you want in this life.”

A YEAR AFTER THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE ambitious project, progress stalled. Tenants in the Capital Hotel refused to yield. One of them, chiropractor Dr David Reason, had launched several actions in the Queensland Supreme Court against Minuzzo’s company, Mainsel Investments. The case was heard before Mr Justice Dowsett. Minuzzo, it turned out, had gone overseas on business despite the court hearings. “I really think Mr Minuzzo should make some attempts to come back,” Justice Dowsett told the court. “We will try, your honour,” said Minuzzo’s lawyer.

As the case dragged on, Justice Dowsett began to lose patience. Minuzzo’s continued non-attendance became an issue. The judge described the property developer’s actions as “a great discourtesy to the court”. Dowsett fined Mainsel Investments $125,000 for failing to comply with various undertakings in relation to the site for the building project, and ordered that the company be restrained from further demolition of the Capital that might affect the running of Reason’s business until his lease expired at the end of October.

“The defendant [Mainsel] acted in a highhanded and irresponsible way which bespoke a complete disregard of the court, the undertaking given to the court and Mr Reason’s rights,” said Justice Dowsett. When Minuzzo finally returned from overseas and faced the court, his legal counsel apologised to the court. Justice Dowsett said he would have jailed Minuzzo in the matter of contempt if he had not received that apology, and gave him a 14-day suspended jail sentence.

The project was still alive. And it was confirmed not long after the court matter that a Korean company, Youchang Constructions, was in the final stages of negotiating finance for the project. Minuzzo told the press that excavations for the tower would soon commence. In August, the project was officially launched with plans now for a 445m building, 2m taller than the Sears Tower. It would be the tallest in the world.

Through 1987, after the establishment and early hearings of the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption, Bjelke-Petersen’s leadership was hanging by a thread and the National Party’s reputation was in tatters. Still, he vigorously pushed for the building project against all advice, the indifference of his parliamentary colleagues and the opinions of naysayers. Some backbenchers said they hoped to attach so many conditions to the building that it would never get off the ground. Bjelke-Petersen, however, stood firm, and told parliament the project could not be stopped because $25 million had already been committed to it. “The government would be up for very heavy damages if you even attempted to stop it,” the premier warned. “In other words, it can’t be stopped. It has started. It will proceed.”

He said there was “no alternative”. It was Bjelke-Petersen at his most arrogant and bullish, and it enraged his backbenchers. The development had not even been approved by Brisbane City Council. It was subject to a Special act of Parliament that had yet to be formally tabled. But despite Bjelke-Petersen’s attempts to rush the legislation through, the backbenchers prevailed. The Courier-Mail reported: “Their series of meetings this week ended with yesterday’s decision that legislation approving projects should not be introduced until next year. The party’s stalling

tactics angered Sir Joh. His spokesman said a ‘great bucket of emotional antagonism’ to the project had been allowed to ‘permeate the party room’.

Backbenchers had asked Sir Joh questions with ‘absolutely scurrilous’ implications, he said. Having stood up to Sir Joh, the MPs now want to oversee the course agreed to yesterday and to ensure the executive arm of government does not interfere. The backbenchers were annoyed after Sir Joh’s office announced yesterday that a special Cabinet meeting had given the green light to the Minuzzo building.”

What exactly were the “absolutely scurrilous implications”? What the public didn’t know was that during the fiery party meeting over the Central Place project, backbencher and National Party member for Springwood, Huan Fraser, stood and confronted the premier. According to a parliamentary colleague, Fraser was a canny businessman and had made good money building spec homes for the Taiwanese community in the Logan area. “They liked white bricks, tiled rooves, gold taps. He built to their liking,” a colleague remembered.

One day Fraser was approached by a Korean business contact who wanted to discuss the world’s tallest building project in the city. “You back the old guy [Bjelke-Petersen] on this,” he told Fraser. “It’s a bloody good payout for him if it [the Central Place project] gets through. The old bloke’s got nothing.”

Fraser, a lifelong National Party member, was incensed. At the partyroom meeting, according to a senior government source who was present that day, Fraser ripped into the premier. “You know, he thought Joh was crooked and he wouldn’t cop it,” the source says. “He told me, ‘This is not right. This is corruption.’ He got up in the partyroom meeting and did it. He said, ‘I know there is a bloody big pay-off to you coming as a result of this. You’re a corrupt old bastard and I’m not going to cop it’.”

Fraser didn’t present any back-up evidence. There was mention that the Korean developers of the project had a nest egg worth more than $20 million in a foreign bank account waiting for Bjelke-Petersen if the Central Place project was passed through Cabinet. In addition, according to the memoir of then Cabinet minister Mike Ahern — Lock, Stock and Barrel, by Paul Reynolds — Fraser had also seen three letters, two from February 1986 and one dated March 1987, that appeared to reveal Bjelke-Petersen had committed to leasing 21 floors of Central Place for the public service. They also showed that developer Minuzzo would be granted $5 million to outfit the floors. Were these arrangements correct, Fraser asked the premier? “Bjelke-Petersen tersely replied that Fraser did not know what he was talking about and moved to close the meeting,” Ahern’s memoir said. “Fraser’s response was that, if he did not obtain an answer, he would leave the meeting and ‘ask the question outside’. All in the room knew that Tony Koch [then state roundsman for The Courier-Mail] was waiting outside the room.”

A senior government member present at the meeting says everyone was gobsmacked, “including Joh”. “The whole room … you could cut the air,” he says. “Joh never said another word. Russ Hinze got up and said, ‘Mr Premier, I’ll take over now if you don’t mind.’ Joh went out and we waited until he caught the lift; we were listening, and when he did there was silence. I didn’t know what to do. Hinze said, ‘Why don’t we all go and have a cup of tea?’ And that’s what we did.”

Later, deputy premier and police minister Bill Gunn suggested Fraser get hold of the actual letters before the meeting reconvened. “Whether Gunn actually obtained them or read them, or was simply made aware of their contents, is unclear, but he verified Fraser’s story and told Fraser that this ‘would soon blow over’,” Ahern’s book said.

The source says everyone realised the ramifications of what had been said. “Joh had to have the strong support of the Executive Council [members] who would proclaim the special legislation for the building project,” he says. “Joh had a plan to get his proposal through Cabinet and into Executive Council to proclaim it as a special project under the Coordinator-General’s Act. The sum mentioned was over $20 million. I’ve got a very clear recall of that particular situation. Joh never went back to another meeting of the party. The place was in turmoil. He made a desperate attempt to get it through because there was a payment. He was putting to the party room a corrupt deal and involving all of us.”

On November 13, deputy opposition leader Tom Burns asked the premier and treasurer, Bjelke-Petersen, a question without notice. It was related to the “continuing saga of the world’s tallest building and the twice-daily meetings that have been held to resolve the differences between the premier and his party members on this issue”. Burns added: “I refer also to the latest edition of Australian Business [magazine], which claims that Minuzzo’s financial partner in the Central

Place development, Youchang, is a very shadowy company about which little is known. I ask: will he explain to the House whether Youchang is a Korean or Singaporean-registered company, as there is considerable doubt about this? Will he explain why Youchang’s Australian representative knows nothing about the financing arrangements for Minuzzo’s Central Place?”

“The government is dealing with that question at this very moment,” the premier said. “What about Youchang? You are not dealing with that, are you?” asked Burns. “The government is dealing with the whole problem in relation to that particular project,” Bjelke-Petersen responded. “A meeting was held this morning and another will be held at lunchtime. If the honourable member wishes, he can come along, or I will tell him about it afterwards.”

Parliament adjourned, and within hours the premier launched his plan to sack five “disloyal” ministers, including Gunn, Ahern, Brian Austin, Peter McKechnie and Geoff Muntz. Was Bjelke-Petersen trying to head off any immediate challenge to his leadership? Or was the removal of the ministers related in any way to the rejection of the world’s tallest building project, and a possible fast-track method to once again expedite it?

The senior government source says: “The sackings were all related to that situation. [Bjelke-Petersen] had to reshape the Cabinet to get that particular thing through. If he didn’t, the government was not likely to accept the Executive Council minute. It was a bombshell. Everyone knew. It was a matter of high criminality.” According to Ahern’s memoir: “… [Joh] needed Cabinet colleagues who would not make trouble for him over the issue. This, Ahern suggested, was the reason Bjelke-Petersen then went to the governor. If Ahern is correct, this explains why Bjelke-Petersen, without warning, commenced the process of the unnecessary and hitherto inexplicable Cabinet reshuffle which was to bring him undone.”

Fraser told Lock, Stock and Barrel author Reynolds: “I had just given Mike the ammunition.” (Fraser died in 2010, but his family confirmed the rendition of events in Reynolds’ book.) Former attorney-general Paul Clauson says he doesn’t remember the Fraser incident, but the building project did concern many people inside and outside of government. “ … the project caused a lot of dissension with the troops at the time,” he says. “Joh was pulling it on with [Brisbane lord mayor] Sallyanne [Atkinson] and we members in the Brisbane and near-Brisbane seats were very unhappy about the idea of pushing against the Brisbane Town Plan with a

ministerial override, as I seem to recall. It wasn’t so much the concept as the way it was being promoted and potentially executed that was the concern.” On Sunday, November 22, transport minister and former police officer, Don “Shady” Lane, said he received a phone call from a senior staffer for the premier “advising me that Joh intended to sack several of his ministers, including Ahern”.

Lane was straight on the phone to Ahern.

THE NEXT MORNING, CABINET MET AS USUAL at 10am. There was no mention of any sackings. After the meeting, Bjelke-Petersen then headed from George St to Government House in inner-west Paddington and informed governor Sir Wally Campbell that he was set on forming a new administration. Five serving ministers would be absent from the revised make-up.

Campbell recommended he request each minister to resign their commission. Each was summoned to the premier’s office after 10am the following day. All refused to resign. According to Lane’s memoir, Austin told the premier he could “get f. ked”. Austin, the member for Wavell, was on his way from Buderim, in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, to Brisbane that morning when he got a call at about 6.30. “I was told Joh was going to sack me,” Austin says. “That was the first I’d heard of it. Joh hadn’t even called me. He told me I was being sacked because of my closeness to [Queensland National Party president Sir Robert] Sparkes. I think he said he was putting together a Cabinet he could work with.”

Lane beseeched the premier in Austin’s defence. Both Lane and Austin had defected from the Liberal Party to the National Party in the 1983 split and had made a considerable “sacrifice” for Bjelke-Petersen. “Joh responded with the statement that some ministers, including Brian [Austin], had lined up with Sparkes against him and that if I didn’t watch out he would sack me too,” Lane recalled. Ahern was also called into Bjelke-Petersen’s office. “Mike, I want your resignation,” the premier said.

“What’s the reason?” Ahern asked.

“I don’t have to give you a reason.”

“I want one if you want my resignation,” Ahern said.

“No.”

“If you sack me, keep an eye on the television,” Ahern responded. “In 15 minutes I’m going to go down and hold a press conference, and I’m going to challenge you.” Ahern told him that if he got the sack, the National Party would not be happy. “I am the National Party,” Bjelke-Petersen replied.

Later that day, the premier went back to Government House and told Campbell he now only had three ministers he wanted removed — Ahern, Austin and McKechnie. The press said Bjelke-Petersen had “signed his own political death warrant”. “He has lost the confidence of National Party people and the business community,” commented Peter Morley of The Courier-Mail. “The goodwill he had built up over 20 years has been replaced by a clamour for his removal.”

Ahern announced his intention to contest the leadership of the party. He intimated the mass sackings were related to the ongoing Fitzgerald Inquiry. While Bjelke-Petersen had changed his mind about sacking police minister Gunn, the premier had offered that Gunn change his portfolio. Gunn refused. Ahern wanted to prevent the inquiry being prematurely closed down.

Bjelke-Petersen, however, had no intention of stepping down. “Why should I resign?” he said. “Why should I go it alone? I am elected. I have been elected as premier. I have done a very, very good job.”

In the meantime, gossip around parliament was that late-night meetings were being held in Bjelke-Petersen’s suite at Parliament House. Some were going to 2am.

“The building was abuzz with it,” says Ahern. “The kitchen had to stay open to bring them toasted sandwiches. My driver said there was something going on. He said [National Party heavyweight] Sir Edward Lyons, [suspended police commissioner] Terry Lewis and [Bjelke-Petersen’s pilot] Beryl Young were up there with Joh.”

On Thursday, November 26, a parliamentary party meeting was held at 10am. The

premier was dispatched as leader of the party and Ahern was installed as new leader over Gunn and Hinze. Bjelke-Petersen only got eight votes. Bjelke-Petersen later recalled: “By the end of the week it was obvious to me that the end had come but I stayed on for a few more days. Each day Ahern would say he was about to become premier, but I kept sitting there in the chair, like a kind of ghost, haunting him.”

Bjelke-Petersen continued to taunt, refusing to resign his commissions as premier and executive council member. He said he wanted to discuss his future with his family on the weekend before making any decisions on announcing his retirement. He proceeded to barricade himself in his office in the Executive Building in George St. It was as if the overwhelming decision by National Party politicians to allow Ahern to take over the premiership hadn’t happened.

On the night of Friday, November 27, Hinze’s press secretary, Russell Grenning, was present outside the premier’s locked office door with Hinze. “It was bizarre, and Russ went to the door and banged on it,” Grenning recalled. “Joh wouldn’t open the door and Russ was bending down, talking to him through the keyhole with tears running down his face, saying, ‘Joh, come out mate, it’s all over’.”At one point, it was later revealed, Bjelke-Petersen telephoned Buckingham

Palace in London and sought the intervention of the Queen. It didn’t happen, and Sir Joh had no cards left to play.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF DECEMBER 1, 1987, Bjelke-Petersen visited Government House in Paddington for the last time and submitted his resignation. He had been Premier of Queensland for a little over 19 years. Now he was gone.

“The National Party of today is not the party I took to the election last year,” Sir Joh said in his resignation speech that day about 5pm. “The policies of the party are no longer those on which I went to the people. Therefore I do not wish to lead this government any longer. It was my intention to take this matter to the floor of state parliament. However, I now have no interest in leading the party any further. I’ve decided to resign as premier and retire from parliament, effective immediately.”

Goodbye and God bless, the old man said. He was 76.

That night, Bjelke-Petersen and his family shared a meal at Denison’s Restaurant in the Sheraton Hotel in the city — a building he had officially opened as premier. Before the food arrived, he said grace. “This is what I look upon as a new phase,” he told a reporter. “It’s really and truly exciting.”

That restaurant, however, had earlier received a bomb threat. And while patrons’ bags were searched, members of the public were encouraged not to sit near the Bjelke-Petersen clan.

The day after Bjelke-Petersen resigned, he was back in the news, and this time over a pet project that, whether in office or out of it, he simply could not let go — the monstrous skyscraper for Brisbane. Former local government minister Hinze suggested in state parliament that the 107-storey Central Place project was to be scrapped. “I have very grave doubts that you’re going to see the tallest building in Queensland,” Hinze remarked.

Outside of parliament, Hinze further said the project was “absolutely dead”. He added, however, that there was nothing to prevent developer Minuzzo from constructing a major building on the site in the Brisbane CBD. Former premier Bjelke-Petersen immediately countered, saying the Ahern government needed to honour previous Cabinet decisions, and that a Cabinet team, which had included Ahern, had given approval for the building. “The government must honour its word

and its pledge and its undertaking, otherwise its reputation goes,” Sir Joh told The Courier-Mail. “If governments are honest and have any integrity, they will honour the pledges of previous premiers. I’m not interested other than [that] there’s a billion dollars’ worth of jobs and materials.”

Premier Ahern told “Citizen Joh” to keep out of state government affairs. “The Queensland government will decide about the world’s tallest building, not Citizen Joh,” Ahern said.

When asked decades later why the story of the former premier, the building and the alleged bribe had never been revealed, a senior source said: “You have to remember that nobody, nobody in the National Party, wants to go down in history as the figure who fingered Bjelke-Petersen as being corrupt.” .

Edited extract from All Fall Down by Matthew Condon (UQP, $32.95), published

Wednesday.