Journalists, as a rule, don’t write the headlines. They’re designed to catch your attention, especially in our click-based economy, and unfortunately aren’t always an accurate reflection of the story they’re selling.
But even as a journalist who knows this all too well, I’m still troubled by one headline from a few years ago that read: “Peter Dutton has the worldview of a Queensland cop. It’s in our interests to give him a go.”
As the author of Pig City, a book about the bad old days in my adopted hometown of Brisbane, I was stunned. You had to pretend a whole lot of stuff hadn’t happened — and wasn’t still happening — to take a headline like that at face value.
Pig City was named after an obscure single by The Parameters. The song excoriated the corruption, intimidation and brutality of Queensland’s finest, four years before their institutionalised malice was laid bare by the Fitzgerald inquiry.
The last witness to appear at the Fitzgerald inquiry was Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the long-serving former premier of Queensland from 1968 to 1987. When the ageing hillbilly dictator was asked if he understood the separation of powers under the Westminster system, Bjelke-Petersen first pretended he had not heard the question. Then he claimed not to have understood it, burbling incoherently until — finally pinned — he answered: “Well, you tell me, and I’ll tell you whether you’re right or not. Don’t you know?”
It’s true Victoria and New South Wales had brutal and corrupt police at that time. But Bjelke-Petersen’s ignorance of and contempt for democratic niceties meant Queensland was the only state in which the police effectively served as the government’s private army.
They kept dossiers on political dissenters. They savagely beat protesters. They harassed and intimidated journalists. In fact, they harassed and intimidated anyone who looked a bit different. Indigenous people and young people, especially punks, were favoured targets. (Sometimes, they got them mixed up. After San Francisco punk band The Dead Kennedys played Festival Hall in 1983, the cops arrested the band’s Black drummer, the late D.H. Peligro, believing him to be a drunk Indigenous man.)
In return for their loyalty, the government turned a blind eye to the police’s protection (indeed, active enfranchisement) of all the “sin” the strict Lutheran premier claimed to have stopped at the Tweed River but which lit up the Moonlight State like a Christmas tree.
The kickbacks flowed all the way to the top: commissioner Terry Lewis was found to have collected more than $600,000 from the brothels and casinos that successive police ministers had sworn, on national television, did not exist.
Inside the force, this racket was codenamed “the joke” — something you were in on, or you weren’t. Lewis was eventually jailed for 14 years and stripped of his knighthood. (That’s him on the cover of Pig City, toting a Tommy gun.)
Peter Dutton, let’s be absolutely clear, wasn’t party to any of this debauchery. But he was every inch a product of the culture and politics of the time, having graduated from the Queensland Police Academy in 1990. Is this really the worldview that it’s in our interests to “give a go”?
And what of the Queensland police now? How much has Pig City, and Queensland, actually changed? In the book’s introduction, I touted it as a story about how Brisbane grew up. I am much less confident of that now.
In early 2022 — at the same time the contentious headline above appeared — the Queensland Police Service was reeling from a series of scandals, culminating in Judge Deborah Richards’ inquiry into the service’s responses to domestic and family violence.
That followed Margaret McMurdo’s inquiry, dismissed as “just another woke report to slam police at every opportunity” by ex-police union boss Ian Leavers. Leavers abandoned his opposition after an inquest into the deaths of Hannah Clarke and her three children.
The Richards report found the QPS suffered from poor leadership and was riddled with cultural problems, including entrenched misogyny, sexism and racism, which unsurprisingly compromised its responses to domestic and family violence.
Leavers later penned a vicious op-ed for the Courier-Mail in which he claimed a state treaty would offer a “free pass to every rapist, domestic violence abuser, habitual home invader and car thief” who identified as Aboriginal. He is now the state’s cross-border commissioner.
To distract from its failings, Queensland Police, in tandem with the Courier-Mail and the LNP, ran a relentless campaign on youth crime. Never mind that the QPS’ own data showed rates were at near-record lows.
Despite being a state issue, campaigning on crime is natural territory for a former cop like Peter Dutton. The Queensland election last October was an exercise in fear and loathing, foreshadowing the federal campaign ahead.
Bjelke-Petersen has been dead for 19 years. He is an abstract figure to most people now. When I wrote Pig City, part of my motivation was to explain what it was like to grow up in Queensland in the ’70s and ’80s.
The easiest way to imagine Bjelke-Petersen is as a proto-Trumpian figure: an authoritarian ignoramus with a ruthless will to power. All he lacked, thankfully, were the nuclear codes and a Twitter account.
His Queensland was the political swamp from which Peter Dutton emerged. Anyone who thinks that’s a worldview we should embrace either didn’t grow up here, is too young to remember it, or too foolish to care.
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