On the first of December 1987, Michael Ahern was sworn in as premier of Queensland, bringing to an end the reign of Queensland’s longest serving premier, Country Party leader, Sir Johannes Bjelke Petersen. During his 19 years in power (having taken office in 1968), his extreme reactionary stances and controversial elections, cemented his place as one of Queensland politics’ most polarising figures and earned him the nickname the ‘Hillbilly Dictator’. A staunch rural conservative, Bjelke Petersen was a beneficiary of a severely malapportioned electoral system which enabled him to initially gain power, and later served to help consolidate and maintain it. Moreover his stability in office was in part due to a domineering political culture, which allowed him to maintain control and political dominance throughout his period in office. However despite the controversy surrounding him, Joh Bjelke Petersen cannot be classified as a dictator, primarily given that he did not fundamentally change or alter his tactics to maintain control, nor did he personally inhibit or flaw the democratic system.
Politically, Bjelke Petersen styled his leadership around the image of a traditional conservative strongman. His simple, homely personna is largely a reflection of his upbringing in a small, fervently Lutheran, Danish peanut farming settlement in Kingaroy. A pivotal force in Petersens life, Lutheranism became the cornerstone of Bjelke Petersen’s world view and underpinned his reactionary brand of politics. In exploring Petersens effect on the religious nature of Queensland, John Harrison suggests that Bjelke Petersen’s public proclamation of his faith, helped foster the identity of a classic, pastoral conservative. This identity, appealed to apprehension amongst a class of middle Australians worried about the cultural and technological modernisation of society (Jones, 2018).
Although technically democratically elected, the Joh Bjelke Petersen administration is synonymous with unfair elections and a malapportioned zonal system which gave him a distinct electoral advantage over his political opposition. Bjelke Petersen began his premiership in 1968, having assumed leadership of the ruling coalition from fellow Nationals member, Gordon Chalk. Barely a year later in 1969, he faced his first election as premier, an election in which he won 47 of the possible 70 seats, despite his two-party coalition attracting just 44% of the vote. Critically, in the 1969 election, and indeed every election Bjelke Petersen would go on to contest, a malapportioned Queensland zonal system allowed his party to form decisive majorities, despite significantly lower amounts of primary votes. Electoral malapportionment is best defined as a zonal system in which some electorates are given a higher representation of voters than others, effectively giving a smaller population of people, the same representation as a seat with a higher population (Timms, 2014). In Queensland this manifested itself as an overvaluation of votes cast in rural seats, which importantly, is where the majority of Bjelke Petersen’s support was situated. In an entry into the Griffith Law Review, Ron Orr and Greg Levy, present a mostly impartial and objective thesis on what they describe as zonal manipulation designed to intentionally reflect the demographic appeal of the Country Party. They assert that a malapportioned zonal system helped Bjelke Peterson to gain power in comfortable majorities, and served to 'raise the bar' for political opposition to win government. The Dauer Kelsey index is used to measure electoral distributions by determining the lowest possible percentage of electors which could theoretically elect the government. In the 1972 Queensland elections, the zonal redistribution was recorded at 44.9% meaning that even with 55% of the vote the Labour party could not win power. However, Hugh Lunn a noted political journalist, argues that in comparative terms, the severity of electoral malapportionment working in favour of Bjelke Petersen, wasn’t the most significant of the time. He references Victoria recording 40.3% in 1974, South Australia under Sir Thomas Playford recording only 23.4%, and most significantly, what was then the most recent Labour redistribution in Queensland, recording only 39.1%. While his work is biased and selective in its contrasts, his argument corroborates with renowned Australian legal academic, David Flint. In his opinion piece, Flint further distances Bjelke Petersen from the actual drawing of the zonal system in adding that the most recent electoral redistribution at the time occurred a term before Bjelke Petersen came to power. By extension his argument suggests that Bjelke Petersen merely inherited a beneficial electoral system and did not orchestrate the electoral malapportionment.
In office, Bjelke Petersen managed to consolidate and maintain his grip on power, as he further imposed himself on the Queensland political landscape. Yet despite the success of these efforts, it is difficult to characterise them as dictatorial, largely given that Bjelke Petersen never meaningfully changed tactics to remain in office. Instead, he relied on two major factors, both of which had been at work in his initial election. These were the malapportioned zonal system, combined with the political culture of Queensland which had the tendency to produce dominating leaders who served long reigns of multiple terms. In regards to the former, malapportionment was again crucial to Bjelke Petersen, this time in consolidating the influence it had given him in the first place. Until the 1983 election, his governments had won office, but in coalition with its more urban conservative partner, the Liberal Party. However governing in his own right, gave Bjelke Petersen the ability to retain complete control over the office, as without a junior coalition partner, he could exercise rule and legislation largely as he saw fit (Levy & Orr, 2009). Additionally, he enjoyed the rewards of a ‘domineering political culture’, that had always encompassed Queensland, exemplified by the dominance of the previous leader of the Nationals, Frank Nicklin who governed from 1957-68. Rae Waer, a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, notes that the culture was usually expressed electorally as voters commonly supported incumbent governments. This was especially significant to Bjelke Petersen as it meant that not only was his coalition receiving the biggest share of voter support, but the unequal distribution meant that the majority of it was producing seats for his Country Party.
A counter thesis to the aforementioned, argues that more importantly than the political climate of Queensland and the zonal system, Petersen was kept in power mostly as a result of the escalation of his crackdown on political protest. In 1971 the South African Springboks toured Australia for a controversial five match series. Apartheid era Springboks tours frequently drew political protest and match disruptions, a phenomenon which had pervaded much of tour in southern states. Determined that progressive political protests would have no place in the Brisbane fixture, Bjelke Petersen commandeered the Brisbane Showgrounds to host the game, a ground which enabled riot police to better control potentially unruly spectators. The success of the match, according to Bond University academic Christopher Crawford, was the beginning of a close relationship between the Bjelke Petersen administration and the police force. His view corroborates with that of Mathew Condon, whose book Jacks and Jokers, while critical of his premiership, investigates Bjelke Petersen’s involvement in a well-known era of police corruption. Condon argues that within a year of corrupt police officer Terry Lewis’s promotion to Commissioner in 1976, Bjelke Petersen had control over what was effectively a police state. A primary quote from Bjelke Petersen himself in 1977 reads that; “the day of political street march is over&he
llip; don’t apply for a permit, you won’t get one, that’s government policy now”. However this argument neglects to consider the legislative restraints of Petersens crackdown, as argued by former politician Andrew Fraser. He points out that legally, Bjelke Petersen’s protest bans were only ever as broad as targeting protests occurring in King George Square, with the scope of such legislation only broadened for specific occasions such as the 1971 Springboks tour and the 1982 Brisbane Commonwealth Games. This close legal examination refutes the notion that a crackdown on protests played any real part in Bjelke Petersens ability to maintain power, or that it was intended to. Given the exceedingly narrow scope of the regulation it is unlikely to have played any role in supporting Bjelke Petersen’s governance, and instead lends weight in support of the theory that Petersen did not resort to changing tactics in order to stay in power.
In summary, despite the controversy around the legitimacy of his election and his reliance upon a fundamentally flawed electoral system, Joh Bjelke Petersen cannot be characterised as a dictator. While he benefitted significantly from an openly malapportioned zonal system, neither he nor his administration had a hand in drafting the electoral redistribution that initially gained him power in the 1969 and 1972 elections. Once in power he was kept in office primarily by the combination of an unchanged electoral system which gave him complete power after the 1983 election, and a domineering political culture that was disposed to fostering dominating political leaders. The chronological combination of the factors which gave him power and subsequently allowed him to keep it, were uncontrollable and largely working independently of Bjelke Petersen’s control. Yet in either case, the potential for faults in the zonal system and its ability to influence entire outcomes of elections, serves as a warning and a lesson as to the fragility of democracy.