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Civil liberties in the old deep north

By Evan Whitton - posted Friday, 22 February 2013


Civil Liberties Persons (CLP) are typically worthy, vigilant, sleepless, ever ready to denounce, and rightly denounce, people who would infringe human rights. Their patron saints are, or should be, Dr (as he now is) Harry Akers and his dog, Jaffa.

Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, 66, and his police chief, Terry Lewis, 47, who happened to be organised criminals, were running Queensland as a police state in 1977. CLP naturally took exception.

Bjelke-Petersen had a cunning plan to persuade gullible voters to re-elect him in November of that year: those who protested that the Bjelkist Regime was up to no good would be billed as the dread Commoes.

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Hitherto, if police rejected an application for a protest march, an appeal could be made to an magistrate. In September, Bjelke made Terry the final arbiter.

Announcing the change, he said: “Nobody, including the Communist Party or anyone else, is going to turn the streets of Brisbane into a forum. Protest groups need not bother applying for permits to stage marches because they won't be granted.”

CL types dutifully rose to the Bjelkist fly. At a rally in October, the wallopers cracked a few heads and flung 400 protesters into police wagons. The regime bolted in.

Harry Akers, then 29 and a dentist in Bundaberg, and Jaffa, a male cattle dog, took a different tack; they showed up the law for the evil nonsense it was. This from a little history of corruption in Queensland, The Hillbilly Dictator (the libel lawyers jibbed at Fuhrer. It can be downloaded free from netk.net.au/whittonhome.asp):

[Akers]applied in March 1978 for a permit to march, in company with his dog Jaffa, down an unnamed No Through road at The Hummock, outside Bundaberg, at 2.45 in the morning of 1 April. Akers told Inspector Seaniger he intended to march only 100 metres, and that he was a pacifist; the march would be peaceful. He also applied for a permit to carry a placard inscribed:

The majority is not omnipotent: the majority can be wrong and is capable of tyranny

Seaniger refused the application. He told Akers a permit could not be issued because it was a protest march. Akers and Jaffa embarked on their illegal procession in the dark on April Fools' Day. A carload of detectives observed this breach of the law, but did not arrest the offending man and dog.

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Jaffawas hit by a car in 1982 and sadly passed away.

One who suffered from Bjelkist thuggery was Terry O'Gorman. A lawyer with a resoundingly booming voice, he got a whack at the old scoundrel on behalf of the Council of Civil Liberties at the Fitzgerald inquiry in 1988. This from The Hillbilly:

Other lawyers addressed Bjelke-Petersen as “Sir Joh”, and largely endured his evasions; O'Gorman gave him no more than “witness”, and, in demanding straight answers, a welcome touch of Police Court thuggery to boot ...

On the illegal march by Harry Akers and his dog Jaffa at 2.45 am on April Fool's Day 1978, O'Gorman asked: “Doesn't that highlight the absolute tyranny and absurdity of this law? I'm asking you to comment on that proposition.”

“No it does not. Simply because you cannot - If the law is a law it has to be observed. I can't for example just go out in the street and block the whole street, even for half a minute - stand out in the middle of the road and block everything, and neither can he for a couple of hundred yards, same principle.”

FITZGERALD: “But Sir Joh, I think Mr O'Gorman’s question is really, might not Mr Akers and Jaffa have been granted a permit without any risk to the public?”

BJELKE-PETERSEN: “I know he - I beg your pardon?”

FITZGERALD: “I say the question really is: might not Mr Akers and Jaffa have been granted a permit without any risk to the public?”

BJELKE-PETERSEN: “Yes, but sir, I'm sure you realise this was just a try-on and just the thin end of the wedge.”

O'GORMAN: “What! Might two people walk at 2.45 am with two dogs?” (Laughter)

* * *

Lawyers tend to be heavily represented in CL organisations, and most believe what they are taught at law school: the adversary system is the greatest legal system ever devised by the mind of man.

It follows that evidence is concealed for a good reason, e.g. that jurors are stupid. For example, evidence from the suspect.

When NSW police were campaigning to modify the “right” of silence in 2010, Cameron Murphy, president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, said that being pressured to answer questions would result in countless innocent people going to prison. Three points can be made:

  • Justice Ken Marks noted in 1984 that the “right” is based on a lie by the first legal academic, Billy Blackstone, a morally bankrupt charlatan.
  • The “right” gets off about half the guilty defendants who hide behind it.
  • Cambridgelaw professor Glanville Williams said: “Immunity from being questioned is a rule which by its nature can protect the guilty only. It is not a rule that may operate to acquit some guilty for fear of convicting some innocent.”

The adversary system is solid for human rights; its firm position is that criminals have a human right not to be convicted, and that their victims have a human right to like it or lump it.

For example, organised criminal Emil Mendel (Eddie) Kornhauser (1918-2006). He came to Australia, via Poland and Germany, in 1939, with an unerring instinct for where the money was, and who could help him get his hands on it.

Abe Saffron, who had senior NSW police in his pocket, had an interest in the Cumberland Hotel at Bankstown. Eddie became the licensee in 1950. He later had hotels in Melbourne, and his instinct eventually led him to the Bjelkist Gold Coast, where honest citizens were daily at risk of being trampled by men in white shoes.

In 1976, Eddie got control of Paradise Centre, a considerable property on the site of what had been Jim Cavill’s Surfers’ Paradise Hotel. In matters of development, the go-to men were Bjelke-Petersen or Russell Hinze, who was no less an organised criminal, but lacked the Premier’s hypocrisy.

Following the Fitzgerald Inquiry, Eddie was charged with having corruptly paid Hinze $250,000 for help with the developing the Paradise Centre. He exercised his human right not to be convicted in 1991, and was said to be worth $345 million in 2005.

Finally, my credentials, however feeble, as a CLP include being invited to attend a Civil Liberties picnic in Brisbane in 1992. At the picnic, the famous Terry O’Gorman rebuked me for some mild criticism I had made of the legal system.

“Aren’t you the guy,” I said politely, “who got Eddie Kornhauser off?”

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About the Author

Evan Whitton is a former reporter who became a legal historian after seeing how two systems dealt with the same criminal, Queensland police chief Sir (as he then was) Terry Lewis.

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