by Ray Whitrod
I told Vince to pick his eight men, to work independently of the Fortitude Valley divisional officers, to report directly to me and to take orders only from me. I told him to draw up his own rosters and to work his own hours. I said that, provided there was good reason, we would pay overtime. I stressed that I wanted to see real results. I asked Vince what he thought he would tackle first and he replied that cracking down on drunken driving would allow us to establish a strong police presence in the area, which might then result in a lower general crime rate. I told him to go ahead.
Vince picked his men and went to work in the Valley. When he reported to me it was clear that he and his team were making inroads into the drink-driving problem. This went on for some months and I began to suspect that we would soon be the recipients of a probe from people with vested interests and political clout, since we were in fact establishing a strong police presence in the Valley. It came — and this surprised me — through the Police Union. The secretary, Merv Callaghan, complained to me that his members were most upset at the way in which Vince Murphy’s men were getting a large share of the overtime. Callaghan thought that the overtime should be spread more equitably.
I said: “Well, it’s interesting that a member of your executive is doing something that your executive doesn’t agree with.”
Callaghan said it didn’t matter that Vince Murphy was a member of the executive; all members of the Force were entitled to their share of the available overtime money.
I said: “Mr Secretary, I’d be very happy to pay overtime if it arises from your members’ need to attend court to give evidence in the prosecution of drunken driving cases.”
I heard no more from Callaghan, but I suspect Vince Murphy would have had to defend himself against criticism from the rest of the executive.
That year there was a reduction of about thirty per cent in the numbers of fatal road crashes in Fortitude Valley. The number of arrests for drunken driving had risen considerably. But then I received a direction from my minister. He told me that Cabinet had decided that the Fortitude Valley team had to confine itself to actions that were at least 50 metres away from licensed premises. Cabinet was not happy with the fact that the patrons of licensed premises were being questioned by Murphy’s men the moment they entered their cars. It was bad for business and the licensees were complaining very strongly about it. I asked Max Hodges if this was an official directive from himself, the premier and Cabinet. He said it was and I indicated that I would instruct Vince Murphy to keep his men at least 50 metres away from pubs and clubs. I called Vince to my office and told him of the new policy.
He said: “Don’t worry, Commissioner, it won’t affect us.”
I scanned the monthly returns and noticed that Murphy’s men were still managing to operate with as much diligence as before. I sent for Vince and asked him how he was managing to be so efficient, was he sure he was operating outside the 50 metre mark? He assured me he was and mentioned that all his briefs gave the location of the intercept and that in all cases they were more than 50 metres from licensed premises. I congratulated him and said I’d pass this information to the minister, which I duly did.
I didn’t hear any more about the matter for some time. Murphy’s successes continued and in the second year there was another drop of about thirty per cent in the number of fatal crashes in the Valley and the number of arrests continued to grow. So one day I asked Vince how it was that he had not been handicapped by the Cabinet direction, which had clearly been designed to slow down his operations.
Vince said: “Well, Commissioner, I’ll tell you what happens. My men come on duty at about five o’clock in the evening and they go to the car parks behind the clubs and they put a small sticker on the left headlights of the cars. Then when the patrons leave after drinking until nine or ten or eleven, they drive down the street and my men can pick every car that has come from a licensed premises. So we pull them over and give them a test. It doesn’t matter how far away we are.”
I said: “O.K., Vince. I can see nothing wrong with that.”
I noticed that soon after I left Queensland, my successor, Terry Lewis, abolished Murphy’s Marauders, as they’d come to be known. Naturally, Vince Murphy also lost his seat on the executive.
When we arrived in Brisbane, Mavis and I quickly found we had little in common with the Brisbane Baptist fellowship who were strictly fundamental in their religious outlook. The services were stuffy, but prior to the morning service there was a men’s Bible class conducted by the Rev. Dr Athol Gill in a room at the back of the church. I had heard of Athol back in Canberra and I thought it would be interesting to attend his class, so I took to turning up at church an hour early. There were about a dozen other men of mixed backgrounds in the group. I found Athol Gill’s approach to Christian living very refreshing. He was the deputy director of the Baptist Theological College and he had started a small Christian community house in an inner Brisbane suburb which he’d called the House of the Gentle Bunyip. He invited Mavis and I to visit the community, just to see what it was like.
We took up the invitation and one night Mavis and I knocked on the door of a comfortable, old-fashioned house. We were greeted by a bright young lady of about twenty years of age.
She said, “Come inside, Commissioner and Mrs Whitrod, I’m one of your piglets.”
I said: “Piglet?”
She said, “Yes, my father is one of your sergeants.”
She took us inside and we joined a group of about sixteen people of various ages in a large lounge. We all sat on cushions on the floor and ate a frugal supper while one of the young men related his day’s experiences. I learnt that there were five people in residence at the house. Two were university students, two worked part-time and one young man was conducting leatherwork classes for unemployed youth at the back of the house. We were shown around and saw the single bedrooms. They were all sparsely furnished, but very clean. The kitchen was spotless. Both Mavis and I were impressed with the atmosphere and the environment in which these young people were working as a small Christian community. We left after about an hour, partly because my legs and back were aching from the unusual experience of sitting on a cushion on the floor. The young lady escorted us to the door and invited us to call again any time, saying she and her friends were delighted we’d come.
About four days later I received a telephone call from one of my sergeants, a man I’d never met. He said he understood that my wife and I had been to the House of the Gentle Bunyip. I told him we had. The sergeant said that he and his wife were very concerned because the young lady we had spoken to was their daughter. She was at university but she was living in the communal house. The sergeant said that he and his wife had grave reservations about the idea of young people of mixed sexes living together unsupervised. There was, he said, a bit of friction between their daughter and her parents because of this arrangement. I told him I understood his feelings. I said that we also had a daughter and that in general we would share his worries, but my wife and I had been delighted with the atmosphere of the house. I said we thought the place had the air more of a monastery than a young people’s house — the place was quite spiritual.
I said: “I’m quite sure your daughter is a very capable, mature young lady of whom we can all be proud.”
The sergeant said: “Well, you reassure me to some extent, Commissioner, but we’re still worried.”
I didn’t revisit the House of the Gentle Bunyip, mainly because I soon became very busy. But we did hear soon afterwards that Athol Gill had not been reappointed to his job as deputy of the Theological College. He went to Melbourne where he was appointed principal of the Baptist University College at Melbourne University. Athol died a few years ago and I was very saddened to learn of his passing. He was an inspiring young man and I thought his approach to Christian principles and practices was quite sound, although obviously too advanced for the conservative Baptists of Brisbane in the early 1970s.
As I’ve said, I
quickly ran into trouble with my enforcement of the police regulation that promotion should be by merit. That this existing regulation should be enforced was one of the recommendations made by Brigadier McKinna in the report on the Queensland Police Force he submitted not long before my appointment. State Cabinet had charged me with the task of implementing all of McKinna’s recommendations. When I began to examine the way in which promotion was determined by seniority alone, I asked what senior police officers actually did in their last year of service because most of them were promoted to inspector with only a little over a year to serve until retirement. It seemed unlikely that many reforms could be introduced in this short time. I was told by my assistant, Ken Hogget, that most inspectors picked a good clerk from the ranks of the younger officers. The clerk handled all of the inspector’s paperwork at the inspector’s desk, whether the inspector was there or not. But the inspector was often absent.
I said to Ken: “Perhaps he’s inspecting his stations.”
Ken said: “No, he’s not doing that. He’s just doing the rounds.”
I said: “What do you mean, the rounds?”
“In the last year of an inspector’s service,” Ken said, “he goes around and calls on all of his old friends and reminds them that he will be leaving soon and that they will be invited to his public farewell.”
“They need reminding?” I said.
“They need reminding that they will be expected to contribute to his going away present,” Ken said. “At the farewell everyone comes along with little gifts and many of these gifts contain money. The inspectors get a fair bit of money that way.”
I said, “Why would anybody pay a departing inspector a large sum of money?”
“Well, what they do,” Ken said, “is they make sure the successor knows how much they are paying towards the retiring bloke’s farewell. So then the new man knows that if he cooperates just as well as the last bloke he’ll get the same when he retires. And since every constable expects to be an inspector before he retires, everybody knows that one day they’ll get their turn. Many retiring inspectors have bought houses that way.”
I said: “How much does it come to?”
Ken said: “Nobody knows. They don’t disclose it because of tax, but I reckon the sums are large.”
Allowing promotions to occur strictly according to seniority had one advantage: it neutralised sectarian rivalries. Trying to change this system at first put me offside with the premier, a Lutheran, when I promoted an Irishman on merit. Then, when I promoted a Protestant, I found myself facing strong Irish disfavour. I also fell foul of the squatters by politely declining a membership ticket to an exclusive racing club. My predecessor, Frank Bischof, had been a frequent patron of race meetings where he had been available in the Members’ Enclosure to listen to requests for police action or for no police action. Frank had had an ulterior motive for his attendance. He used it to launder money he was unable to account for except as winning bets. He would bet on three likely horses in each race, as much as $500 on each. The bookie’s clerk would initially record the bet as having been made by ‘Mr B’. If a horse won, the name would be completed as ‘Bischof’; if it lost, the bet had been made by a ‘Mr Baystone’. Poor Mr Baystone: he never backed a winner in his life.
I’d first met Frank when I was running the Commonwealth Investigation Service and began attending the annual Australasian Police Commissioners’ Conference. As I’ve mentioned previously, I first attended the conference in 1953 and managed to attend it every year except one until 1976. The conference was initially a big disappointment and nothing like the Chief Constables’ Conference in England. By and large, the delegates to the conference were not very interested in the proceedings. The Queensland commissioner was usually the least interested of all. At first this was Paddy Glenn but he was soon replaced by Frank Bischof. Bischof was an imposing figure, well-dressed and big despite not carrying any excess weight. He didn’t speak much and his contributions to the conference were usually confined to saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’. I had the distinct impression that he was just going through the motions of attending. So long as his own bailiwick wasn’t under threat, he wasn’t concerned. It was customary for weekends at the conference to be given over to socialising. The host commissioner would arrange an outing for the delegates and their wives, but Bischof never went on these trips. He would go instead to the horse races or the trots. At the time I had no idea that he was doing this to check on the progress of his money laundering scam back in Queensland.
Because he contributed so little to the conference, Frank gave me no opportunity to assess his intellectual capacity. It was only when I became the Queensland commissioner myself that I realised that he had been a very astute operator. Many years before, he had skillfully selected three of the very best of his cadet intake — Terry Lewis, Glen Hallahan and Tony Murphy — to be what the newspapers called his bagmen.
Just how Frank came by the money he bet at the track was discovered in 1964 by the then treasurer, Sir Thomas Hiley. As I’ve said, I was not told of Hiley’s discoveries while I held office in Queensland and did not become aware of the information he revealed until some years after I had left when the Courier-Mail finally published his findings. Hiley had revealed the existence of a well-organised but surreptitious “levy” placed on all unlicensed bookmakers throughout the whole state. Payment of the levy guaranteed freedom from police action. According to Hiley, the “levy” was collected by local police officers on the understanding that it was a donation to the “slush funds” of a political party. No receipts were issued at any stage, so that nobody knew how much was retained at each step in the process. The balance from each town, calculated according to population, was forwarded to Brisbane where it disappeared — much of it at the racetrack. Hiley had only been made aware of this state of affairs when three disgruntled illegal bookmakers had complained to him that the levy was being raised to unreasonable heights. The bookmakers hadn’t minded paying for protection from prosecution, they just didn’t want to pay too much. Hiley had called in the premier of the day and the solicitor general. The solicitor general had advised that there was little chance of prosecuting anybody unless the bookmakers themselves were prepared to give evidence. So all Hiley and the police minister did was call in Frank Bischof and tell him to stop the practice. At first Frank denied that it happened at all, but then Hiley had shown him the bookmakers’ betting sheets which he had access to as treasurer. Where exactly were Mr Bischof and his alter ego, Mr Baystone, getting their betting money? Bischof had then agreed that perhaps the rules were being bent a little and he gave a verbal undertaking to put a stop to the levy. There was no question of him resigning from the Force for such a minor impropriety. When Bischof died, his estate was fairly small, so I’ve no real understanding of where all the money went. I could never get close to Frank Bischof. He was cold, not unfriendly but always very neutral as far as I was concerned. He seemed more preoccupied with personal matters than departmental ones.
Had I known of the “levy” raising practice — unapproved officially but condoned by those who benefited — I would not have accepted the invitation to become commissioner. Although I had guessed at the extent of the frequent social interaction between influential police officers and Cabinet ministers, I would have realised sooner that I had no chance of succeeding in reducing corruption. If the police controlled the inflow of “slush funds” to parliamentarians, they also strongly influenced voting in Cabinet.
Perhaps I had been misled by my own experience of a corruption-free state Cabinet in South Australia where committed Christian, Sir Thomas Playford, was state premier for twenty-seven years. “Honest Tom” came from a rural background, yet managed to make South Australia a large manufacturing region with happily settled, recent migrants from England. When he retired back to his orchard in the Adelaide Hills, his personal wealth had not increased. I had assumed that Playford’s principles were the norm for Christian leaders but my Queensland years
taught me otherwise. Queensland in my day was still permeated by a rural fundamentalism. Ownership of land was a goal for most men, and it was a male society. Even my own police talked about the time when they would “own a bit of soil”. Rural cultures favour settling disputes informally and I came across a fair bit of this practice. I had to resign from a highly respected community service organisation because weekly lunch meetings were obligatory, and these were used by fellow members to approach me to cancel traffic tickets and other “trifles”. I lost a few influential supporters this way, but at least I no longer had to put up with “Ah, Commissioner, good to see you. Can you fix this for me?”
My mail frequently contained similar requests from members of Parliament who were passing on pleading letters from their constituents. My minister, Max Hodges, supported my refusals. I was sometimes present in his office when he would receive a telephone call from another MP requesting special treatment. Max would reply by quoting the date and number of his own traffic violation and the receipt number of his own payment of the fine. We both lost supporters in this way.