QLD pollies who have fallen foul of the law
Queensland has had its fair share of politicians who have fallen foul of the law after committing crimes ranging from fraud to sexual assault and even blackmail.
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Queensland has had its fair share of politicians who have fallen foul of the law and jailed for crimes ranging from fraud to sex charges and even blackmail.
SCOTT DRISCOLL
Scott Driscoll was a Liberal National Party MP for Redcliffe from 2012-2013 who was sentenced to six years’ jail for soliciting hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret commissions from supermarkets before and after being elected.
He was referred to the Crime and Misconduct Commission in November 2012, after complaints of official misconduct followed by complaints of fraud to police.
He was found guilty of 42 counts of contempt of parliament, four counts of failing to register interests and one count of misleading the House in 2013.
The Parliamentary Ethics Committee recommended he be fined $84,000 for contempt; $4000 for failing to register interests; $2000 for misleading the House; and be expelled from the chamber “to protect the honour and dignity of the Legislative Authority”.
A year later, he was charged with 16 offences including fraud and soliciting secret commissions. In November 2016, Driscoll pleaded guilty to 15 fraud charges. He was found to have falsified meeting minutes of the Queensland Retail Traders and Shopkeepers Association and taking secret commissions.
GORDON NUTTALL
The former Labor minister was jailed in 2009 for 14 years for perjury, corruption and receiving secret commissions. Among his convictions were 35 relating to corrupt payments from businessman Ken Talbot, totalling $300,000.
Nuttall, now 67, represented Sandgate from 1992 to 2006. He was a minister in the Beattie Ministry from 2001 to 2005. He was found guilty of corruptly receiving secret commissions during office and jailed for seven years.
In 2010, he was found guilty of five charges of official corruption and five charges of perjury and jailed for an additional seven years, the longest jail term for corruption handed to a commonwealth politician. The state government appealed the “inadequacy” of the sentence and the appeal was upheld with an extra two years’ jail handed down, extending his non-parole period to July 2015. The Supreme Court ordered Nuttall repay the state $454,000 after deeming it as “proceeds of crime” and also ordered him to pay the government’s legal costs of $42,000. Nuttall was brought before the bar of parliament in May 2011, to answer 41 charges of contempt of parliament for nondisclosure, as a member of parliament, of pecuniary interests totalling $368,866. Parliament found him to have been contemptuous and fined him $82,000.
He was released on parole in July 2015.
MERRI ROSE
The former Labor minister was jailed in 2006 for 18 months — suspended after she served three — for trying to blackmail former premier Peter Beattie.
She was elected as the member for Currumbin at the 1992 Queensland election and after the 2001 election became Minister for Tourism and Racing.
She came under fire when it emerged her son drove her ministerial car to watch sporting events in Sydney, and also faced accusations of bullying staff.
The controversy grew to a point that Beattie was forced to sack her from cabinet just before the 2004 election. After the election she sought a job in the public sector. In 2007, she pleaded guilty to demanding benefit with threats in relation to her efforts to get the job and was sentenced to 18 months’ jail.
BILL D’ARCY
The former Labor MP, was convicted of child sex offences less than a year after he quit state parliament in January 2000. He was sentenced to 11 years behind bars for offences which occurred while he was a teacher in the 1960s and ‘70s. He was released on parole in 2007.
He was the member for Albert from 1972 to 74 and Woodridge from 1977 to 2000.
He worked as a teacher and business consultant before his entry into politics.
He was tried and convicted in Brisbane Supreme Court in November 2000 of one charge of rape and 17 other charges of sexual assaults on children. These were said to have taken place in the mid 1960s while D’Arcy was a teacher at the Yalleroi School in Queensland. He was ordered to undertake a treatment program but refused while maintaining his innocence. D’Arcy was released in 2007.
BRIAN AUSTIN
Brian Austin was a Queensland Health Minister who represented the seat of Wavell for the Liberal Party from 1977–1983 and then for the National Party from 1983–1986.
He was sentenced to 15 months’ jail on misappropriation charges arising from the Fitzgerald Inquiry. He played a key role in a coup against premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen in 1987 and was later implicated in corruption and forced to retire in 1989.
He was convicted on 25 counts of misappropriating public funds, involving $8700 spent on private accommodation, travel and meals.
In 2010, it was reported he was selling real estate in the exclusive Brisbane suburbs of Ascot, Hamilton and Clayfield.
KEITH WRIGHT
Former Labor opposition leader and federal MP Keith Wright was jailed in 1993 for nine years for raping and indecently dealing with two girls. In 2009, he publicly apologised to his two victims. He died at the age of 72, in January 2015.
He was elected to parliament in 1969 as the Labor member for Rockhampton South and after a seat redistribution, represented Rockhampton from 1972 to 1984. In 1982, he became Leader of the Opposition. In 1993, he was charged with indecently dealing and child rape, and as a result lost his Labor endorsement. After leaving jail, he moved to Vietnam and ran a company, International Language Academy Australia, which trains TESOL teachers in Southeast Asia. He died in Vietnam on in 2015, aged 73.
LEISHA HARVEY
The former National Party minister was sentenced to 12 months’ jail in 1990 on misappropriation charges arising from the Fitzgerald Inquiry into corruption. She served in parliament from 1983 to 1989, representing the electorate of Greenslopes. She was Minister for Health in the government of Mike Ahern from 1987 until her sacking in January 1989.
She was not long out of parliament when she was charged with misappropriation of public funds over her use of her official credit card and $42,364 in personal expenses, some of which it was alleged included taking her husband on a birthday trip to the Adelaide Grand Prix. After a high-profile trial in 1990 and subsequent conviction, she spent five months in prison and a further seven months in home detention. She was convicted of misappropriation on 13 of the original 124 charges, concerning $7900, and sentenced to twelve months in prison in November 1990. The Court of Criminal Appeal later reduced the convictions to nine counts but did not reduce the sentence. In April 1991, the judge struck down a further 20 charges and released Harvey to serve the last seven months of her sentence in home detention. Harvey was due to face a retrial on the remaining 71 charges, but these charges were dropped in July 1991 by the Director of Public Prosecutions. She was released from prison in 1991, and has largely remained outside of the public eye.
DON LANE
The National Party minister was convicted of misappropriating public money following the Fitzgerald inquiry and sentenced to 12 months’ jail.
He was a Transport Minister and had been a former policeman in the Special Branch before being elected in 1971 to the seat of Merthyr, an electorate which included Fortitude Valley where a lot of illegal brothels and casinos operated.
Following the 1983 state election, he switched to the National Party along with Brian Austin. Lane and three other Bjelke-Petersen ministers Leisha Harvey, Brian Austin, and Geoff Muntz, were tried in the District Court and sentenced to 12 months imprisonment for falsifying expense accounts.
He was released on home detention in February 1991, and paroled two months later. The state government originally sought $834,657, including $450,000 in superannuation, but the court rejected that, requiring only $25,000. Lane died in 1995.
GEOFF MUNTZ
The former National Party minister was jailed for 12 months on 19 charges of misusing ministerial expenses arising from the Fitzgerald inquiry.
He was born in Beenleigh and became a rural and urban valuer. He was elected to parliament in 1980 for the seat of Whitsunday. In 1983, he was promoted to the Minister for Welfare Services, moving to Corrective Services, Administration Services and Valuation in 1986.
In also took on Tourism, National Parks and Sport, and in 1987 Environment, Conservation and Tourism. He stepped down from the ministry in September 1989 and resigned form the party in November that year to run as an independent but was defeated. In April 1991, he was found guilty of misappropriation of $4891.83 from a ministerial expense fund and sentenced to 12 months jail after being found guilty on 19 of 30 charges.
He got special protection in jail because, as a minister, he once suggested hunger strikers in prison should be left to starve.
PAUL PISASALE
The former mayor of Ipswich was convicted of two counts of extortion in July 2019 after he was found to have impersonated a private investigator as part of a plot to unlawfully obtain $10,000 from another individual. His appeal was dismissed in March 2020. He later pleaded guilty to charges including perjury, fraud, corruption, and sexual assault.
He was mayor from 2004 to 2017, making him one of Queensland’s longest-serving mayors. He resigned in 2017 after a raid on his office by the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission. He was charged with corruption in 2017 and was committed to stand trial on a number of other charges in 2019, including charges of sexual assault where he is accused of “unlawfully and indecently” assaulting an Ipswich woman, and charges of perjury.
He pleaded guilty to charges which included two counts of sexual assault, official corruption, unlawful drug possession, 27 counts fraud, secret commission by an agent, and fraud of property. He was initially sentenced to two years’ jail to be suspended after 12 months for his extortion offences, and commenced his sentence at the Wolston Correctional Centre where he was admitted to hospital. He was sentenced to an additional seven-and-a-half years for the crimes he admitted in 2020, and will be eligible for parole in October 2022.
HAJNAL BAN
Hajnal Ban is an Australian lawyer, author and former conservative politician, who was convicted of charges that prevented her being elected to public office between 2012 and 2016. She was elected to Logan City in March 2008 but was disqualified from March 2012.
She won Liberal National Party selection for the seat of Wright in 2009 but lost endorsement after allegations she mismanaged the funds of a 65-year-old man. In 2002, she had surgery to increase the length of her legs by 8cm and wrote about it in her book God Made Me Small, Surgery Made Me Tall. She married fellow Logan councillor Sean Black in 2010 but they divorced.
After questions were raised by Queensland’s Adult Guardian about Ban’s administration of an elderly man’s estate, the Liberal National Party revoked its endorsement of her as the candidate for Wright in 2010.
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She surrendered her power of attorney and proceedings in the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal were dropped. In 2011, she faced criminal charges for allegedly breaching local government financial disclosure laws. In 2011, a Brisbane judge found she had failed to act properly on behalf of a dementia patient after the sale of his Park Ridge property.
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In 2012, she was found guilty of not declaring a pecuniary interest while working in public office and for failing to declare a joint bank account with a man she held power of attorney over. She was fined $3500 and ordered to pay costs of $5000, and had a conviction recorded. In September 2012 the judge ruled she was only entitled to $40,000 of the $700,000 she took.
SEAN BLACK
Former One Nation adviser Sean Black was sentenced to five years’ jail for raping and assaulting a woman, but his sentence was suspended after two years and three months.
He had pleaded not guilty to three counts of assault occasioning bodily harm and one count of rape.
Black was state secretary of Young Labor and a staffer for former Labor heavyweight Terry Mackenroth, before he was kicked out of the party over his adverse naming in a 2001 electoral fraud inquiry. His attacks on took place in 2007, a year before he returned to politics as a Logan City Councillor. He came to public prominence through his second marriage to fellow councillor Hajnal Ban.
Their wedding attracted Liberal National Party figures, including federal MP Barnaby Joyce. Complaints of bullying and intimidation against Black within the council led to him being banned from entering chambers or dealing with staff, as well as being subject to special security arrangements. He worked on former Liberal National Party MP Michael Pucci’s campaign in 2012 before following Pucci to One Nation via Senator Roberts’ office
STACEY McINTOSH
The former Logan City councillor was sentenced to three years in jail for stealing $180,000 from a Brisbane engineering firm. http://bit.ly/McIntoshPleadsGuilty
Justice Tony Moynihan sentenced McIntosh, after she pleaded guilty to misdirecting $184,000 from Coopers Plains engineering company Fortuna Engineering into her own accounts in 2014.
Justice Moynihan said her crimes had a serious impact on the families and employees of Fortuna Engineering. He also said Ms McIntosh had never paid back any of the money.
In a written apology, McIntosh expressed remorse and regret for her family but did not apologise to Logan ratepayers, who had no representation after she was suspended.
Prosecutor Mel Wilson told the court 9 per cent, or about $16,000, of the embezzled funds went to Ms McIntosh’s 2016 election campaign.
The sentence was suspended after 12 months, when Ms McIntosh was granted parole.
She appeared 30 times on the matter, which first went to court on January 10, 2017.
She was suspended on full pay of $130,000 in May 2018 until she, and the rest of the council, were dismissed on May 2 by Queensland’s Local Government Minister Stirling Hinchliffe.
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