Honouring Tony Fitzgerald

Several weeks ago Time magazine published a special double issue. It was called 1989 and explored how the world changed in that year, two decades ago. It was a remarkable year, when extraordinary, earth shattering events were happening every day.

The magazine drew up a list of what it considered the big events of 1989. It was the year:

• the Berlin Wall fell;
• Russia was transformed by another revolution;
• America won the Cold War and Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history;
• the world wide web was invented;
• people dreaming of a fairer political order were slaughtered in Tiananmen Square;
• FW De Klerk agreed to release Nelson Mandela and apartheid entered its death throes;
• Vietnamese troops withdrew from a devastated Cambodia;
• the Dalai Lama won the Nobel prize;
• a fatwa was declared on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses;
• oil from the Exxon Valdez’s devastated the Alaskan coast;
• Japan’s invincibility came to a shuddering halt as its economic bubble popped; and
• the first episodes of The Simpsons were broadcast;

It was a year “history was being made so often in so many places that is seemed almost routine”.

Time magazine had a predictable emphasis, some of the things it included were parochially American. But the sentiment was right. Sixty-eight is generally thought to be the year that changed the world, but I am persuaded that the number you get when you turn 68 upside down and flip it over - 89 - is more important in terms of lasting global significance.

As I picked up a copy of the magazine at Brisbane Airport I quickly scanned the table of contents. I knew it was a forlorn and provincial hope, but I was disappointed to see that the completion of the Fitzgerald Report and the end of an old regime in Queensland did not make the list.

It deserved to.

It was one of the truly transformative events in Australian history - one which not only signalled the end of a particular style of corrupt and authoritarian politics and public administration - but one which made a wide range of administrative, social and economic changes possible, both here and elsewhere in Australia.

We are tardy in this country. We are more inclined to remember, even celebrate, failure than success. I don’t know if it is diffidence, embarrassment or some inversion of egalitarianism. All too often we fail to recognise the big transformations that occur as a result of brave people pushing just that bit harder.

There are not many people, who when given a basket full of knotted skeins of wool, keep tugging and pulling, patiently yet determinedly undoing one knot after another, following the thread as it tangles through the mess, until it is all rearranged and packaged in neat bundles. Even fewer provide a plain English instruction manual to ensure that the wool doesn’t get messed up again.

As Tony Fitzgerald has said to me, becoming such a person was a life changing event.

So it is particularly important to honour Tony Fitzgerald and those with him who accepted the unenviable challenge to unravel the complicated and interrelated mess that this state was, two decades ago. It was a mess that had made this state the laughing stock of the nation. It had undermined many of its most talented citizens and sent them scurrying away. It rewarded ignorance and allowed corruption to flourish - all the while, encouraging people to believe they were living in a lotus land, when not so far beneath the surface there was a stinking, muddy quagmire.

At the time we knew that the dogged work of the Inquiry was important, but it was impossible to judge just how transformative it would become when backed with the political will of the government of Wayne Goss.

It is my strong belief, that if it had not been for this combination of diagnosis and prescription, Queensland would not have become an economic powerhouse it has been for so much of the past decade. Economic growth is not sustainable in a corrupt environment. More tangibly, without the experience that came as a result of being in the government that was elected to implement the Fitzgerald reforms, Kevin Rudd would not be the Prime Minister today.

Those of us who had grown up in Queensland during the Bjelke-Petersen years were stamped with the often unspoken legacy of a particular time and place - one that out of outrage, fear, exhaustion and eventual transformation, taught us about courage and caution in our personal and public lives.

When I think back to the Brisbane that I grew up in and the city it has become it is as though they are two completely different places. I am thinking about Brisbane before air-conditioning, when the river was muddy, the executive building was the highest in the city, Cloudland was a dance venue, the Powerhouse still produced electricity and the smells of food factories and markets, beer, biscuits, wafted over the city.

Brisbane was hot and sticky, small, clubbish, certain, uneducated, poorer than the other mainland capitals, boozy, brutish and somewhat dissolute - but distinctive, visceral and, in its own way, quite charming.

In my memory I can switch back to the emotions, the smells, the texture, the outrage, the despair, the excitement, I knew as a young person in Brisbane. When I look around now, there are a few prompts - the hills, the weather, in some suburbs the houses, the trees, the smugness of a certain strata - not much else.

Brisbane today is almost unrecognisable from what it once was. It is a city that has grown up. Paradoxically it is now a young city, a city with thriving and diverse subcultures, where the internet supplements the mainstream media, where there are diligent and comparatively well resourced monitory agencies.

Yet as we have seen in recent weeks the instruction manual on keeping systems honest and accountable is needed as much now as ever.

Generally I am impatient with the media-driven celebration of anniversaries that have a zero on the end. But in this case - 20 is a good number. It seems that the angels may have had a hand in the timing, providing us with a tangible reminder of the failings of human nature and the fragility of the systems we invent to keep it in check.

Places like people have genes - memes I think they are called - passed on from one generation to the next. Those who are here tonight know the embedded history. In one way or another we lived through it. Now we must work hard to ensure that others who did not, do not lose sight of the heritage - good and bad - from which they have emerged.

There is a need for constant vigilance, and political and personal courage, to ensure that the old ways do not return. As we saw in 1989, all around the world and even here in Australia’s deep north, transformation is possible.