Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen (13 January 191123 April 2005) was an Australian politician and farmer who served as premier of Queensland from 1968 to 1987 as leader of the Queensland National Party (earlier known as the Country Party). He was renowned for his political longevity and the institutional corruption that pervaded his government.
Bjelke-Petersen was born in New Zealand's North Island to Danish immigrant parents. His family moved to Australia when he was a child and settled on farming property near Kingaroy, Queensland. He left school at the age of 14 and went into farming. Bjelke-Petersen was elected to the Kingaroy Shire Council in 1946 and to the Queensland Legislative Assembly at the 1947 state election. He would serve in state parliament for over 40 years, holding the seats of Nanango (1947–1950) and Barambah (1950–1987).
Bjelke-Petersen was appointed as a government minister in 1963 and succeeded as premier and Country Party leader in 1968 following the death of Jack Pizzey. He would lead the party to seven consecutive election victories, governing in coalition with the Liberal Party until 1983. His first three electoral victories saw his party benefit from a system of rural malapportionment later nicknamed the "Bjelkemander", which allowed him to remain premier despite frequently receiving a smaller number of votes than the state's two other major parties.Peter Charlton, "Law and order the making of unlikely leader," The Courier-Mail, 25 April 2005, pg 25. The system earned Bjelke-Petersen the nickname "the Hillbilly Dictator". Regardless, he was a highly popular figure among conservative voters and over the course of his 19 years as premier he tripled the number of Country/National voters and doubled the party's percentage vote. After the Liberal Party under then leader Terry White pulled out of the Coalition government in 1983, Bjelke-Petersen reduced his former partners to a mere eight seats in an election held later that year. In 1985 Bjelke-Petersen launched a campaign to move into federal politics to become prime minister, though the campaign was eventually aborted.
Bjelke-Petersen earned himself a reputation as a "law and order" politician with his repeated use of police force against street demonstrators and strongarm tactics with trade unions, leading to descriptions of Queensland under his leadership as a police state. Starting in 1987, this administration came under the scrutiny of a royal commission into police corruption and its links with state government ministers. Bjelke-Petersen was unable to recover from the series of damaging findings and after initially resisting a party vote that replaced him as leader, retired from politics on 1 December 1987. Two of his state ministers, as well as the police commissioner Bjelke-Petersen had unusually appointed from a junior Inspector rank, and then later knighted, were jailed for corruption offences and in 1991 Bjelke-Petersen, too, was tried for perjury over his evidence to the royal commission; the jury failed to reach a verdict as the jury foreman was a member of the Young Nationals and a member of the "Friends of Joh" group, and Bjelke-Petersen was deemed too old to face a second trial. Bjelke-Petersen was widely regarded as corrupt and used threats of defamation writs to quell reporting of allegations.
During the Bjelke-Petersen era the state underwent considerable economic development."Sir Joh, our home-grown banana republican" , The Age, 25 April 2005. He was one of the most well-known and controversial figures of 20th-century Australian politics because of his uncompromising conservatism (including his role in the downfall of the Whitlam federal government), political longevity, and the institutional corruption of his government. Many aspects of the projects that contributed to economic development were achieved through the bribery of government ministers, most notably Russ Hinze, to gain approvals and funding that would have otherwise been refused.
Early life Bjelke-Petersen was born on 13 January 1911 in Dannevirke, a town in the North Island of New Zealand. He was the second of three children born to Maren () and Carl George Bjelke-Petersen. His parents were both Danish emigrants to Australia; his mother had arrived in Queensland as a child while his father moved to Australia as a young man. His father's siblings included prominent novelist Marie Bjelke-Petersen and physical culture advocate Christian Bjelke-Petersen.
Bjelke-Petersen's parents had moved from Queensland to New Zealand in 1903, where his father, a Lutheran minister, was posted to the originally Scandinavian settlement of Dannevirke. The family returned to Australia in 1913 to aid his father's health, settling on a farming property named "Bethany" near Kingaroy, Queensland. Bjelke-Petersen was raised in a conservative religious household, with the Sabbath strictly observed and daily Bible readings; his mother ran a Sunday school from the family home. At their father's insistence, he and his siblings were raised speaking Danish as their home language, something atypical of Scandinavian immigrants in Australia who more often rapidly adopted English.
The young Bjelke-Petersen suffered from polio, leaving him with a lifelong limp. The family was poor, and his father was frequently in poor health. Bjelke-Petersen left formal schooling at age 14 to work with his mother on the farm, though he later enrolled in correspondence school and undertook a University of Queensland extension course on the "Art of Writing". He taught Sunday school, delivered sermons regularly in nearby towns and joined the Kingaroy debating society.
In 1933, Bjelke-Petersen began work land-clearing and peanut farming on the family's newly acquired second property. His efforts eventually allowed him to begin work as a contract land-clearer and to acquire further capital which he invested in farm equipment and natural resource exploration. He developed a technique for quickly clearing scrub by connecting a heavy anchor chain between two bulldozers. By the time he was 30, he was a prosperous farmer and businessman. Obtaining a pilot's licence early in his adult life, Bjelke-Petersen also started aerial spraying and grass seeding to further speed up pasture development in Queensland.
After failing in a 1944 plebiscite against the sitting member to gain Country Party endorsement in the state seat of Nanango, based on Kingaroy, Bjelke-Petersen was elected in 1946 to the Kingaroy Shire Council, where he developed a profile in the Country Party. With the support of local federal member and shire council chairman Sir Charles Adermann and state opposition leader Sir Frank Nicklin, he gained Country Party endorsement for Nanango and was elected a year later at age 36, going on to give regular radio talks and becoming secretary of the local Nationals branch. He would hold this seat, renamed Barambah in 1950, for the next 40 years. The Labor Party had held power in Queensland since 1932 and Bjelke-Petersen spent eleven years as an opposition member.
Rise to power
On 31 May 1952, Bjelke-Petersen married typist Florence Gilmour, who would later become a significant political figure in her own right.
In 1957, following a split in the Labor Party, the non-Labor parties came to power for the first time in 32 years and only the second time in 42 years. Nicklin became premier, with the Liberal Party as junior partner in a non-Labor Coalition. This was a reversal of the situation at the national level. At the federal level and in most states where a Coalition existed in the normal sense, the Liberals were the senior partner in the Coalition. However, Queensland, then as now, was Australia's least centralised mainland state; the provincial cities between them have more people than the Brisbane area. In these areas, the Country Party was stronger than the Liberal Party. As a result, the Country Party had historically won more seats than its urban counterpart, and had been senior partner in the Coalition (until the parties merged) since 1925.
In 1963 Nicklin appointed Bjelke-Petersen as minister for works and housing, a portfolio that gave him the opportunity to bestow favours and earn the loyalty of backbenchers by approving construction of schools, police stations and public housing in their electorates. At various times, he also served as acting minister for education, police, Aboriginal and Island Affairs, local government and conservation and labour and industry. He would serve in cabinet without interruption until his retirement in 1987. Only Thomas Playford IV, who served in the South Australian cabinet without interruption from 1938 to 1965, served longer as a federal or state cabinet minister.
Premiership (19681987) Nicklin retired in January 1968 and was succeeded as Premier and Country Party leader by Jack Pizzey; Bjelke-Petersen was elected unopposed as deputy Country Party leader. On 31 July 1968, after just seven months in office, Pizzey suffered a heart attack and died. Deputy Premier and Liberal leader Gordon Chalk was sworn in as caretaker premier until the Country Party could elect a new leader, with Bjelke-Petersen as deputy premier. The Country Party had 27 seats in Parliament; the Liberals had 20. Nonetheless, there was some dispute over whether the Liberals should take senior status, which would have made Chalk premier in his own right. Matters were brought to a head when Bjelke-Petersen—elected Country Party leader within days of Pizzey's death—threatened to pull the Country Party out of the Coalition unless he became Premier. After seven days Chalk accepted the inevitable, and Bjelke-Petersen was sworn in as Premier on 8 August 1968. He remained Police Minister.
First Ministry and conflict of interest
Within months of becoming premier, Bjelke-Petersen encountered his first controversy over allegations of conflict of interest. In April 1959, while still a backbencher, he had paid £2 for an Authority to Prospect, giving him the right to search for oil over near Hughenden in far north Queensland. The next month he incorporated a company, Artesian Basin Oil Co. Pty Ltd, of which he was sole director and shareholder, and the same day entered an agreement to sell 51% of the company's shares to an American company for £12,650. The following day he sought the consent of Mines Minister Ernie Evans to transfer the oil search authority to Artesian for £2; the consent was given a week later.
When the Taxation Commissioner ruled that the £12,650 windfall from the £2 authority was a taxable profit, Bjelke-Petersen appealed, eventually taking the matter to the High Court. The appeal was dismissed, with Justice Taylor ruling that Bjelke-Petersen's six million percent gain from the £2 authority arose from "a profit-making undertaking". In 1962 Artesian transferred its Authority to Prospect to a new company, Exoil NL, for £190,000, and Bjelke-Petersen in turn bought a million shares in Exoil.
On 1 September 1968, three weeks after becoming premier, Bjelke-Petersen's government gave two companies, Exoil NL and Transoil NL—in both of which he was a major shareholder—six-year leases to prospect for oil on the Great Barrier Reef north of Cooktown. Opposition Leader Jack Houston revealed the Premier's financial involvement in the companies at a press conference in March 1969, where he asserted Bjelke-Petersen had gained "fabulous wealth" from the £2 prospecting authority, which had now mushroomed into Exoil shares worth AU$720,000. Bjelke-Petersen said he had done nothing wrong, but resigned his directorship of Artesian in favour of his wife.