Flashback: Gold Coast of 2017 bears strong resemblance to 1997’s top news headlines

PAULINE Hanson, pollie perks and the Aussies.Welcome to April 1997, which early 2017 is looking a lot like.

Justice Bill Carter presiding during the 1997 Carter Inquiry into Gold Coast police corruption.

PAULINE Hanson is dividing the community and a federal politician is in trouble for an expenses scandal on the Gold Coast and a Glitter Strip corruption inquiry.

No, it’s not April 2017 but April 1997 and despite two decades some things never change.

POLLIE PERKS

Sussan Ley.

IT was announced late last month ((MARCH)) that politicians will only be able to claim travel expenses when official business is the dominant purpose of their trip.

The changes were sparked by the entitlements scandal that forced the resignation of Coalition Government Health Minister Sussan Ley, who had used taxpayer funds to make multiple trips to the Gold Coast.

Christine Smith was celebrated for her honesty

Twenty years ago it was one of the state’s most controversial politicians, Senator Mal Colston, who was ultimately slapped with 28 charges of defrauding the Commonwealth by misusing his travel allowance.

Senator Mal Colston.

His Gold Coast-based secretary, future State MP Christine Smith, was hailed as a hero for her “honest and meticulous” work after she gave evidence revealing that it was the Senator, not her, who prepared his travel claims.

He retired from the Senate in 1999 and died in 2003.

Pauline Hanson at the 'One Nation Party' Launch in April 1997

HANSON’S GREATEST HITS

PAULINE Hanson is anything but forgettable.

The One Nation Senator continues to provoke controversy more than 20 years after the firebrand politician was first sworn in.

Last month she declared she had never been a racist during debate in Parliament over changes to race-hate speech laws.

Two decades earlier, the then-independent Member of Oxley launched One Nation and used the occasion to declared that racists would in fact be kicked out.

“I deplore racial intolerance, I really do. I think I could pick it in someone,” she told the Midday Show.

“It’s going to be such a very big operation for me to keep my finger on the pulse at all times, it's going to be very hard but if that is ever picked up in the organisation I’d be the first one to tell them where to get off.

“It’s not what I stand for and it is not what One Nation Stands for.”

2017 — One Nation's Pauline Hanson in the Senate. Picture Gary Ramage

CORRUPTION INQUIRY

GOLD Coasters watched on with interest this week as the Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC) held hearings into the 2016 Gold Coast City Council elections.

The Operation Belcarra hearings, which will continue this week in Brisbane, come 20 years after the then-Criminal Justices Commission’s (CJC) Carter inquiry into police corruption on the Gold Coast.

Justice Bill Carter at the CJC, 1997

The probe was headed by Justice Bill Carter QC.

The Surfers Paradise police station and other Gold Coast premises were raided and police officers ordered to front the inquiry.

A detective was in the firing line for an allegedly corrupt relationship with people involved in drug and illegal activities stretching back to 1995. The cop’s identity was suppressed during the hearings.

Following the hearing, former officer Silvio Spidalieri was sentenced to six years jail after he was found guilty of six counts of corruption and two counts of perjury at the Carter inquiry.

2017: Gold Coast Cr Kristyn Boulton appearing before the CCC’s Operation Belcarra hearing. (AAP Image/Dan Peled)