Lyons saga deserves fresh investigation

SIMON BEVILACQUA: WRITER James Boyce’s new book is the most impressive investigative journalism about Tasmania that I have read.

WRITER James Boyce’s new book is the most impressive investigative journalism about Tasmania that I have read.

Losing Streak: How Tasmania was Gamed by the Gambling Industry is accurately described as “jaw-dropping” in a blurb for a talk to be given by Boyce at Fullers Bookshop in Hobart next Wednesday.

Boyce is an academic and historian, who has produced scholarly titles such as 1835, which won the Age Book of the Year Award, and Van Diemen’s Land, which won the Tasmania Book Prize and the Colin Roderick Award.

Losing Streak, however, is an expose in the journalistic tradition.

I focus today on just one issue raised by Boyce – a matter of history and intrigue that, if not resolved now, could leave the reputation of one of Tasmania’s most famous sons forever shrouded.

The uncertainty surrounds the late Kevin Lyons, son of former prime minister Joseph Lyons and Dame Enid Lyons, the first female MP and cabinet minister.

Former politician, the late Kevin Lyons.

A former Liberal MP who formed his own party, Kevin Lyons held the balance of power in the hung parliament of 1969. He helped the Liberals form government and was made deputy premier.

In 1972, however, Lyons unexpectedly resigned, pulling the rug from under the Bethune government’s majority in the House of Assembly and sending Tasmanians back to the polling booths.

At the time, Lyons was alleged to have been bribed by figures in the gambling and tobacco industries to bring down the government.

Boyce’s research posits that these industries were aggrieved by the Bethune administration’s policy on casino licences, its proposal for a state-run TAB, and its support for a probe into the alleged fraudulent purchase of a large parcel of Tasmanian land by British Tobacco.

In 1973, Hugh Dell, former private secretary to then Labor premier, the late Eric Reece, and one-time press secretary for then attorney-general, the late Mervyn Everett, presented Reece an affidavit outlining illegal inducements he alleged had been offered to Lyons.

These, he alleged, included payment of about $29,000 on his home mortgage and an offer of a job at a salary no less than his ministerial earnings.

Reece set up a police probe that Boyce describes as a government-controlled process overseen by Everett, who was implicated in the allegations.

Calls for a royal commission were ignored and the government refused to release the police report.

Boyce last year became the first person to officially read the report, now publicly available due to the expiration of the 25 years required by the State Archives Act, since it was locked away.

The report concludes that a royal commission or judicial inquiry was not warranted and dismisses the allegations as an attempt at character assassination by a “sinister minority” in the ALP.

The report finds nothing unusual or improper in a $1000 loan given to Lyons in his last weeks as an MP by Federal Hotels for a deposit on a home in Melbourne.

It confirms Lyons bought a second expensive property in Melbourne within months of leaving parliament. It confirms two blocks of land that were part of this purchase were subsequently bought by Bay Investments, a company fully owned by Tasmanian bookmakers.

Boyce reveals that an advance of $25,000 that Lyons had said was from a publishing company he preferred not to name, and that he had said was for him to write his memoirs, was paid by British Tobacco. No such memoirs have been published to this day.

The report finds no evidence to support the allegation Federal Hotels had offered Lyons an income after he retired. Boyce points out that the report does not mention that Lyons formed a public relations firm that Federal Hotels employed for an undisclosed fee soon after he resigned.

From the opposition benches, deposed Liberal premier the late Sir Walter Angus Bethune called for a royal commission to explain his former deputy’s new wealth, suggesting it may have come from a “rich uncle” or “Santa Claus”.

Boyce became aware of the existence of two other related police files, but in 2015 was told one was unable to be found because it was not where it should have been filed in the State Archives and the other was under an extra layer of secrecy that required police to clear it for public release.

Police Commissioner Darren Hine informed Boyce last year he would not release the supplementary file because “no offences were detected” and some interviewed by police were “still active in the Tasmanian community”.

Boyce argues, rightly I believe, that the fact some remain active in the community is no reason to maintain secrecy, but rather cause to quickly reopen the case while they can contribute.

Tasmania’s history is littered with scandals that have been swept under the carpet to fester into persistent ugly rumours, dating back to the belated 1830 inquiry into the killing of Aborigines at Risdon Cove a quarter of a century earlier.

Failing to investigate properly at the time of a scandal in a bid to protect reputations often does nothing of the sort, in fact it can do the opposite.

We owe it to all Tasmanians, not least Kevin Lyons, to drop the secrecy and reopen the investigation before it is too late.

Simon Bevilacqua is a former Opinion Editor of the Mercury.