Before I Sleep (20 page)

About four days later I received a telephone call from one of my sergeants, a man I'd never met. He said he understood that my wife and I had been to the House of the Gentle Bunyip. I told him we had. The sergeant said that he and his wife were very concerned because the young lady we had spoken to was their daughter. She was at university but she was living in the communal house. The sergeant said that he and his wife had grave reservations about the idea of young people of mixed sexes living together unsupervised. There was, he said, a bit of friction between their daughter and her parents because of this arrangement. I told him I understood his feelings. I said that we also had a daughter and that in general we would share his worries, but my wife and I had been delighted with the atmosphere of the house. I said we thought the place had the air more of a monastery than a young people's house — the place was quite spiritual.

I said: “I'm quite sure your daughter is a very capable, mature young lady of whom we can all be proud.”

The sergeant said: “Well, you reassure me to some extent, Commissioner, but we're still worried.”

I didn't revisit the House of the Gentle Bunyip, mainly because I soon became very busy. But we did hear soon afterwards that Athol Gill had not been reappointed to his job as deputy of the Theological College. He went to Melbourne where he was appointed principal of the Baptist University College at Melbourne University. Athol died a few years ago and I was very saddened to learn of his passing. He was an inspiring young man and I thought his approach to Christian principles and practices was quite sound, although obviously too advanced for the conservative Baptists of Brisbane in the early 1970s.

As I've said, I quickly ran into trouble with my enforcement of the police regulation that promotion should be by merit. That this existing regulation should be enforced was one of the recommendations made by Brigadier McKinna in the report on the Queensland Police Force he submitted not long before my appointment. State Cabinet had charged me with the task of implementing all of McKinna's recommendations. When I began to examine the way in which promotion was determined by seniority alone, I asked what senior police officers actually did in their last year of service because most of them were promoted to inspector with only a little over a year to serve until retirement. It seemed unlikely that many reforms could be introduced in this short time. I was told by my assistant, Ken Hogget, that most inspectors picked a good clerk from the ranks of the younger officers. The clerk handled all of the inspector's paperwork at the inspector's desk, whether the inspector was there or not. But the inspector was often absent.

I said to Ken: “Perhaps he's inspecting his stations.”

Ken said: “No, he's not doing that. He's just doing the rounds.”

I said: “What do you mean, the rounds?”

“In the last year of an inspector's service,” Ken said, “he goes around and calls on all of his old friends and reminds them that he will be leaving soon and that they will be invited to his public farewell.”

“They need reminding?” I said.

“They need reminding that they will be expected to contribute to his going away present,” Ken said. “At the farewell everyone comes along with little gifts and many of these gifts contain money. The inspectors get a fair bit of money that way.”

I said, “Why would anybody pay a
departing
inspector a large sum of money?”

“Well, what they do,” Ken said, “is they make sure the successor knows how much they are paying towards the retiring bloke's farewell. So then the new man knows that if he cooperates just as well as the last bloke he'll get the same when he retires. And since every constable expects to be an inspector before he retires, everybody knows that one day they'll get their turn. Many retiring inspectors have bought houses that way.”

I said: “How much does it come to?”

Ken said: “Nobody knows. They don't disclose it because of tax, but I reckon the sums are large.”

Allowing promotions to occur strictly according to seniority had one advantage: it neutralised sectarian rivalries. Trying to change this system at first put me offside with the premier, a Lutheran, when I promoted an Irishman on merit. Then, when I promoted a Protestant, I found myself facing strong Irish disfavour. I also fell foul of the squatters by politely declining a membership ticket to an exclusive racing club. My predecessor, Frank Bischof, had been a frequent patron of race meetings where he had been available in the Members' Enclosure to listen to requests for police action or for no police action. Frank had had an ulterior motive for his attendance. He used it to launder money he was unable to account for except as winning bets. He would bet on three likely horses in each race, as much as $500 on each. The bookie's clerk would initially record the bet as having been made by ‘Mr B'. If a horse won, the name would be completed as ‘Bischof'; if it lost, the bet had been made by a ‘Mr Baystone'. Poor Mr Baystone: he never backed a winner in his life.

I'd first met Frank when I was running the Commonwealth Investigation Service and began attending the annual Australasian Police Commissioners' Conference. As I've mentioned previously, I first attended the conference in 1953 and managed to attend it every year except one until 1976. The conference was initially a big disappointment and nothing like the Chief Constables' Conference in England. By and large, the delegates to the conference were not very interested in the proceedings. The Queensland commissioner was usually the least interested of all. At first this was Paddy Glenn but he was soon replaced by Frank Bischof. Bischof was an imposing figure, well-dressed and big despite not carrying any excess weight. He didn't speak much and his contributions to the conference were usually confined to saying ‘yes' or ‘no'. I had the distinct impression that he was just going through the motions of attending. So long as his own bailiwick wasn't under threat, he wasn't concerned. It was customary for weekends at the conference to be given over to socialising. The host commissioner would arrange an outing for the delegates and their wives, but Bischof never went on these trips. He would go instead to the horse races or the trots. At the time I had no idea that he was doing this to check on the progress of his money laundering scam back in Queensland.

Because he contributed so little to the conference, Frank gave me no opportunity to assess his intellectual capacity. It was only when I became the Queensland commissioner myself that I realised that he had been a very astute operator. Many years before, he had skillfully selected three of the very best of his cadet intake — Terry Lewis, Glen Hallahan and Tony Murphy — to be what the newspapers called his bagmen.

Just how Frank came by the money he bet at the track was discovered in 1964 by the then treasurer, Sir Thomas Hiley. As I've said, I was not told of Hiley's discoveries while I held office in Queensland and did not become aware of the information he revealed until some years after I had left when the
Courier-Mail
finally published his findings. Hiley had revealed the existence of a well-organised but surreptitious “levy” placed on all unlicensed bookmakers throughout the whole state. Payment of the levy guaranteed freedom from police action. According to Hiley, the “levy” was collected by local police officers on the understanding that it was a donation to the “slush funds” of a political party. No receipts were issued at any stage, so that nobody knew how much was retained at each step in the process. The balance from each town, calculated according to population, was forwarded to Brisbane where it disappeared — much of it at the racetrack. Hiley had only been made aware of this state of affairs when three disgruntled illegal bookmakers had complained to him that the levy was being raised to unreasonable heights. The bookmakers hadn't minded paying for protection from prosecution, they just didn't want to pay too much. Hiley had called in the premier of the day and the solicitor general. The solicitor general had advised that there was little chance of prosecuting anybody unless the bookmakers themselves were prepared to give evidence. So all Hiley and the police minister did was call in Frank Bischof and tell him to stop the practice. At first Frank denied that it happened at all, but then Hiley had shown him the bookmakers' betting sheets which he had access to as treasurer. Where exactly were Mr Bischof and his alter ego, Mr Baystone, getting their betting money? Bischof had then agreed that perhaps the rules were being bent a little and he gave a verbal undertaking to put a stop to the levy. There was no question of him resigning from the Force for such a minor impropriety. When Bischof died, his estate was fairly small, so I've no real understanding of where all the money went. I could never get close to Frank Bischof. He was cold, not unfriendly but always very neutral as far as I was concerned. He seemed more preoccupied with personal matters than departmental ones.

Had I known of the “levy” raising practice — unapproved officially but condoned by those who benefited — I would not have accepted the invitation to become commissioner. Although I had guessed at the extent of the frequent social interaction between influential police officers and Cabinet ministers, I would have realised sooner that I had no chance of succeeding in reducing corruption. If the police controlled the inflow of “slush funds” to parliamentarians, they also strongly influenced voting in Cabinet.

Perhaps I had been misled by my own experience of a corruption-free state Cabinet in South Australia where committed Christian, Sir Thomas Playford, was state premier for twenty-seven years. “Honest Tom” came from a rural background, yet managed to make South Australia a large manufacturing region with happily settled, recent migrants from England. When he retired back to his orchard in the Adelaide Hills, his personal wealth had not increased. I had assumed that Playford's principles were the norm for Christian leaders but my Queensland years taught me otherwise. Queensland in my day was still permeated by a rural fundamentalism. Ownership of land was a goal for most men, and it was a male society. Even my own police talked about the time when they would “own a bit of soil”. Rural cultures favour settling disputes informally and I came across a fair bit of this practice. I had to resign from a highly respected community service organisation because weekly lunch meetings were obligatory, and these were used by fellow members to approach me to cancel traffic tickets and other “trifles”. I lost a few influential supporters this way, but at least I no longer had to put up with “Ah, Commissioner, good to see you. Can you fix this for me?”

My mail frequently contained similar requests from members of Parliament who were passing on pleading letters from their constituents. My minister, Max Hodges, supported my refusals. I was sometimes present in his office when he would receive a telephone call from another MP requesting special treatment. Max would reply by quoting the date and number of his own traffic violation and the receipt number of his own payment of the fine. We both lost supporters in this way.

When I first arrived, Max was riding high politically with a small majority of backers in Cabinet. At the time he was also Minister for Public Works and was able to approve some politically useful new schools and bridges. Joh Bjelke-Petersen was a new premier. He had not yet developed into the hillbilly dictator of his later years. But the potential had been recognised and was being developed by a couple of competent tutors, Sir Edmund Lyons and Sir Lesley Thiess.

Joh's progress in this direction was being hindered by the presence in Cabinet of one of Max's supporters, Gordon Chalk, the very able leader of the Liberals. Gordon Chalk and I were not soulmates, but we respected each other and he was always prepared to listen to our proposals. He often agreed with us and would support Max in Cabinet. Nevertheless, even Chalk was to some extent a politician in the Queensland mould. I sometimes wonder if I could have supported Max better by being more accommodating to Gordon Chalk and other influential people, by being less rigid in my moral standards. I received a telephone call from Chalk at a time when we were under attack by the Police Union and some powerful media critics. It was a time when Max needed all the help he could get in Cabinet. Chalk said on the phone that he needed a favour done. He said he knew that I was opposed to doing what he was about to ask of me, but he was in ‘big trouble at home'. His wife had received a speeding ticket and she couldn't understand why her husband, one of the most powerful political figures in Queensland, couldn't have it nullified. Many of her friends had spoken of having tickets for traffic violations withdrawn in previous years.

Chalk said, “Can you help me?”

I thought about the request and then said, “Look, I'm sorry. I can't interfere with the traffic constable's decision. He's issued a ticket. Members of the Force know my policy not to interfere with any prosecution. So I'm awfully sorry.”