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Last
Drinks by Andrew McGahan.
St Leonards (Sydney): Allen & Unwin, 2000.
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This Inquiry
is not a competition between a bunch of lovable rogues
and a group of narrow-minded prudes intent on imposing
puritanical moral strictures upon a reluctant public.
... The demi-monde with which the inquiry is concerned
is not a jolly place peopled by happy-go-lucky fun
lovers sampling the pleasures provided for them by
generous benefactors. It is a world of greed, violence,
corruption and exploitation ... The link between so-called
victimless crimes and organised crime is well recognised:
the link is provided by the huge profits which can
be obtained and put to other uses. (Tony Fitzgerald
QC, quoted in Dickie, 259)
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Forget
patriotism: age and infirmity is the last refuge of the
scoundrel. It's also a politician's best friend. Ask former
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, as he dodges trial
for a variety of human rights abuses. Or Ronald Reagan,
whose stature as a great American president continues
to rise the longer he can't remember being president at
all. Of course, we can't ask Richard Nixon, but even the
old trickster might have been embarrassed to be hailed
as a peacemaker upon his death in 1994.
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Here
in Queensland, former State Premier Johannes Bjelke-Petersen
is having his turn bathing in the warm glow of revisionist
history. As the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption
exposed the tawdry moral hypocrisies his government turned
into an art form, Joh's exit from politics in 1987 could
scarcely have been more ignominious. Today, the ailing
Hillbilly Dictator's1 multitude of sins is
barely remembered. Mention any of them and the odds are
you'll get a wistful "But he did great things for Queensland"
by way of reply. Even current Premier Peter Beattie —
now entrenched in power as leader of the once hapless
Labor Party — cultivates his broad appeal with the
kind of down-home rural folksiness that Joh exploited.
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[1]
The phrase is cribbed from Evan Williams's book of the
same name, The Hillbilly Dictator: Australia's Police
State (ABC Books, 1989). Former Justice James McLelland
had originally referred to Bjelke-Petersen as a "hillbilly
Führer".
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