Honouring Tony Fitzgerald

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.