The author:
Queensland: beautiful one day, perfect the next but constantly riddled with corruption. That was the situation I discovered when I arrived in Brisbane in 1982 fresh from Fleet Street to start a new life with my wife and two young children.
I had been attracted by the outdoor lifestyle in an eternal summer and an egalitarian society. I was looking forward to writing positive and uplifting stories for the state’s Sunday Sun instead of the weekly diet of exposés and revelations of the News of the World where I had worked as an investigative reporter for the previous nine years – a time when the paper was still principled and ethical in dealing with people and information.
But it didn’t take long to realise something was rotten in the state of Queensland and that the weeds of corruption were actually being propagated and nurtured by the most senior levels of government, with a crooked police commissioner acting as head gardener.
At one level innocent people were framed, demonstrators bashed by police, political opponents spied on, honest police bullied and vilified, and efficient companies failed to gain government contracts despite submitting the best tenders.
More extremely, lives were ruined or extinguished. There was a lack of action in tackling the growing illegal drug trade, with some victims becoming criminals to support their habits and others dying from overdoses. Families fell apart when gamblers at the illegal casinos lost vast amounts, even their homes. Young girls were allowed to become enslaved as prostitutes. There were suspicious deaths and unsolved murders – prostitutes who perhaps threatened to rock the boat and were found dead from overdoses, drug dealers who became a problem, and men who were involved with illegal gambling.
The media had largely failed to expose this regime and its effects. The state’s daily newspaper, The Courier-Mail, was a sedate, old-fashioned daily newspaper which suffered from a lack of competition. There were other media outlets but many journalists were in thrall to some of the biggest villains, gambling regularly with illegal starting price bookies and drinking after hours at an illegal gambling den associated with a brothel, where police were paid for protection. There was also an attitude among some journalists that this was the way it had always been and there wasn’t much point in trying to change it.
As an example, I came across a flagrant abuse of power by the officer in charge of a small country town. He avoided any risk of local youngsters getting drunk and disorderly on Friday nights by locking them up early in the evening, with no charges but with a beating when he considered it necessary, and then releasing them in the early hours of the next morning. The chief of staff told me: “Look, there’s nothing wrong with that. I was kicked down the back steps of my local police station when I misbehaved at that age and it taught me a lesson.” I had to take time off work and visit the town in my own time, take statutory declarations and then give my story to the Opposition police spokesman to expose the brutality. For my trouble I was ‘named and shamed’ in Parliament as a lousy no-good journalist by the government MP representing the town.
I made it my business to discover why Queensland had reached this appalling position. In addition to asking pointed questions of people in a position to know, I read every copy of the Sunday Sun for 30 years and then examined Hansard for a similar period, photocopying anything and everything which I felt had a bearing on the corruption. Later, I analysed the Sunday Sun’s coverage of the 1963-64 National Hotel Inquiry as part of a master’s degree and wrote an 85,000 word thesis on why it was that newspapers had failed to expose Queensland’s endemic corruption in the 30 years leading up to the Fitzgerald Inquiry which finally ended that corruption.
I decided that journalistic life in Queensland was going to be rather tame after that. The challenges would be found inside government where enormous change was about to take place. I became a ministerial media advisor, working for several ministers in the reformist Goss Government until it was ousted in February 1996. New Opposition leader Peter Beattie invited me to become the Opposition’s media advisor and when Peter became Premier in June 1998 he invited me to become his principal media advisor. I’m proud to have been part of governments which contributed to Queensland broadening its attitudes and its economic base.
My formative years were spent in the London suburb of Lewisham roaming among bomb sites, building soap box carts, playing pinball machines and, occasionally, attending the non-fee paying Colfe’s Grammar School. While working for HM Customs and Excise in a desk job I joined an organisation which needed a secretary – so I taught myself to type and became secretary. Then a press secretary was needed – so I learned what a good media release should comprise and contributed weekly reports to the local paper, The Tonbridge Free Press. The editor happened to live next door to the chairman and mentioned that he thought my media releases were excellent. And that’s how I fell into journalism. I grabbed the opportunity and have never ceased to realise how lucky I was, especially when so many youngsters with their hearts set on becoming a journalist never managed to get past the front door, despite writing to every small-town newspaper in the country.
I’ve been married for more than 40 years to a wonderful wife who has cheerfully put up with the fact that for more than a decade I started work at 6am and frequently didn’t get home until she was in bed – and then, when she hoped we’d have some time together, I spent another few years finishing The Most Dangerous Detective, secreting myself in libraries and archives and becoming a permanent fixture in front of the computer. Thank you, Kaye. We’ve got two charming adult children and two delightfully cheerful grandsons.
Odds and sods:
I compensated for my lack of enthusiasm at school by enrolling in a four-year master’s degree at Queensland University of Technology in the 90s and, largely by studying between 10pm and 2am, gained a master of business degree in 1998.
Genealogy has led to a deep interest in social history and revealed amazing twists and turns in my family’s ancestry which I might write about one day.
One of my favourite books is Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice. But which is the town that Shute believed could grow and prosper to emulate Alice Springs? A few years ago Kaye and I set out to discover the answer to that question. I’ll eventually get round to posting the resulting article on my blog.
I qualified as a ski instructor in the 70s and still enjoy skiing – nowadays with my snowboarding daughter.
I started running in 2000, completed that year’s Gold Coast Marathon and have maintained my fitness.
I’ve abseiled over the White Cliffs of Dover, completed a mod/diff climb in the Langdale Pikes, chatted with the Queen and Prince Philip, been a nippers’ soccer team manager and coach, Scout Group chairman, caused gales of laughter when I learned to sailboard, been lucky enough to travel extensively and believe that the bottle is always at least half full.
I now have time to spend more time on researching travel plans, red wines and single malts.
Queensland: beautiful one day, perfect the next but constantly riddled with corruption. That was the situation I discovered when I arrived in Brisbane in 1982 fresh from Fleet Street to start a new life with my wife and two young children.
I had been attracted by the outdoor lifestyle in an eternal summer and an egalitarian society. I was looking forward to writing positive and uplifting stories for the state’s Sunday Sun instead of the weekly diet of exposés and revelations of the News of the World where I had worked as an investigative reporter for the previous nine years – a time when the paper was still principled and ethical in dealing with people and information.
But it didn’t take long to realise something was rotten in the state of Queensland and that the weeds of corruption were actually being propagated and nurtured by the most senior levels of government, with a crooked police commissioner acting as head gardener.
At one level innocent people were framed, demonstrators bashed by police, political opponents spied on, honest police bullied and vilified, and efficient companies failed to gain government contracts despite submitting the best tenders.
More extremely, lives were ruined or extinguished. There was a lack of action in tackling the growing illegal drug trade, with some victims becoming criminals to support their habits and others dying from overdoses. Families fell apart when gamblers at the illegal casinos lost vast amounts, even their homes. Young girls were allowed to become enslaved as prostitutes. There were suspicious deaths and unsolved murders – prostitutes who perhaps threatened to rock the boat and were found dead from overdoses, drug dealers who became a problem, and men who were involved with illegal gambling.
The media had largely failed to expose this regime and its effects. The state’s daily newspaper, The Courier-Mail, was a sedate, old-fashioned daily newspaper which suffered from a lack of competition. There were other media outlets but many journalists were in thrall to some of the biggest villains, gambling regularly with illegal starting price bookies and drinking after hours at an illegal gambling den associated with a brothel, where police were paid for protection. There was also an attitude among some journalists that this was the way it had always been and there wasn’t much point in trying to change it.
As an example, I came across a flagrant abuse of power by the officer in charge of a small country town. He avoided any risk of local youngsters getting drunk and disorderly on Friday nights by locking them up early in the evening, with no charges but with a beating when he considered it necessary, and then releasing them in the early hours of the next morning. The chief of staff told me: “Look, there’s nothing wrong with that. I was kicked down the back steps of my local police station when I misbehaved at that age and it taught me a lesson.” I had to take time off work and visit the town in my own time, take statutory declarations and then give my story to the Opposition police spokesman to expose the brutality. For my trouble I was ‘named and shamed’ in Parliament as a lousy no-good journalist by the government MP representing the town.
I made it my business to discover why Queensland had reached this appalling position. In addition to asking pointed questions of people in a position to know, I read every copy of the Sunday Sun for 30 years and then examined Hansard for a similar period, photocopying anything and everything which I felt had a bearing on the corruption. Later, I analysed the Sunday Sun’s coverage of the 1963-64 National Hotel Inquiry as part of a master’s degree and wrote an 85,000 word thesis on why it was that newspapers had failed to expose Queensland’s endemic corruption in the 30 years leading up to the Fitzgerald Inquiry which finally ended that corruption.
I decided that journalistic life in Queensland was going to be rather tame after that. The challenges would be found inside government where enormous change was about to take place. I became a ministerial media advisor, working for several ministers in the reformist Goss Government until it was ousted in February 1996. New Opposition leader Peter Beattie invited me to become the Opposition’s media advisor and when Peter became Premier in June 1998 he invited me to become his principal media advisor. I’m proud to have been part of governments which contributed to Queensland broadening its attitudes and its economic base.
My formative years were spent in the London suburb of Lewisham roaming among bomb sites, building soap box carts, playing pinball machines and, occasionally, attending the non-fee paying Colfe’s Grammar School. While working for HM Customs and Excise in a desk job I joined an organisation which needed a secretary – so I taught myself to type and became secretary. Then a press secretary was needed – so I learned what a good media release should comprise and contributed weekly reports to the local paper, The Tonbridge Free Press. The editor happened to live next door to the chairman and mentioned that he thought my media releases were excellent. And that’s how I fell into journalism. I grabbed the opportunity and have never ceased to realise how lucky I was, especially when so many youngsters with their hearts set on becoming a journalist never managed to get past the front door, despite writing to every small-town newspaper in the country.
I’ve been married for more than 40 years to a wonderful wife who has cheerfully put up with the fact that for more than a decade I started work at 6am and frequently didn’t get home until she was in bed – and then, when she hoped we’d have some time together, I spent another few years finishing The Most Dangerous Detective, secreting myself in libraries and archives and becoming a permanent fixture in front of the computer. Thank you, Kaye. We’ve got two charming adult children and two delightfully cheerful grandsons.
Odds and sods:
I compensated for my lack of enthusiasm at school by enrolling in a four-year master’s degree at Queensland University of Technology in the 90s and, largely by studying between 10pm and 2am, gained a master of business degree in 1998.
Genealogy has led to a deep interest in social history and revealed amazing twists and turns in my family’s ancestry which I might write about one day.
One of my favourite books is Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice. But which is the town that Shute believed could grow and prosper to emulate Alice Springs? A few years ago Kaye and I set out to discover the answer to that question. I’ll eventually get round to posting the resulting article on my blog.
I qualified as a ski instructor in the 70s and still enjoy skiing – nowadays with my snowboarding daughter.
I started running in 2000, completed that year’s Gold Coast Marathon and have maintained my fitness.
I’ve abseiled over the White Cliffs of Dover, completed a mod/diff climb in the Langdale Pikes, chatted with the Queen and Prince Philip, been a nippers’ soccer team manager and coach, Scout Group chairman, caused gales of laughter when I learned to sailboard, been lucky enough to travel extensively and believe that the bottle is always at least half full.
I now have time to spend more time on researching travel plans, red wines and single malts.
