Original subtitles

- Okay.

- Get the other speaker quickly. This one isn't working.

- [Crew] Move the speaker.

- I can't hear a thing.

Can you hear me now?

- [Crew] Yes.

- [Joh] Yeah, good.

- [Crew] We need a bit more level.

- [Joh] Great.

- It's breaking up.

- [Crew] Hello. How's the our level for you?

- [Joh] One, two. Oh, the level is excellent.

Perfect.

- [Crew] Well, we definitely need a bit more

from your end.

- [Crew] Sorry about that. Haven't got sound.

Just say something.

- Hello? How's that?

Can you hear me? - I've lost sound.

- Well obviously what he's got

isn't working up there.

Could you fix it please?

- Can you fix it?

- Okay?

Good.

- Get me an earphone.

- [Crew] Ah, that was it.

Can we have another count, please?

- Yes. One, two, three, four.

- Ah, loud and clear. Very well done.

- [Matthew] He was almost the premier by accident,

certainly not a born politician.

- And we're meeting the man who's the longest serving

and certainly the most controversial premier

this country has ever known.

I'd like you to welcome from our Brisbane studio,

the Premier of Queensland, Mr. Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Give him a big welcome.

(audience clapping) - Thank you very much.

- Who's Joh?

Do you really want to know?

Who's Joh?

- I don't think he was a grand master genius

that planned and plotted.

I think he was one of those guys that successfully bumbled.

- I think Joh was a force of nature.

He was... He was God.

And Joh, of course,

saw himself as being on a mission from God.

- Joh is God.

To hell with that,

the trees and animals were our religion before Joh came.

- Joh was a very boring, mundane character.

- This may surprise you, but he had charisma.

- He was a patriot.

I mean, he believed in Australia,

particularly the Queensland version of Australia.

- Power-hungry.

- Dictator.

- I think I respect him more than anybody else

I've ever met.

- I thought he was an absolute corrupt bastard.

- No, but he represented the mindset of the state.

- He was a complete dead shit,

and the world is better off without him.

- The crazier things got, the vote went up.

- Well, he wasn't Rudolph Valentino

in the looks department.

He couldn't string three coherent words together,

but he was an innovator.

- And a real country man.

- Looking back, in many ways,

Joh wrote the playbook for Trump.

- It's like, well, he made no sense back then,

so how can you explain him now?

- Joh was this crazy politician

who was in Parliament for 40 years

and Premier of Queensland for 19,

and he was called a Bible-bashing bastard.

The hillbilly dictator.

He spoke really strangely in press conferences,

but was a cunning old guy.

He tried to run for Prime Minister of Australia,

but lost.

He was accused of corruption but never convicted,

and apparently when he was voted out by his own team,

he locked himself in his office and wouldn't come out.

(dramatic music)

- [Broadcaster] Good evening

on this historic day in Queensland politics.

There is absolute confusion, chaos and turmoil

in the government.

What we can say for certain is this.

The Premier, Sir Joh, is still Premier,

but isolated, and refuses to resign

to make way for the new regime

elected unanimously by National Party MPs today.

- [Matthew] Bjelke-Petersen had locked the doors.

He refuses to budge.

- [Reporter] Well, yes, he's still in his office

at the executive building.

He is a bitterly disappointed man.

- [Matthew] Joh was not accepting, could not accept,

he is not the king anymore.

The crown has been wrested off him.

(dramatic music)

- You think this bothers me?

I'm Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Premier of Queensland,

servant of the people.

No, no, no.

What did Matthew say?

Verse seven, don't throw your pearls to pigs.

They'll tear you all to pieces.

You think I care with all your hullabaloo?

I've had prime ministers in here.

I've had presidents sitting right there.

I built this place. I built Queensland.

You want me, you know where I am, right here.

(dramatic music)

Old Joh the ghost.

(dramatic music continues)

- [Matthew] It's almost impossible to believe

that all of this actually happened,

and all began in Bethany.

- My grandfather chose the name Bethany

because it means a place of rest.

This is where he was coming back to recuperate

to start a new life here with my father.

He had to milk the cows,

help his mother milk the cows.

His father couldn't do manual work, so it fell onto him.

So he would help in the morning before he went to school,

and then in afternoon when he came home from school,

he'd have to go through the same process again.

- I think the hardship taught him to be self-reliant

from a very early age.

It just became part and parcel of who he was,

that he became a problem solver.

If something didn't work, he would have to fix it.

He was a doer.

- [John] My grandfather being a pastor

wasn't paid a great deal of money

and thought his health might improve, but it didn't.

- In some ways he had a broken education,

but Dad was just too much needed on the property.

- Time and again, they've wondered this,

how come old Joh was so successful

when he left school so young?

They'd tie themselves up in riddles

time and time again over that one.

Well, I'm here to tell you,

there's more to learning on a farm

than any of your fancy places like Oxford University.

Mother used to say the proof's in the pudding.

The proof's in the pudding.

Well, I'm it.

- He had a chip on his shoulder to some degree.

He had a need to constantly prove himself,

not just to his past, but to his present.

(energetic music)

- He's a social isolate, doesn't drink, doesn't smoke,

doesn't go to the pub, doesn't date girls, doesn't dance.

He would have actually conducted his own daily devotions,

so he would have actually read his Bible, prayed,

and then he would have gone out into the field

and basically hacked down the scrub for most of the day.

- Well, a lot of the area had just been opened up

then for selection.

It had to be cleared.

It was just handwork by axe, and it was very hard going.

There were no big machines when they all settled here.

That sort of came later, 20 years later.

- [John] So it was in the early '30s

that he brought his first tractor.

- He went to the bank and wanted to buy

a 10-20 McCormick-Deering tractor.

Bank manager looked him up and down as much as to say,

"Well, where'd you get that silly idea from?"

But he prevailed.

They might've thought it was crazy at the time,

but he had a next-door neighbour or someone saying,

"I'll give you 20 pound to plough out 20 acres."

- So ultimately, the people

who'd come to have a look at this tractor,

they all said to him,

"You're mad. You're going to go broke,"

were the ones that ultimately paid for the tractor.

- And the contract business started up

and I think he would work from sunup to sundown.

- In fact, I'm told, well, I know those old tractors

didn't have a generator and lights.

- So the next thing he devised was some headlights.

- So as he could plough into the night.

- There was a problem, he used to be able

to find a way to solve it.

(energetic music)

- I came up with this idea

of dragging a big anchor chain between two bulldozers,

and gee whiz, if they didn't come down right away

and stay down.

You could hear the dozers and the glorious crack and snap

of that brigalow a mile away.

Let me tell you, it was like music,

the Grey Wood and wattle flowers coming down.

If progress had a sound, that was it.

Nothing was more satisfying.

- [Matthew] I mean, imagine the noise.

It must've been cataclysmic.

The sound of chains ripping through ancient forest.

It must've been like a monster.

- [John] That's where my father made his money

opening up vast areas of land out on the downs.

- And he was in demand for this.

This was the guy that can flatten

hundreds, thousands of acres quickly, efficiently.

If you needed it, you called Joh.

(dramatic music)

- [John] And a lot of those people that he worked for

were the ones that encouraged him to get into politics.

They thought he would do a great job

of representing them.

(gentle music)

- Before Joh came on the scene,

Queensland was controlled and owned

by the Australian Labour Party.

The unions were big.

Brisbane at the time was very small, comparatively.

It's a big country town they used to call it.

But right up the coast, the east coast of Queensland,

were substantial cities in their own right,

20,000 population-plus.

From Gympie to Maryborough

to Bundaberg to Gladstone to Mackay to Rockhampton

to Townsville to Cairns.

So it was decentralised

because of the pre-mechanisation rural workforce.

- Well, Joh Bjelke-Petersen always presented himself

as a kind of reluctant entrant into politics,

and in fact, there's a bit of a wowser

when he comes into Parliament.

- Well, Bjelke-Petersen joins Parliament in 1947

and he's not making much of a splash,

but he's kind of biding his time

and waiting for an opportunity.

- I guess he would have picked up a few clues

as to how Queensland governments generally operated.

Queensland was in the unusual situation

of having only one House of Parliament,

so scrutiny of government was very limited.

- [Matthew] He was this sort of wallflower

observing and absorbing.

To me, he was an odd-bod from the day he entered Parliament.

(gentle music)

- Around the time that Joe enters parliament,

he also learns to fly.

Obviously, the roads and that sort of thing

weren't that crash-hot back in that time,

and so to drive back from the electorate down to Brisbane

to go to Parliament and that sort of thing,

he did I think the first couple of years,

and then he would fly down to Brisbane

and avoid all those potholes.

- He could fly to Brisbane and get there much quicker.

The train actually took a long route.

You nearly had to go up through Maryborough.

- It was four days, I think, to use the train.

- It was a long time and the roads were just terrible,

and Dad was always a person who wanted to do things

as quick as you could.

- I believe that Dad was on a deputation

to the Main Roads Commissioner,

and Mum was the secretary

to the Main Roads Commissioner.

She came in to take shorthand,

and some of the other ladies after that, everyone had left,

said to Mum,

"Joh Bjelke-Petersen is single and he's got lots of money."

- And he's got loads of money.

You'd better get to know him.

- You should marry him.

- So Dad actually asked Mum about going to the movies,

but Dad had never gone to the movies

and actually was a bit suspicious of girls

that liked to go to the movies,

because Dad was in his late thirties,

which in those days was considered

almost past getting married,

so it nearly all didn't happen.

- [John] He would have actually had a very solitary life

up until then,

and so meeting Florence was actually

quite a transformative experience for him.

But Flo also, she had

a very conservative theological outlook with Joh,

and they were married in 1952.

(energetic music)

- [Frank] Well, the Labour Party across the country

had great turbulence in the 1950s,

and it did split in several states.

The Queensland split was rather distinctive.

It happened later in 1957.

- And the Labour Party split

brought the Country Party and the Liberal Party to office

as a new coalition government.

Frank Nicklin was the leader of the Country Party

at the time.

- It has been a quarter of a century

since Queensland has had a change of government,

and I feel that a change is going to be of great benefit

for the state and its people.

- Dad was, I guess, using his plane

to help Sir Frank Nicklin out in flying around the state.

- Well, there's nothing you can tell me

about the meaning of hard work.

I've done it all my life, never complained.

"Leave it to Joh," they always said.

"He'll get it done."

It's probably why Frank Nicklin, when he became Premier,

he always had me running around on errands.

"Joh, could you head up to Cairns

and help out our Country Party candidate?

He needs a hand."

"Joh, could you get out west of Charleville

and set straight our candidate?

He's a good fellow, but he needs a leg up."

Well, that was me, because Frank knew

that I never said no to hard work.

- [John] So Joh does a lot of the hack work till 1963

when the premier, Frank Nicklin, appointed him

as Minister for Works and Housing.

- Joh said that the boys, as they all were,

came to me like bees round a honeypot

because everyone wanted something in their electorate,

a new station, or a new school, or public housing.

- [John] Joh was off and running

providing his Country Party colleagues

with roads and hospitals and so on,

and they were indebted to him.

- [Rae] And it allowed him to create a favour bank.

(gentle music)

- [Paul] It would be very difficult for Joh Bjelke-Petersen

not to have been aware of corruption in the police force

to some extent,

given his position as a politician,

but also as a cabinet minister in the Nicklin government.

- And it was the Nicklin government

which appointed Frank Bischof as Commissioner of Police.

And that may well have been the genesis

of what became organised corruption,

not just a sling or a bribe on the side,

but organised corruption by the coppers themselves.

- Frank Bischof was one of the best detectives

that Brisbane had ever seen.

In terms of solving murders especially,

he had a great record.

And he knew how to pick people

who weren't just good at being corrupt,

but were good at being police officers, as well,

because that's how he made his career.

- So during that period, Bischof perfected

an early version of the corrupt system

that became known later as 'The Joke'.

- The police were allowing corrupt behaviour.

They all agreed that prostitution was a victimless crime.

You can't stop it, it needs to be controlled,

and you need to be able to control it

so you don't have drugs.

As a result, they received a cash payment from the brothels

to pay them for the time that they spent

outside of their hours protecting the setup.

That's why it was The Joke.

The Joke was, we're getting paid to protect prostitution.

(energetic music)

- [Rae] In 1968, Nicklin retired

and was succeeded by Jack Pizzey.

- I do know this, that when Nicklin stepped down,

he didn't want Joh to be the Premier,

and that's why Jack Pizzey stepped in.

- Then within a short space of time,

Jack Pizzey died,

and I think he died very suddenly of a heart attack.

- The issue with Pizzey dying was that there was no one

to replace him from the Country Party.

- [John] Joh then comes through the ranks

as the Country Party candidate for Premier

calling on the votes of all

of the Country Party good old boys

to whom he had provided schools, hospitals, and roads.

- [Paul] But there was actually moves

to try and work out a way for Joh Bjelke-Petersen

not to become the premier

because people were concerned about

what a Bjelke-Petersen Premiership would look like

for Queensland.

- I can't -

How would you pick Joh Bjelke-Petersen for politics?

He was a bit of a lightweight, actually.

Well he was just hopeless, I took one look at him

and thought, "That's the end of the Country Party.

We're finished, gone forever."

- Joh was basically a farmer,

and they used to come out all the time

saying he's a peanut farmer,

but I wasn't impressed at all.

- [Quentin] Now, when he first became Premier,

a lot of people had never heard of him.

- Yes, John, we've been very happy.

I, of course, as you know,

have travelled up and down Queensland

during the three years-

- And I would see him on black and white TV

looking pathetic,

and I would think that he wasn't going to last.

- [Rae] And there was a move against him by the party.

They were fairly confident of rolling him.

- So a number of his colleagues came to see him

to say, "They've got the numbers, Joh.

We're going to replace you, and you should stand down now

and go peacefully."

Joh didn't go peacefully.

- And so when it looked like

they were going to take it away from him,

I think that that really showed the spirit

of Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

- [Scott] And what he did was spend the whole night

ringing everyone around and calling up all his favours.

- And he won that with his votes,

and two forged proxies.

And they were of members of the Country Party

who were on an overseas delegation at the time,

and when they came back, they were made ministers.

- He was very smart, he was very cunning.

I think, wittingly or not,

I think he was incredibly deceptive.

- Once upon a time, somebody said to me,

"Joh, you're too nice to be Premier."

Well, there's something to say for that.

Let's make this clear.

Let's wash the mud off this.

I'm not a vindictive man.

I am a positive man, but there's no way in the world

that I will let people tramp on my toes.

See, for a long time there, everybody that walked past me

in the political arena

gave me a good hard kick in the shins.

And I realised, you've got to look after yourself,

nobody else will.

So I came up with a guiding principle.

You give me a problem,

I'll give you a bigger one.

You try me on, and I will come back at you

bigger and stronger.

You take on Joh Bjelke-Petersen

and you've got a fight on your hands.

- So I think the whole episode shows a certain ruthlessness

and a great desire to stay in office.

He wasn't going to give up the premiership

for anything really.

- Frank Bischof had been the police commissioner

for around about 10 years.

- Bischof is committed to a hospital,

and was caught

naked in a closet at one point,

calling out that his life is in danger

and people are coming to get him.

So he has a mental breakdown, essentially,

and is relieved of his position as Commissioner.

- The police minister at the time

was a guy called Max Hodges.

Max always told anybody who would listen to him

in the corridors of Parliament

that he was worried about the corruption

within the Queensland Police Force,

and he wanted an exterior appointment,

and he got Ray Whitrod to come in and take over.

- Always known as Honest Ray.

He was a very bright individual, multiple degrees.

Whitrod was up against it

from the minute he got off the plane in 1970,

and discovered that the vast bulk of officers

hadn't literally progressed from schooling aged 12.

- Mr. Whitrod, what information have you been given

about the Queensland Police Force?

- Not a great deal.

I've had a chance to talk to the minister,

and of course I've read the newspapers,

and I've had some contact with the Queensland Police

over the years.

- [Quentin] Needless to say the police of Queensland

were very unamused by an outsider coming in.

- [Paul] When Ray Whitrod arrived in Queensland,

what he inherited was the fact that Bischof

had strategically promoted different police officers

into important positions,

and very well liked and respected

within the Queensland Police Force too.

And it became a personal mission of his

to really take on this Rat Pack.

- [Matthew] Tony Murphy, Glendon Patrick Hallahan

and Terry Lewis.

- [John] Terry Lewis of course and the Rat Pack

were very much opposed to Whitrod

and did everything they could to undermine him.

- [Matthew] And Whitrod faced years

of perennial white-anting.

Every decision he made, there was opposition,

accusations against his character, his leadership.

It was relentless.

(sombre music)

(film whirring)

- [Reporter] Do you or any member of your family

hold any shares in Comalco?

- Well, in regard to this question,

let us have first things first also

and I'll answer that question in a few moments.

To get the record straight, let me ask you,

what's wrong with having shares in either Comalco or Utah?

You tell me that. What's wrong with it?

- [Quentin] Questions started to be raised

about Joh's conflicts of interest.

- A conflict of interest? In which way?

- He wanted exploration licences on the Great Barrier Reef,

and got them.

- Sir, could you answer the question

about your shareholdings?

- Yes, I'm coming to that, but I want to say this.

- Comalco issued mining shares at low cost

and a number of politicians took them up.

- Because you held shares in a certain company,

would you say that this could influence a decision?

I'm not saying would it, but could it?

- It certainly wouldn't influence any decision.

- [Reporter] Did you receive any shares?

- [Reporter] Did you get any Comalco shares yourself?

- Now, gentlemen, in reply, as I said earlier this evening,

no, I have no Comalco shares or Utah shares whatsoever.

My wife has shares in both these companies

by entitlement and by application.

- [Paul] People were concerned that Joh Bjelke-Petersen

didn't play by the rules.

He was a rogue operator.

- [Reporter] You will continue to hold shares

in public companies?

- I haven't done anything in this particular issue at all

as you jolly well know.

- [Reporter] But you have held shares in companies

which have dealings with the public?

- If you're going to try and misconstrue it

just for your own political propaganda,

you've got another thing coming.

Cheers. - Mr. Premier,

thank you very much.

- But he needed a diversion.

So the Springboks were coming

and that divided Australia

because there was great concern all around the world

about the apartheid regime in South Africa.

- So 1971, we had an all white Springbok rugby team

visit Australia.

- There were protests from the beginning

as soon as they arrived in Perth

because Australians were quite enthusiastic

about trade boycotts of South Africa

over the apartheid regime.

And so those demonstrations occurred

as they made their way around the coast.

(crowd jeering)

- What the Springboks tour also shows

is it shows to the protest movement

what they've been ignoring for a long time,

which is actually the apartheid

that's happening in their own state.

(gentle music)

- Yeah. I stayed in Cherbourg all my life.

I was born in Cherbourg, in reserves such as Cherbourg,

even Woorabinda.

They had signs outside to show

that you have to have a piece of paper

to get into the community

or you have to get a piece of paper to get out

or if you haven't that, you got six months in jail

or $600 fine.

- The federal government knew it had to do something

because it was under UN scrutiny.

And in 1971, that's when Joh Bjelke-Petersen

lost the ability to hold anyone on a reserve

against their will.

There was a massive influx off reserves,

not just pastoral properties,

but reserves into Queensland towns and cities

for the first time in colonial history.

And then white people felt quite comfortable

writing to Joh Bjelke-Petersen saying,

"We don't want them here.

They can't come to the pool."

But see, you had a world anti-racism push

after World War II.

And there were a lot of white people that fought as well.

There was civil rights activists and things like that.

So the time was right.

- The beginning of the '70s, we were having an effect.

We were all part of this huge generational change.

And the fact that we're out there marching in the streets

was part of that generational change

that the mainstream culture despised.

(crowd chanting)

- So there was a huge movement growing.

(crowd chanting)

And we saw the worst, I think, of Joh trying to stop that.

- Well, some problems are clear cut.

You learn that on a farm.

You say your surface water gets scarce,

well, you pump up your ground water.

It's pretty straightforward.

And it is the same when the Springboks came to town.

It was just another equation. Just another equation.

They had a right to play rugby

and all the protestors who tried to stop them

had no legal right to do so.

It was as simple as that.

And I declared a state of emergency,

that it was my decision, and we, yes, moved on from there.

I'd been Premier for a few years by then

and I'd learned one thing.

You make a decision and you get on with it.

That's what I did.

- [Paul] It was something that was unprecedented.

It hadn't happened before.

- [Quentin] It was unbelievable. Made world headlines.

- State of emergency gives the right

for the Rugby Union to use the exhibition grounds

to play the matches, on which to play the matches.

- When the Springbok state of emergency was declared,

I became involved in a group of independent legal observers.

It wasn't a state of emergency

that was declared to deal with a cyclone or a bushfire.

It was a state of emergency called on by a Premier

who cynically used politics

to shore up his own then somewhat tenuous grip

on his recently obtained Premiership.

(dramatic music)

- [John] Joh did everything possible

to facilitate that tour.

He brought in hundreds of country cops.

- [Paul] So police from all over Queensland

were basically rallied.

They were housed at a military camp

and really getting each other worked up.

And Joh Bjelke-Petersen openly said he was giving police

a green light to do what they needed to do

to keep security on the streets

and there won't be any repercussions.

- Which meant it gave police carte blanche

to do whatever they wanted to you.

So we were very, very nervous.

- It became a major political sideshow.

He took them on. He took them on.

And, "Gee, that Joh, he's got it all right.

He can take them on."

- # We shall not be moved #

- [Paul] So on the night Springboks arrived,

they went to their hotel, which was at the Tower Mill.

- I was on that hill.

We had the right to march for that demonstration.

- Just be responsible for a change.

(pair squabbling indistinctly)

- I was there that night as part of the legal observer team.

Then Whitrod, who was present at the scene,

gave a direction for the protesters to effectively move on.

- Now you must move back off the road.

Otherwise we'll have to move you.

- Step back. - Please go back.

Move back. Move back.

(crowd jeering)

- They didn't. And after that, the police

in effect took it into their own hands,

chased protesters in the dark.

- [Raymond] And it was just unleashed.

It was frightening.

- And the police were just bashing people on the head

and we were trapped.

And it was massively brutal.

- [Quentin] Heads were cracked by police batons.

- [Paul] And they had taken off their badge numbers,

which is never a good sign.

- [Terry] A number of protesters ended up with broken bones.

- [Paul] And people got hurt. People almost died.

- [Terry] And particularly to see the police

just disobey Whitrod's command was an eye-opener.

- And I'll tell you this.

So the police were absolutely outstanding,

and we worked hand in glove with them and we got it done.

And they knew that I supported them.

They knew that they could trust me from that moment on.

It was a jolly good relationship and we never looked back.

- [Paul] The Springboks tour and its aftermath

showed Queensland that Joh Bjelke-Petersen was somebody

who would push back threats,

which was what the activist movement really represented

for Joh and for many Queenslanders

who saw the state that they had once knew

sort of slipping away into modernity.

- A lot of people used to say they felt safe under Joh,

which I know is a silly thing perhaps to say,

but he was the sort of person that radiated

that sort of -

That sort of comfort that people did feel safe under Joh.

- I grew up in a very big Joh supporter household.

My father in particular was very much Team Joh.

And I grew up basically hearing about him like he was a God,

like he was the model that every politician should follow.

- [Norm] But he could go somewhere

and he could read the feeling of the people.

He just had that gift.

That's what he did have.

- [Amy] There is so much love for Joh.

- [Norm] And he was always very courteous.

- I was struck by his humility, and it wasn't bunged on.

He just felt it was naturally his job

to go and boil the billy and make tea for people.

And Jesus told us to be humble

and he washed the feet of the disciples.

And Florence, his wife, was more unpretentious still.

- [Reporter] Back to your scones, I think now.

- Oh, well, thank you.

We'll pop them in the oven and we'll see what happens.

(dramatic music)

- Joh, of course,

was popular in the country areas.

- [Amy] And I think what Joh really tapped into

was that feeling of being ignored

and just used up for their resources and their labour

and everything else.

- (crowd chanting) We want Joh. We want Joh.

We want Joh. We want Joh.

- [Amy] And he spoke in a way that really appealed to them.

- From far away Canberra,

they have wrecked far too much already.

They have wrecked everything that they can lay hands on.

The mining industry, ladies and gentlemen,

was booming and prosperous until they came into power

and thousands of job opportunities went by the board.

- He's the father of a modern-day Queensland

because he had the courage of his conviction.

He had the strength and determination

to stand up and to be different.

- [Raymond] Under Joh Bjelke-Petersen,

he was exporting an idea of Queensland

that it was separate from the rest of Australia.

He said, "We're not Australians. We are Queenslanders."

- [Amy] And he told the nation that it was not only okay

to be from Queensland, in fact, it was better.

- [David] And what he was able to do was galvanise support

by actually just taking on Canberra

and making it a conflict.

- [Amy] Joh viewed Canberra with contempt

and he hated that there were politicians in Canberra

who could make decisions that would impact

what he was doing in Queensland.

(crowd cheering)

- In 1972, the Whitlam government was elected.

And from that point on, a whole new image of Joh

developed as the strong leader defending Queensland.

- [Matthew] So you had a tall, hugely educated,

erudite individual with Whitlam.

- [Rae] And he made no bones about being well-educated.

And Joh wasn't any of those things.

- [Raymond] The new Labour government under Gough Whitlam

sets to work with a huge programme of reform.

And I mean, this would've set

Bjelke-Petersen's alarm bells ringing,

all these things that he did not like.

- [Paul] Funding the arts, buying Blue Poles, painting,

having a royal commission on human relationships.

- [Raymond] I can't think of any areas

in which they actually agreed.

- I shall continue, continue to fight to implement

our Labour programme.

- He clearly had no idea.

He just, "Oh, the poor people. We'll give them money."

Well, you have to increase taxes

if you want to give them money.

You can't borrow.

And if you just borrow, you're going to run away inflation.

- Can we assume that the Labour Party

is nothing more than a front for achieving the aims

of the communistic minority-

- [Host] Okay. I think we've heard enough at that one.

Thank you very much.

- ... and the destruction of Australia?

- Whitlam was labelled a communist by Bjelke-Petersen

at various times.

- It's a situation where people don't really know

even what communism is,

but it's to create fear of the unknown.

"And I will save you.

I will protect you from that threatening group."

- At this stage, what do you see as the vital issues

in the next election?

- Oh, I think they're a new deal in those things

which affect citizens closest.

For instance, education, health,

housing, transport,

the whole of the conditions in which people have to live,

mostly in cities.

- There was a real reaction

against the Whitlam government

throughout rural areas.

- It's not hard to evoke Canberra

as a big sort of monster

wanting to get their claws into regional Queensland.

- We really needed Joh to fight Whitlamism,

and so he became super hero.

- Would it be fair to say that your relations

with the Prime Minister

perhaps don't even exist at this time?

- I know Mr. Whitlam very well.

I've met him from time to time over the years.

And I would say we are quite good friends.

And we attack each other's policy very strongly.

I always do and always have and always will.

It's a centralist control,

and this is what we can't accept

because the honeymoon is over.

- Vincent Lingiari, I solemnly hand to you these deeds

as proof in Australian law that these lands

belong to the Gurindji people.

(audience clapping)

- So one of the promises of the Whitlam government

coming to power

was to bring in Aboriginal land rights.

- And Joh of course takes a view

that under no circumstance

would Indigenous people be given land rights in Queensland.

- No one could understand the concept

of Aboriginal land rights, and if they do,

you can have the land that's left over now-

- (chanting) Land rights.

- [Valerie] Because government's about averting criticism

and getting re-elected.

It's not about putting things right.

We expect government to put things right,

but at the end of the day, it's a settler colony.

I think Joh just was a person in power

that got lots of votes with the racist,

draconian views that he espoused.

(crowd chanting)

- Well, I've travelled the length and breadth

of this great state with all its natural wonders

and rich with its resources,

and then along come these extremist Aboriginals

with their sinister, radical campaigns for land rights

who want to take the land from under everybody's noses

and create a Black state.

Well, this has to be stopped.

This has to be stopped giving away national assets

left, right and centre.

You want land, you buy it like everybody else.

It's straightforward as far as I could see.

In Queensland, there's no such thing

as Aboriginal land rights or mineral rights.

Queensland is for Queenslanders.

We treat Aboriginal and Islander people exactly the same,

exactly the same as everybody else up here.

And it couldn't be fairer.

Couldn't be fairer.

- Joh was nothing other than reflecting

the absolute ignorant attitudes of everybody.

It's populism.

Donald Trump is not very different from Joh Bjelke-Petersen,

in the sense what you do is

all of the things that the public doesn't like,

you tell them you don't like them either.

You tell them they're the enemy.

"Identify your enemy.

Run your war against the enemy,

against the communists, against the socialists,

against the trade unionists, against the activists.

Nip it in the bud. Hit it with a hammer."

- The ALP team might be on the march,

but it knows only one step, left, left, left.

(crowd cheering)

- I mean, Whitlam thought he was up against a buffoon

and a fool, and his natural arrogance took flight.

He wasn't the sort of bloke to see danger.

His ego was too great to see the danger.

- Good evening.

Those were the scenes outside Parliament House

during what could well have been the roughest day ever

in the history of Australian politics.

Gough Whitlam sacked, both houses of Parliament dissolved

and a caretaker government formed under Malcolm Fraser

until a general election sometime before Christmas.

- The dismissal of 1975 divided the nation.

Whitlam underestimated Bjelke-Petersen's

absolute determination to get his own way

and paid the price.

- The people can speak. The people can work.

And the people can vote.

(audience cheering)

- [Attendee] And they want to keep it that way.

- [Amy] I mean, Joh was going to come at Gough

in any way that he could

to try and find some chinks in the armour.

And it was Joh who pushed over that domino

that led to the fall of the Whitlam government.

- Well, I think he's certainly one of the progenitors

of the dismissal.

- Bjelke-Petersen was certainly seen as a player

in the bringing down of the government,

particularly through his interference

with the composition of the Senate.

- In 1975, Labour Senator of Queensland Bert Milliner died,

and Joh introduced his own candidate, Pat Field,

who was the head of the furniture polishing union.

- [Frank] Albert Patrick Field was indeed a member

of the Labour Party, but he was an opponent of Gough Whitlam

and very hostile to the Labour Party

as it was then governing Australia from Canberra.

- No curbside interviews. You know that.

- No curbside interviews? - Yeah.

What do you want me to say about Mr. Field?

- Well, he- - Have you ever heard of him?

- Not until last week. Had you?

- Neither had I.

- And what do you think - - And I've never met anyone

I think was absolutely contemptible.

What makes it all the more nauseating

is of course that Mr. Bjelke-Petersen

is such a Bible-bashing bastard.

- That did not play well outside Brisbane.

- And a lot of Queenslanders thought that dismissal of Joh

was dismissing them as well.

- That was a slap in the face to Queensland,

not just Bjelke- Petersen.

Bjelke-Petersen would've absolutely loved that.

- Why do you think Mr. Bjelke-Petersen has done it?

Just to spite you?

- I suppose that's the only rational explanation,

but of course, the man is a paranoic.

He is a fanatic. He's a bigot.

- [Reporter] Pretty strong words, aren't they?

- Yes, well, the actions, of course,

would justify stronger words still, wouldn't they?

- The thing that can be easily overlooked

with Bjelke-Petersen

is that he was an extraordinarily vengeful person,

and that made him a very dangerous politician.

- Well, I never hid my opinions under a bushel

when it came to Mr. Whitlam.

His socialist agenda was

a very grave threat to Australia

and all the values we hold dear, and he had to be stopped.

Make no bones about it.

His policies were going to tear the heart

out of this country's prosperity and freedom,

and something had to be done and very quickly

before his poison had a chance to spread.

The federal opposition didn't have a clue

how to handle Mr. Whitlam.

They couldn't contain him.

So I decided to do it myself.

I stepped up and I did what I had to do as a good Australian

and a good Christian.

Who else was going to do it?

(film whirring)

- [Broadcaster] This is the latest roundup

from the Triple Z newsroom.

- Right at the end of Whitlam's Prime Ministership,

there was a push to grant a whole series of public licences

around the country to various radio stations.

And Triple Z was one of them.

The thing about Queensland at that time

was that there was really no alternative media to speak of.

- Triple Z, because it started on the campus

of the University of Queensland,

was embedded in protest culture.

They were the ones who were leading the charge.

- [Speaker] 4ZZZ don't stick to the rules

of Joh's media management.

Joh famously said that working with the media

was like feeding the chooks.

All you had to do was give them some feed

and they'd run off and report on it.

Triple Z didn't do that.

(gentle music)

- Well, in Cedar Bay in 1976,

that afternoon, the Telegraph newspaper

had a banner headline,

"Police bust hippie drug commune in North Queensland."

But then 4ZZZ started to run interviews

with some of the residents of the Cedar Bay commune.

- [Resident] I was just lying in bed asleep

and all of a sudden the helicopter started coming over

early in the morning, about six o'clock.

- And Triple z ended up being a really important kind of

counter narrative to what was going on.

(gentle music)

- [Bill] Cedar Bay was a beautiful, isolated stretch

of coastland north of Cairns.

- [Andrew] And that was to be redeveloped as a major resort,

but nobody knew about this hippie colony as such.

But Joh's government did and they wanted to get them out.

- On the 29th of August, 1976,

the Queensland Police Force conducted a military-style raid

on Cedar Bay.

There was over 30 police officers involved,

indigenous trackers.

- Helicopters and inflatable boats,

and there was gunfire.

- [Bill] The people that were living there were arrested

and tied to coconut trees

and the police officers set about setting alight

some of the hippies' dwellings.

- [Andrew] Joh thought being in far North Queensland

in August, no one would know about it.

Except ZZZ had a member of their news team there,

they heard about this, and they broke the story.

- [Bill] And it became a bit of a political fiasco.

- [Joh] I didn't think there were any houses there.

There may have been a few gunyahs.

I've seen these sort of things up in the north.

- [Reporter] Oh, certainly. They're very humble shelters.

I agree with you. - Yeah. Humble.

I've said some of the places

I wouldn't even tie my dog up in some of them.

That's what I've seen of some of them

up there in the north. - But haven't these people

got a right to live as they choose?

- [Joh] Well, I think that there were a lot of aspects

there about it that you ought to know, Andrew,

that you wouldn't live there.

- [John] This caused quite a furor in the media,

and Whitrod ordered an inquiry, which Joh closed down.

- I mean, this business of demanding an inquiry

at this point of time

before there is the evidence necessary to justify it,

well, this is why Cabinet made the decision that they did.

- [Bill] And the police were never held to account.

- [Paul] That pushed Whitrod over the edge.

Since the Springboks tour,

Joh Bjelke-Petersen had been

stepping all over Whitrod's authority.

- [John] Whitrod said,

"Well, I'm not going to tolerate interference

in my responsibilities as commissioner," and he resigned.

- [Quentin] It was at that time that Whitrod realised

that he'd lost control of the police force

and told the media at his resignation press conference

that Queensland was being turned into a police state.

- I was not prepared to be merely a front

for other people's decisions in areas of my responsibility.

The only way I couldn't draw attention to this situation

was by resigning.

- [Reporter] Is there widespread corruption in the force?

- It depends upon your point of view.

- [Reporter] What's your point of view?

- I don't want to answer that question.

- And Whitrod fled Queensland rapidly,

literally in fear for his life.

- And the story is told that a furniture van

containing his effects and a number of his papers,

some of which were quite incriminating apparently,

crashed and burned in a road accident

on the way to South Australia.

- And then when Whitrod resigned,

Joh turns to Terry Lewis,

this guy who he'd just made Assistant Commissioner,

and he says, "Actually, you know what?

You can be commissioner now."

- Even though all the folklore was that Terry Lewis

was a member of Bischof's Rat Pack.

- [Reporter] What was your relationship with the Rat Pack?

- Well, it's a funny term that one,

because I suppose if we look back far enough,

that was one I think that was used in relation

to Frank Sinatra, if we look back that far.

- [Reporter] For example, I might be more specific if I may-

- Yes. Very well.

- [Reporter] It's been suggested that you've

at some stage in your career been on the take,

that you've been a bag man.

- Well, it's certainly all foreign to me,

the validity of this.

(tense music)

- The relationship between Lewis and Bjelke-Petersen,

it's a very symbiotic relationship.

Bjelke-Petersen put Lewis as the head of his police force

so that Lewis would always support Bjelke-Petersen

in whatever endeavours he tried to bring forward.

- In October, 1977, the premier came into parliament

with an amendment to the Traffic Act,

saying the now infamous words,

"The day of the political street march is over."

- [Paul] And he said,

"We won't be issuing any more permits for protests,

and if you try to have one,

then we're going to crack down with the police

for the full force of their authority."

And Terry Lewis was willing to go along with that,

for lack of a better term, because he owed him one.

And in return, what Terry Lewis gave to Joh Bjelke-Petersen

was essentially an army that were willing

to carry out his ideological agenda.

- Well, I'm a simple man.

Things are pretty black and white to me,

which is why all the hullabaloo

over the crackdown on street demonstrations

was such a load of nonsense.

"Oh, Joh's denying our civil rights, our freedom to protest,

to express our opinion.

He's a dictator in jackboots."

Load of rubbish.

You know what this was? Pure, pure and simple.

Disrupting traffic. Yes.

Especially during the afternoons

when the school kiddies were trying to get home from school,

which is when the mobs would

hold their so-called protests.

What about normal people's rights?

Police Commissioner Lewis got it,

and so did the people of Queensland.

It was black and white. It was law and order.

And if you don't like it, you know what you can do.

- Myself and other lawyers and legal observers

in effect said, "What have we come to?"

(dramatic music)

- You know, on the BBC, I saw 700 people protesting

with two and a half thousand cops kind of controlling them

and a pregnant woman being hit in the head with a baton.

- You'd see tonnes of cops facing you, just facing you,

and it was whether or not you wanted to be the front line.

And then you could decide whether or not

you were going to run

or you were going to stay and hold your position.

- [Paul] In trying to ban street marches,

he radicalised so many more people

who might not have participated in other demonstrations,

but they sure as hell wanted

to still have their freedom of speech.

- We all supported each other in every march.

So the unionists would turn out for the women,

the women would turn out for the unionists.

- [Paul] It didn't matter what you were protesting for.

The right to protest being taken away

was a problem for everybody.

- You know, there were priests there

and all of these older people

and then all of us ragtag lot all in there as well.

And the power that you felt being in that group shouting,

"Joh must go, Joh must go."

Yeah.

- And it also split the community in two

in that you had a conservative mainstream

and you had a fighting left, the progressives,

who could see what was happening

and who knew that it was wrong, that it was immoral.

- The young, the unemployed, hippies, gays, students;

Joh didn't like any of them,

and he used his police force

to go and beat them up basically.

#'Pig City' - The Parameters #

- I can't almost explain it.

When punk hit Brisbane, there was a political edge to it

that there wasn't in Sydney and Melbourne.

(aggressive music)

# You go downtown, just beware #

# Pig city #

- The police in Sydney and Melbourne

weren't busting punk gigs.

But in Brisbane it was like,

"God, they're going to take over in a city hall.

It's the end of civilisation. Red alert, everyone."

- The cops would be coming during the gig.

We'd know, we'd see them amassing outside.

So we knew that when the gig was over

and we were leaving, that people were going to be arrested.

- Why are you doing this?

People are hiring a hall, a couple of punk bands play.

What's the problem?

- I mean, it was horrible, but it made the movement

far more magnificent.

And it was all political.

This system was well and truly fucked

and we were living under it,

and we had to do something about it.

# Go to a dance to have some fun #

# Pig city #

# Here come the boys with their dogs and guns #

# Pig city #

# They don't like punks #

# Run, Johnny, run #

# Pig city #

- And I think that was the thing of Joh.

Overreaction, overreaction.

- [Lindy] There was no future in Brisbane.

There simply was no future.

How could your work progress in a town like that?

- You know, it's very easy with the passage of time

to forget how appalling a place it actually was

for creative people.

You have a section of the community

that is coming down the Pacific Highway to escape

and a parallel highway that are moving into the spaces

they have vacated.

- People, of course, were coming up

from the southern states,

coming up from Melbourne and Sydney

because it's a low-tax state.

- My father got rid of the death duties,

and ultimately this state grew from that,

because people from down south

where death duties were still in place at that time,

people with money or near it,

or had retired or whatever else,

they flocked up here.

- [Frank] So the abolition of death duties

was meant to benefit certainly the rural community,

and particularly farmers

passing property on through inheritance,

and the fact that it was followed by the other states,

of course increased his prestige.

- And I sort of think that with what Sir Joh did there,

if he hadn't had done it,

I don't think anyone else would have done it,

because no government likes to lose a source of revenue.

- [Frank] Queensland seems to be

the centre of things economically,

and Joh seems to be at the centre of the Queensland economy,

making things happen.

- [Bob] It was extraordinary.

I mean, to take Australia

from being arguably a coal-importing country

and turn Queensland into

the biggest coal-exporting state on earth.

- [Frank] I mean, this is the period where coal really

begins to overtake wool

as Australia's most lucrative export.

- I'm not saying Joh did it by himself,

but Joh deserves the credit.

And good on him, you know?

I mean, we're not here to play Tiddlywinks.

- [Raymond] One of the problems with it, of course,

is that the companies that were operating in Queensland

were all overseas companies

and they took most of the profit out of the state.

- Australia's economy has been carried by coal.

And if you like it or don't like it, I don't care.

Right?

You have to live with the fact that it was us,

the people that backed Bjelke-Petersen and believed in him,

that were responsible for you

being able to buy a motorcar from overseas;

which is about everything you buy from overseas now,

but you would have no money to buy that if it wasn't for us.

- Bjelke-Petersen was a smart-arse,

but he was smart for his people.

He was clumsy on humanity.

He was clumsy on the earth.

He fucked up the rivers, brother.

He buggered up all the bloody rivers

and diverted them into dams.

That's what he'd done.

All these destruction things today

were done in a way of for profit.

- Look, Joh's superpower was to cut through.

And he did it in such a simplified way

that it was beautiful in execution and beautiful in outcome.

- Well, to me, he was very effective

because he got things done.

And I have to say that the thing that I liked best

about dealing with him is that he made a decision quickly.

- [Andrew] And that when you're in government,

that's the power you have.

Simply get on with the job and do it.

- My young lad, John, was home at Bethany one weekend

and one of the tractor tyres was flat.

Well, he stood there for ages staring at it.

Couldn't work it out for the life of him.

A head full of thistle soup.

"What do you think you're doing?" I said.

"It's not going to fix itself.

You'll be there dreaming in a month from Sunday.

Get stuck in."

I said, "Get her up on the jack, take the tyre off

and get the tube out, take her into town and get her fixed.

Don't think about it too much, John."

And that's always been my philosophy.

You get cracking.

- But Joh was the powerful man who was the Premier

who could make a decision about whatever he wanted to.

Yeah, he didn't have respect for the Westminster system.

Joh had this concept of democracy that,

"I've been voted for.

I should be able to do whatever I want."

- Mark my words.

I have seen my fellow politicians

up and down the length of this country

stand and stare at a flat tyre like John.

Where would Queensland be today if I'd taken that attitude?

Up the creek, I can tell you.

- I mean, he believed that he had absolute power

to make whatever decision was not illegal for him to do.

- In a pre-dawn move today,

demolition teams destroyed one of Brisbane's

most well-known landmarks, Cloudland Ballroom.

In a surprise move apparently intended

to forestall complaints from conservationists,

workmen moved in with heavy equipment about 4:00 AM.

- The destruction of those old buildings under Joh

made me furious.

It showed you how easily things that you loved

could be taken from you.

- [Broadcaster] In little more than an hour,

the distinctive Cloudland shell dome

had disappeared from the city's skyline.

(gentle jazz music)

- [David] And once those places are gone,

it's like someone's died, really.

It's just a feeling of overwhelming sadness.

(gentle jazz music)

- That was one of our very few big venues.

And what's there now? Apartments.

He destroyed so much.

- In a way, it was his way of saying he didn't need to care

what anybody else thought.

I remember somebody telling me

it was real dick on the table stuff.

- [Matthew] Queenslanders liked a show of strength

in their leader.

The sight of a crane meant progress.

- [Norm] He used to come down to the Gold Coast

and he used to count all the cranes in the sky.

And he used to look around

and he used to go to various developments there.

He was very, very proud of what he believed

he had created.

- [Edwina] In many ways,

Joh had hypnotised the majority of the state.

- But he made it easier for business to survive,

and that's why he won election after election.

- I don't really know how he hypnotised people.

I think because he seemed unbeatable.

- [Announcer] The Premier of Queensland,

Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

- [Edwina] Because no matter

how many times you voted against him,

he came back.

He was like Freddy Krueger. Unkillable.

- Oh, it often felt utterly hopeless, and you would think,

"How long is this going to continue?

It's just getting worse and worse."

- I think by that point in time,

after what would have been about 15 years

of conservative rule in Queensland,

it was a feeling of despair that the tyranny

was seemingly going on forever.

There had been elections where Joh

had manipulated the gerrymander into his favour

so that he was reclaiming power election after election.

- [Raymond] In Queensland,

gerrymander means you set up the electorate

so that the rural voters have more votes

than the city voters.

- God bless you. - Thank you.

Thank you very, very much.

- Joh was only there because of the electoral system.

He was only there because of the electoral system.

If we'd had equal representation in parliament,

he wouldn't have been the premier

for all that length of time.

- [Raymond] So to me, it was like a facade

propping up an authoritarian regime.

- Well, goodness gracious me,

they went on about this so-called gerrymander thing

until they were blue in the face

the whole time I was Premier.

"It's a conspiracy. It's unfair.

Joh has rigged the election."

Let me tell you straight.

When I first entered parliament after the war,

you didn't hear a peep about any gerrymander the whole time

because all of those country seats

were held by Labour people.

Not a word.

I led the national party to victory in those seats

because I got off my backside, hopped in a plane,

and I was up and down and back and forth across Queensland

like a dragonfly.

Those people in the back box,

they told me that they felt

as if they had been forgotten about.

Well, you call it a gerrymander,

I call it hard work and smart politics.

- Bjelke-Petersen is the equivalent of a redback spider

in the underpants of society.

He thought he was the king of Queensland.

He thought that he could run the state in any way

that he saw fit.

Cloaked himself in a garment of so-called Christianity

and then destroyed people.

- [Matthew] Everything with Joh is like a fight.

If there are strikes from the unions,

he's going to fight them.

By the mid 1980s throughout Australia,

the new right, as it was called,

seemed to be very much on the march,

and one of their central ideas is that unions

had too much power.

And the SEQEB dispute was about the government's efforts

to replace union labour

within the electricity authority in Southeast Queensland

with contract labour as a way of saving money.

- [Dick] The longer the dispute went on,

the longer people were without power.

Of course people were getting angry.

- Don't let union leaders wreck your livelihood.

All they are doing is inflicting unnecessary harm

on the community.

And who pays for all this?

The answer is simple. You will have to pay.

- [Dick] And the government

basically criminalised the strikers.

(strikers chanting)

- [Reporter] Until today,

the demonstrators have been passive.

This was different.

(protestor yelling indistinctly)

- [Dick] There was 1,020 who were actually sacked.

- [Reporter] They're dismissed, are they?

- They're dismissed. Of course they're dismissed.

They dismissed themselves. I didn't do it.

I warned them for day after day.

You can't do more than that, can I?

- [Raymond] With the SEQEB dispute, he had said,

"The days of union power are over.

I am using this dispute

to crush trade unionism in Queensland."

- People committed suicide

during the course of that dispute.

Families were split.

- Scab! - Scab!

- Scab! - Yes.

- [Striker] Hope you choke on your dinner, you grub!

- Better hold that job, you scab.

You won't get another one.

- Scab!

- Am I bitter about it?

Absolutely I'm bitter about it.

- [Norm] Joh had to make difficult decisions there,

because people were hurting.

Food was going bad in the supermarkets.

- Then I think to myself,

"My word, we've got to continue to work hard."

We've all of us got to give everything we've got

so that we can get back on a stable government,

so we can get Australia back up on its feet again,

ladies and gentlemen.

We've been knocked right over.

- [Norm] And he seemed

to tackle situations like that head on.

So there's no doubt about it.

He was certainly the man in charge.

- We feel he's a very honest man.

- I like him because he's a Christian.

He stands for the things that are right.

- [Frank] And it turned Bjelke-Petersen

into a kind of heroic figure,

and it set him up for another major election victory

the following year.

- There'll be no strikes. The power will stay on.

The lights will stay on.

(audience cheering)

- [Raymond] But as we see the story unfolding,

when he reaches the zenith of his power,

which is the 1986 election,

the seeds of his destruction are already in place.

- What's your dream?

How much do you dream your dream?

If your business collapses, that's sad.

If your dream collapses, that's a tragedy.

- [Paul] And so Joh Bjelke-Petersen decides

that he's going to make an attempt

from outside federal parliament

to run to become the prime minister of Australia.

- Because this is the launching today of a very big campaign

that will go from one end of Australia to the other

as the days and the weeks and the months go by.

- With the Joh for PM campaign,

I think some of the first questions asked were, "Why?"

- [Raymond] He felt he was riding so high

that he could take over the country.

- This is crazy.

- [Frank] However, a group of Gold Coast businessmen

often called "the white shoe brigade"

would take credit for planting this idea.

- [Raymond] At the time they believed

they really could pull it off.

- [Quentin] What was the delusion was,

he built his political base

on the fact that we Queenslanders don't like you bastards

in Canberra or New South Wales or anywhere else.

We're Queenslanders.

- [Frank] Bjelke-Petersen continued to use

the same old rhetoric, "Those socialists in Canberra."

But ordinary voters looked at Hawke and they asked,

"So where's the socialist?"

- [David] Joh didn't understand federal politics.

He just thought he could run some slogans.

He was going to dismantle the socialist legislation

of that terrible Labour Party and save the country.

- [Frank] He wants to make the country,

the whole country of Australia, more like Queensland.

He sees the free enterprise policies

that he believes that he's pursuing in Queensland

as the salvation of the country.

- [David] His belief in himself

and what he could achieve,

he was ... He had no doubt about himself.

(spiralling music)

- Isaiah said it best.

"What will you do on the day of reckoning?

Run for help? Leave your riches behind?"

He said,

"We will cringe among the captives

and fall among the slain."

Now, I'm a positive person,

but that day is coming for this country.

When I ran for PM, it wasn't about ego or glory.

Not on your nelly.

Everybody misunderstood this about me at the time.

We were on a slippery slope.

Why did I do it?

To clean up the disastrous political mess

we were sliding into as Australians.

I could see the big picture.

I saw catastrophe coming.

And in all good conscience, I had to try to do something.

Hawke had fooled the lot of them.

He fooled the lot.

He tricked them into looking the other way.

They couldn't see what I could see.

And nobody ended up caring anyway.

Well, that day of reckoning is on its way,

and it will be here sooner rather than later.

- [Frank] The Joh for PM campaign is deeply disruptive

to the coalition in Canberra.

The Liberal Party leader,

the leader of the opposition at the time, was John Howard.

- [John] Oh, look.

It was very frustrating at the time,

but he showed appalling political judgement

in imagining that his ludicrous Joh for PM campaign

could have come off.

- [Quentin] But it was impossible

to ask Howard to stand aside

and let Bjelke-Petersen from Queensland take over.

But he did. He tried.

- [Andrew] What it does, of course, is it actually breaks

John Howard's first attempt to become Prime Minister.

- [John] And I can understand that. Politics is like that.

You get somebody who grabs the microphone and says,

"I know how you feel and how you're hurting."

- I'm in the business of defeating the Hawke government

and we're going to beat the daylights out of them

on the 11th of July.

- And a lot of people would say, "You'll listen to Joh?"

and I'd say, "Yeah, but do you really think

we can win by destroying the Federal Coalition?"

"Oh, no. Joh won't do that." Yeah, well, he did.

- [Frank] And Hawke called an early election

and the Labour government was able

to basically point to the opposition and say,

"They can't run themselves. Don't let them run the country,"

and it worked.

- [Reporter] A jubilant Bob Hawke

claiming Labor's third historic victory.

- [Reporter] At Southport, Sir Joh formally announced

what must rank as one of the most humiliating back-downs

in Australian politics.

- But I want to say today that time beat me.

We have a Prime Minister in Canberra who lied.

(billiard balls clanking)

- [Paul] So the Joh for PM campaign wasn't just a disaster

on a political level.

It was also really problematic

because at that very critical moment,

his eyes weren't on the ball.

His mind was elsewhere.

- I heard a leak

from a Canberra-based police intelligence person,

and he told me a story about a friend of his

who was an undercover officer in Queensland

who'd been offered a bribe.

No surprise there.

But what was different about this

was that the bribe had come from a superior.

So there was an indication,

an early indication of systemic corruption.

I found my way to Queensland,

I met that undercover police officer.

His name was Jim Slade.

- When I first met Chris Masters,

it was the last bloody thing that I would have done,

especially in my position.

I was an undercover intelligence officer.

No one knew that I was a police officer for eight years.

Even my neighbours didn't know I'd been a police officer.

So when I sat down with Chris Masters at a hotel bar,

I felt very, very uneasy.

- I'll never forget the meeting.

He wasn't earning a lot of money,

but he didn't want to take the corruption money

that was coming his way.

- [Jim] And as a result of that, I was ostracised.

A car couldn't come into our driveway

without me pulling a firearm,

thinking that it was someone coming to get me.

My dog was poisoned.

My bedroom where my children sleep was smashed with a brick.

That was what fucking did it.

I wasn't going to be part

of being a member of a police force

that couldn't abide by someone telling the truth.

I had to do something.

I had to do something for myself.

I had to do something for my family.

I had to do something for the police force.

And that was what it was.

I sold out all my mates and went to a journalist.

(dramatic music)

- [Andrew] I remember sitting around the television

with the entire family when "The Moonlight State" aired.

- Thanks for joining me.

- And we were all riveted by it

and there was a sense that after this,

surely, everything changes.

And it turned out to be true.

(dramatic music)

- [David] To actually see people on camera

finally telling the truth, it was just extraordinary.

- [Blair] We knew how corrupt this government was.

We knew how corrupt this police service was.

We knew how corrupt

the then-Sir Terrence Lewis police commissioner was.

We knew all this.

And then the response by Joh's deputy, Bill Gunn,

Joh, again, was away.

- [Quentin] The pressure was on Gunn to do something.

- Anyway, Gunny, he rang me up at midnight and he said,

"We've got a corrupt police force,"

and I said, "I know."

And he said, "How do you know?"

"How do you think I know?"

"They have a go at you? "Yeah, why don't you come to me?"

No, because you couldn't get close to him, Bill.

- There's been a series of police ministers

that have had this hanging over the head.

And it's not going to hang over my head, I can tell you.

I'm going to go out and I'm going to get it done.

- He called the Fitzgerald inquiry without consulting Joh.

- And I said, "Well, Joh's not going agree to that."

He said, "Joh's away."

I said, "He's sure going to be unhappy when he gets back."

He said, "Too fucking bad.

He should have done something about it before this

and he hasn't."

- [Quentin] So Gunn looked around

and appointed a QC, Tony Fitzgerald.

And with a very short time,

the whole politics of Queensland changed.

- [Frank] It felt like the spell was broken.

As much as he'd like to use the old methods

of closing down an inquiry which had worked before,

Bjelke-Petersen is no longer in control of the story.

- Well, the obvious question

that people are asking themselves,

thanks to all this Fitzgerald inquiry business,

is if there was so much corruption going on

under every nook and cranny,

then how did the premier not know about it?

Well, listen to me very carefully.

I did not know about any of it.

And to understand how I didn't know,

you need to understand how government works.

A government is very much like

one of those big anchor chains

that I used to clear the Brigalow.

A chain has dozens of links,

hundreds that go way back into the past.

And also, how long is the chain and how far back does it go?

And perhaps these are the sort of questions,

well, that defy answers.

- [Matthew] What's fascinating to me is how quickly

the House of Cards fell.

And within weeks you have these extraordinary allegations.

- [Paul] Political corruption,

corruption in the corporate world,

corruption in the judiciary as well.

- [Matthew] The Joke is exposed.

- [Paul] There were question marks

about some of the infrastructure projects

and construction projects

that Joh had really pinned his legacy on.

- [Matthew] It was jolting every day of the week.

Queensland was reeling from the revelations.

- Sir Terrence, do you think you have anything to fear

from the ongoing prosecution?

- Well, I shouldn't have

unless they display a biassed attitude

and want to justify their great amount of money

that's been spent.

- [Jana] So you don't expect to be charged

with any offence? - I shouldn't be, no.

- You think the inquiry's been a waste of time?

- To some extent, yes.

- Sir Terrence, thanks for your time.

- Thank you.

- [Quentin] It's important to remember that Fitzgerald

didn't make any declarations of corruption.

But ultimately, Sir Terrence Lewis was convicted and jailed

and stripped of his knighthood.

(dramatic music)

- I wish to announce to the people of Queensland

that I've decided to retire on the 8th of the 8th, '88.

The date will mark 20 years as Premier.

- [Paul] Now at this time, that still would have put on

almost about a year that he would have had left in office.

But by that point, the Fitzgerald inquiry,

with more and more revelations of corruption

coming out day after day after day in the press,

it became unsustainable for the party to allow Joh

to go out on his own terms.

- So Bjelke-Petersen's solution was a typically

ruthless, mean one.

He'd sack five ministers.

- [Reporter] Gunn, Ahern, Austin, Munson, and McKechnie.

- [Frank] He goes off to the governor, Walter Campbell,

and asks for those five ministers to be sacked.

- That didn't work.

A day later, he asked the Governor-General

to sack three of his ministers.

That succeeded, but by then the party had had enough.

- What happened was Joh was stabbed in the back, right.

- They turned on him.

- But still, Joh didn't give up.

In fact, one of his last grasps to keep that power

was to ignore the Nationals entirely

and turn to his arch nemeses, the Labour Party, and say,

"Hey, why don't we all come together

and I'll be your premier?"

- Ask the other members

because there's nothing to raise about it.

- [Reporter] So there wasn't an attempted coup, Premier?

- No, there wasn't.

- [Frank] There were also stories

of him approaching the palace,

of trying to get the Queen to save him.

- There was the feeling that Joh was going

a little bit bananas.

- [Quentin] It all became quite farcical.

- [David] I mean, a man of his stubbornness,

a man with his history,

a man with his steel is not going to go quietly.

- [Reporter] Have you got any plans

for your retirement anyway?

- No, I haven't.

- [Reporter] Are you going to stay until the election?

- I'll stay on as long as I want to stay on.

- His final moments are tragic.

He had been turned away at every door

and the last thing that he could do,

he basically barricaded himself in the office

and refused to leave.

- Have a good day. Okay?

- [Reporter] Wow.

- [Reporter] Well, yes, he's still in his office

at the executive building.

He is a bitterly disappointed man.

- [Matthew] Joh had lost touch with reality.

He'd lost it.

- [Edwina] For days, three days, he stayed in there.

- [Quentin] Even though people were knocking on his door,

saying, "Joh, it's over, you've got to go.

You've got to go."

He held out until it became ridiculous.

- [Paul] He almost became locked in this delusion

that if he just stayed there long enough, he could beat it.

(bell dinging)

- [David] Surely, that would suggest to you

that he's made his modus operandi was power.

Power.

(dramatic music)

(bell dinging)

- [Joh] I've decided to resign as premier

and retire from parliament effective immediately.

I do appreciate your prayers.

I wish you well.

Thank you all.

Goodbye.

(dramatic music)

- [John] He was disappointed at the way in which it

the way it ended.

He would have loved to have done the 20 years.

(gentle music)

- [Norm] Well, first of all, Joh was not corrupt.

- [Raymond] But you've got to look at the evidence

and the evidence shows that he was.

- [Sallyanne] I will go to my death, my deathbed

not believing that Joh was corrupt

and I base that on the fact that I never saw any evidence

of corruption or greed or looking for wealth.

I think what he did do, which was a sort of country way,

was a few favours for mates.

- [David] Well, Joh was never convicted of any crime.

He walked away with nothing.

He walked away after years of public service,

making Queensland great, an innocent man that left a legacy.

And that is the story.

(gentle music)

- [David] Joh,

a man who made history

that history's already forgotten,

but what a character.

I'll never see another one of him, I don't think.

- [Bob] When he was getting a bit enfeebled,

and Florence said,

"Bob, Joh has to lie down now.

He's pretty exhausted, you know."

But it was very sad.

I had to carry him in my arms and put him in the bed. Hmm.

That's the last time I saw him. Yeah.

(sombre music)

- [Meg] For me, I mean, he died years and years

after he left politics

and I can still remember we had a beautiful service

in the town hall, and there was just all this sea of people.

He really did have an impact

and people felt that it was the passing of an era.

- As a matter of fact, it meant a lot to me

(gentle music)

because I knew the guy,

and Queensland lost someone special.

- We look at Joh and think,

"Once in a generation, this character."

Then we look at Trump and we go, "Hang on."

Some bells start to ring in terms of

what we've gone through a generation or two before.

I mean, that template was already here

with a peanut farmer at the bottom of the world,

and now we see it play out on a world stage.

But there are eerie and uncanny parallels.

- Well, it's a beautiful sunrise up here this morning.

There was nothing like Bethany, but very beautiful.

God's work.

I can hear father's voice.

"You stand tall.

You walk with your shoulders straight, Joh,

and hold that head high, son.

You go out on your own terms."

Now what do you think I scribbled in my Bible

that night after my last session in Parliament?

"God, Save the Queen?"

"They know not what they do?"

Oh, no, no, no, no.

"It is finished."

It is finished.

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