Before I Sleep (22 page)

The academy was very well-equipped and I impressed upon Harry that he needed to keep a faithful record of the contents. An audit was conducted about eight or nine months after the academy opened. It was discovered that a mattress in one of the spare bedrooms was missing. Harry organised an inquiry and subsequently rang me and said that the missing mattress had been found and that he would be forwarding a report. He said that, since it was the first case of its kind, he thought I might need to establish some policy guidelines. The report reached me and I discovered that the missing mattress had been found in the back of a station wagon that belonged to one of the leading cadets. Apparently he had converted the station wagon into what he called a passion wagon, for which he had found great use. The problem with this was that the young man was the son of one of my senior inspectors at headquarters, one of my few supporters. The inspector was well known in Brisbane and throughout the force and did his job with commendable efficiency. I had employed him on a number of occasions for special tasks. I knew that it had been a great joy for him and his wife when their son was accepted by the academy. Somehow a whisper reached me that word was going around that the lad would be let off with a light reprimand because of my friendship with his prominent father.

Mavis and I had been spending a lot of off-duty time in the evenings with the cadets at the academy. We had visited their camps in the bush. We had spent many after-dinner hours yarning with them and I had hoped that not only would we get to know the cadets this way, but that I'd be able to pass on to them my vision of what an ideal police officer was. I had stressed that one of the outstanding qualities for a police officer was integrity, that his honesty could be relied upon at all costs. If you couldn't trust a policeman to be honest, I said, the whole system broke down. So the missing mattress was a test case of some importance to me. I had to either confirm my position on the importance of honesty in a police officer's make up, or else be seen to offer concessions which would be attributed to my relationship with the cadet's father. It seemed to me that I had no choice in this matter. If I was to keep faith with the other cadets and with the philosophy I'd been preaching, I had to take some quite firm action. This I did. I suspended the lad and told him that if he found himself a job and if his record at the job was good enough, we would consider him for re-entry into the second intake. This was a bitter blow to him and to his parents. The lad's father came to see me and was most upset that I had imposed such a severe penalty for a mere peccadillo, for simply borrowing one of the academy's mattresses. I tried to explain that honesty was important to me, that I couldn't make allowances because of any personal preferences. The lad left the academy and soon got a job somewhere else. He never applied for readmission and I lost the very valuable support of the inspector. It was a hard decision, but it seemed to me that I had to demonstrate my belief in my own principles.

From time to time, I've had reports of the doings of the lads and girls I recruited into the Queensland force some twenty-five years ago. I was delighted to note that Tim Atherton, one of the first cadets accepted by the academy, has recently been appointed Assistant Commissioner of Police in Western Australia. That really puts the mark of approval on our selection and training procedures. For Tim Atherton to go from Queensland, which hasn't got an altogether clean record, to a high interstate position is a matter of some joy to those of us who started the academy. It is also a reflection on the government of Queensland which, in recent years, has tended not to choose people of the calibre of Atherton from its own ranks to fill the top positions, but has turned south to try to pick the eyes out of the Victorian Police Department.

9
A losing battle

(1970-1976)

N
O doubt many of the uneducated in the Queensland community sympathised with Joh's jibe that the police force did not require Rhodes scholars, for surely he himself had shown that an ignorant country lad could amass a million dollars. And if Joh, as premier, didn't know what the doctrine of the separation of powers was, why should the man in the street care about such southern niceties? But not all Queenslanders were so ignorant. The Bar Council, the Law Society, the law professors and the more intelligent of the clergy might have been able to define the separation of powers if pushed — but from them came no comment in my defence. Were they just craven and scared of the consequences?

They had every right to be. My own experience confirmed this. After I left Queensland, I applied for an advertised vacancy for a researcher at the Australian Institute of Criminology in Canberra. The director, Bill Clifford, telephoned me. He said that with my Cambridge diploma and wide ranging career I was the outstanding applicant and the job was mine. He rang again the next day and said that, as a matter of courtesy and formality, he had notified the Commonwealth attorney-general of my selection. As a courtesy and a formality, the attorney-general had notified his state colleagues. Bill Clifford then had to inform me that I was not acceptable to Queensland and that other arrangements had to be made.

Yet it must be said that the “rural culture” of Queensland provided me with a most supportive minister, Max Hodges, and his able Departmental Head of Public Works, David Mercer. And in the Police Department I found a small core of loyal, intelligent and committed officers prepared to back my ethical standards. It took a little time for me as an outsider, but I somehow managed to reproduce a team in the Queensland Police Force that equalled the ASIO group I had had in Sydney. To do this I had to build upon foundations laid down by the corrupt Frank Bischof. Bischof had never employed a secretary or a typist. He never wrote anything himself; he never dictated anything. He had an outer office in which he housed his “legal section”. This was staffed by some hand-picked, bright young men under the direction of an inspector. These men handled all correspondence, which Bischof merely signed. Bischof must have applied a different set of selection criteria when he picked his legal section from that which he used when picking his bagmen. It was from the legal secion that some of my strongest supporters came. One of these men was Sergeant Ken Hogget, whom I made my personal assistant. John Dautel and Greg Early also came to my team from the “legal section”. These three, along with Val Barlow and Norm Gulbransen and my secretary, were in effect my kitchen cabinet. They not only embraced my policing philosophy of integrity and competence, but they built upon it with practical suggestions. They were insiders with a knowledge of how things had been done at the top. They had smelt a few rats in their time. Their knowledge of the force was far superior to mine, and their understanding of likely reactions by other members — in particular, those of the union executive — was invaluable. Hoggett and Dautel resigned not long after I did. Early stayed on under Terry Lewis and eventually became assistant commissioner.

Norm Gulbransen was a very popular man, a few years younger than myself and of medium build. He was a bright bloke, never moody, a pleasure to be with. He was always very courteous to me, even calling me “Commissioner” on social occasions, although I would have been quite happy with Ray. In some ways he, like the rest of my team, was an oddity: he had managed to rise through the ranks of the Queensland Police Force without becoming tainted. Indeed, he had gained a reputation for honesty that impressed Max Hodges so that, when we were forming the Criminal Intelligence Unit, he was Max's immediate candidate for leader. I suppose it is one of the ironies of promotion by seniority alone that such a system cannot deny promotion to non-corrupt officers. Norm was very fit. He was a marathon runner and an enthusiastic cricketer, a better bowler than batsman. For a number of years, Norm captained and chaperoned a team of students at the academy. I'm sure that his approach to cricket in particular and life in general must have had a good influence on the students.

Ken Hogget was also a likable young man. As I have said, he had wangled the job of picking me up at the airport when I first arrived in Brisbane, and was the first to warn me of the true state of policing in Queensland. I thought he was very brave to tackle a new appointee with such news. In the coming years, he proved to be a very loyal, thoughtful personal assistant. If I wasn't at my desk and Ken answered the phone, he would give nothing away, even to the minister, merely insisting that I would ring the caller back when I was free to do so. He wrote shorthand, which was unusual. Somehow we just seemed to click. He had a young family of boys and taught Sunday School at a Baptist church. If I thought up a new scheme, Ken would immediately start adapting it to Queensland conditions — he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the state's geography, both physical and political. After he had been my assistant for about four years, I pointed out to him that in the interests of his own career he had better have a bit more on his CV than having worked in my office. So Ken set up a schools' liaison committee and soon had a working relationship with many of Brisbane's high school principals. It was in this capacity that Ken cracked a housebreaking crime ring that had been eluding police for some time. The houses were always broken into at lunchtime and the thieves always picked empty houses, although they did not employ the usual method of determining whether anyone was at home: knocking on the door, pretending to be collecting for a charity or some similar ploy. Ken discovered that the thieves were school boys who, before wagging school for a bit of lunchtime thievery, first checked the school canteen to see whose mother was working there that day, leaving her home unattended. A few years before I left Queensland, I encouraged Ken and a few others to undertake part-time degrees. It was becoming obvious to some of us that a close connection with me could well become a liability under a new regime. Ken completed his degree just before I was forced to resign. He soon resigned himself and obtained a position with the Brisbane Harbours Trust, the chairman of which was my former minister, Max Hodges. Ken eventually became CEO of the trust.

John Dautel was another invaluable member of my team, although I got off on the wrong foot with him. He had been a sergeant in the legal section but had recently been promoted to senior sergeant. Within a week or two of my arrival, there was an appeal against his promotion by another sergeant who had seniority. I was called by the appeal committee to give evidence about the role of my office staff. The only objective bit of evidence of superior skills that John Dautel could muster was his ability to write fast shorthand. The committee asked me only one question: did I think that the ability to write shorthand was an essential qualification? I said that since I was now employing trained secretaries, there was little need for sworn police officers in my office to have this skill. The promotion was given to the sergeant who had appealed. I soon discovered that this was a great pity because Dautel was easily the superior candidate. I told John that, had I known this at the time, I might have indicated that I regarded shorthand to be a very valuable asset. John Dautel, like Ken Hogget, was of great use to me in placing things in a Queensland context. Like Ken, he completed a part-time degree and, also like Ken, he resigned not long after Terry Lewis took over as commissioner. He and his wife opened a successful high-class restaurant in Maryborough.

Perhaps it would have been a good thing if Tony Fitzgerald had included in his investigation an attempt to determine why these particular men were prepared to openly join my attempts to identify their corrupt workmates. It was a courageous thing to do because they would have known better than me that our chances of success were slim. In any case, they would be — and did become — outcasts in Queensland for the rest of their lives. I still wonder why this small group of men was different.

Instead Fitzgerald chose the time-honoured method of trying to introduce change in individuals by imposing further departmental procedures and reorganisations from the top down. I remember well the wise response of Nigel Powell, Queensland whistle-blower of the century and former member of the notorious Licensing Branch during the Bischof era, who resigned when he found out what was going on and told the press all he knew. “Lasting change can never be imposed or even legislated for,” Powell said. “Lasting change will occur only if we as individuals decide we want to change.”

My choice of a personal staff team was not perfect. Unwittingly, and on good recommendations, I included an opportunist who benefited personally in subsequent years. But one error in a dozen choices, with my starting from scratch, was unfortunate but acceptable. The others have suffered rough treatment to varying degrees. Some have developed psychological problems. As I told Colin Dillon, I wrote to Joh's successor on their behalf but the unfazed “rural culture” denied them recognition for their and their families' sacrifices.

There was one idea of mine that won Joh's immediate support. I had heard from army contacts that there were some serviceable aircraft about to be sold off. The army wasn't expecting to raise much at auction for these planes as they only had three seats. I checked our files and found that we had three qualified pilots who were serving policemen. I went to Joh and suggested that it was about time we developed an air wing. Joh is himself a qualified pilot and fond of flying, so he soon saw the merit of my suggestion that we could save time and money by using small planes to transport prisoners to district courts, transport police witnesses to hearings, take inspectors to their outlying police stations and alleviate the necessity of chartering planes every time we needed them in an emergency. We purchased one of these planes, the department paid for the three pilots to upgrade their licences and we started our Air Wing. I must acknowledge that the idea came from South Australia. John McKinna already had an air wing, but the pilots were not themselves policemen and the planes were chartered. We found our planes most useful. When they were not in use for other business, I encouraged my inspectors to use them for visiting remote police stations. I discovered that some stations in the far west of the state had never previously been visited by a superior officer. I arranged that Mavis and I would pay these stations a flying visit, so that I could talk to the police and the local shire people and Mavis could talk to the police wives about their housing conditions.

One of the police stations we visited was in Birdsville. It was my second visit, but Mavis's first. We only stayed two days, but I managed to pay a visit to the school house. It was not the same building that my mother had attended. It was light, well-ventilated, clean and well cared for with many posters, charts and diagrams on the walls, but it was simply a single room with a porch entrance. Inside there was a class of about twenty children, all dark skinned except for one boy with red hair. All the primary grades were represented. It was only a one-teacher school, but that teacher must have been very committed to his job. I met him and I was impressed: he clearly meant to make his stay in Birdsville worthwhile for the children in his care, but he only planned to stay one year. I found that that was the rule: teachers only ever stayed one year in Birdsville, so the children experienced an ever-changing parade of teachers. The teacher told me that no child from Birdsville, as far as he could determine, had ever gone on to secondary school. I asked about the red headed boy and was told that he was the policeman's son. I paid for a couple of years' subscription to the
National Geographic
for the children and told them that my mother had greatly benefited from her time in the school. I asked the policeman, Senior Constable Kern, about his boy and his progress at the school. He said that most of the children at the school found European education difficult and that he felt that his own boy was being handicapped by being brought up in such a remote spot. He hoped that his boy would proceed to secondary school, but this would mean that the lad would have to board somewhere else.

While I was there, I checked around amongst the station managers, the hotel licensee and others and they all gave me good reports about Senior Constable Kern. They said he was very community minded and on public holidays would often organise a barbecue in the police station grounds. People would come from miles around to grill steak from their own cattle and drink beer. Senior Constable Kern would play his banjo. I was told that the policeman really livened up existence in Birdsville.

When I returned to Brisbane, I still kept thinking about the disastrous film night and what it had done to my reputation amongst the good families of Brisbane. I talked about this with my little team at headquarters and wondered if there was something I could do to lift my public image. Ken Hogget said that Clem Jones, the Lord Mayor of Brisbane (which included a lot of the surrounding countryside), maintained his reputation from year to year by appearing once a fortnight on a talkback radio program on a local commercial radio station. Ken said that Jones usually managed to answer listeners' queries on air and he gave the impression of being a caring Lord Mayor. So the next Tuesday, at about eleven o'clock, Ken and I listened to Clem Jones's program. I was impressed. He started by giving a quick rundown of recent council development programs and then invited listeners to phone him with their problems. The queries came in thick and fast and Lord Mayor Jones handled them with aplomb. I asked Ken how Jones was able to answer detailed questions about obscure suburban roadworks, about paving, about when the sewerage would be laid on, about overflowing creeks and the like. Ken said he'd make some inquiries. A few days later, he had the answer. Ken told me that Clem Jones had a very nice little system for dealing with on-air enquiries. Ken said that when a listener rang the station with a question there was a 90 second delay before the caller was put through to Jones, who was probably on air answering another question. In that 90 seconds, the caller had to give the station receptionist a brief outline of what he or she was calling about. Unbeknownst to the general public, Clem Jones was accompanied by the city engineer and the city treasurer, who were equipped with suitable reference material. During the 90 second delay, these two would consult their records and quickly jot down the details. When Clem Jones took a call about the potholes in a particular street, he would be able to tell the caller that he thought he could remember the street in question.