by Ray Whitrod
I introduced the concept of management by objectives, using quantifiable data, as a way of assessing our annual outcomes. Once a year the executive heads of the force’s branches would meet to check their performance against goals which had been set twelve months previously. If, for example, it was found that the target of decreasing housebreaking by five per cent had not been met, reasons would be sought and remedies proposed. There was a set procedure for communicating these decisions and initiating debate down the line. The branch heads would talk to their inspectors who would talk to their district sergeants who would talk to the rank and file members of the force. I provided a detailed breakdown of this procedure in my annual reports.
After some years I was able to report that all of the McKinna recommendations had been introduced and were being implemented, with the exception of the principle of promotion by merit. I had given the McKinna material my prime attention as Cabinet had requested, but there were other departmental activities that caused me concern. Soon after my arrival I had spent some hours inspecting the Special Branch office and files. Most of the files I examined contained information that was unclassified as to validity, reliability and degree of relevance. I found references which appeared to be purely anecdotal, hearsay or at best third-party reports. The range of people investigated seemed unjustifiably large and selection appeared to be based on the personal judgments of investigators rather than a systematic analysis of any threats.
Obviously the branch had simply grown from small beginnings and was staffed by men who had received little if any training in intelligence duties. Perhaps their calibre can be gauged by the fact that Mr Don (“Shady”) Lane, the now-disgraced ex-MP, had once been a long-time member of it. The staff operated almost autonomously and had frequent access to the premier. It was clear to me that if the premier was receiving the type of information I had found in the files, he could be basing his decisions on unreliable reports. There seemed to be no system of accountability in operation, and no overall supervision by a senior police officer, yet in theory I was responsible for the branch’s operations. But since the Special Branch officers were on good terms with the premier, and since any attempt to improve its operation was likely to be a long, drawn-out struggle, I postponed taking action until I had cleared my more immediate objectives.
There were other almost autonomous units: the Pipe Band, the Mounted Cadre and the Water Police. Each had built up a considerable body of public support and any attempt by me to produce a cost—benefit analysis was likely to be met with strenuous opposition from both the Police Union and the media. Yet I had come across disturbing features in each of these bodies and my immediate reaction was to consider the possibility of a community advisory committee which would provide expert advice and propose operational guidelines for them. But again, I could foresee organised resistance from vested interests. Some of these “interests” were in high places. On one of my rare inspections of the Water Police vessels, I came across a very large freezer in the stern of their largest boat. I was curious and was told that this was needed to hold the catch when “X” was out with them. This fishing was a regular duty. “X” wanted the fish for official dinners since his entertainment allowance was pretty thin. When later my wife and I were dinner guests of “X”, we were served fresh fish! He made his point. I postponed my review of the Water Police operations.
When the number of women recruited as police officers had reached about one hundred, I called them together and addressed them in confidence. I was the only male present. I explained that their recruitment had been controversial and that any mistakes they made were likely to be given magnified public coverage. I asked them to be prudent in their behaviour at all times because at the moment they were in the public eye. I told them that they were sworn officers with the same powers and responsibilities as their male colleagues, and that every position in the Force was open to them until it was established that females could not do those particular duties. I told them I planned to have an all-female rape squad and a female traffic car to begin with, perhaps introducing more units like these if the scheme worked satisfactorily.
I explained that the union executive was not in favour of my moves because a male of any rank was traditionally considered senior to any female, regardless of her rank. I suggested that the female police officers might consider attending branch meetings of the union with a view to influencing the union’s views. I told them that this talk was just between them and me. Within two hours the police union secretary rang me and was able to describe the details of that confidential meeting with the police women. But generally my policy of recruiting women to up to twelve per cent of the total force strength proved successful.
The 1970s were a time of much student agitation over a number of issues. At the University of Queensland, Zelman Cowan was also having a rough ride. The students invaded his office and refused to leave. He appealed to me and I had police forcibly remove the trespassers. This got me off to a bad start with the students. They began a strike during which they occupied the central quadrangle for several days and disrupted lectures. Zelman again appealed to me and I went to the university and spoke to the ringleaders. The outcome was their challenging me to a public debate, which I accepted. It was held the next evening in a large university hall overflowing with heckling students. It was known that the debate was being televised live by the ABC.
My opponent, a third-year student, an articulate and presentable young woman, outlined the students’ side, and then I responded. I remember I started them by saying that my objective was not only to get them to agree to go back to studies but also to agree to my setting up a permanent police station on their campus. They were all aware that in Melbourne a similar situation had been resolved by the police agreeing that the campus was a “no go” area for them and that they would not enter without getting permission to do so. I told the students that, quite recently, I had been a student myself. I knew their problems. At the ANU I’d attended classes while I was Commissioner of Police and had young radicals sitting beside me, lighting up marijuana cigarettes, just to egg me on. I cannot recall all the details of the debate, which was rowdy and full of interjections, and so the exact outcome is only vaguely remembered, but the strike finished at that time. With the consent of the vice-chancellor and the students, I set up a small one-man police office in the university The officer appointed to this task was already a part-time student at the university.
I instructed him to go out of his way to be helpful to students who wanted to report accidents, renew licences, report lost property, arrange driving tests and the like, but otherwise to keep a low profile. The arrangement worked satisfactorily for all concerned until it was discarded by my successor, Terry Lewis, some years later. I was pleased with an invitation to be the patron of the Engineering Students’ Society and flattered when they repeated this offer the following year. I was proud of that invitation. I was asked to speak after dinner to the residential colleges and relationships between police and students were good. However, at the time of the Springbok confrontations they rapidly deteriorated.
The South African rugby team had already been the subject of violent confrontations between anti-Apartheid protesters and the police in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. In Brisbane, we managed to provide a secure playing field, but the protesters gathered outside the Tower Mill Hotel where the Springboks were staying. On the second night of the protest, I took charge myself. There must have been about a thousand demonstrators facing six hundred police outside the hotel. Things started to hot up at about a quarter to seven, just as the main television news broadcasts were about to begin. I received a call from the matron of the next-door hospital. She was worried about some surgical operations then in progress. The noise was making the surgeons edgy — would it be possible to quieten things down a bit? I went to the leader of the protesters, a theological student, and explained the problem. I pointed out that the Springboks would still be here on the following night. Couldn
’t the proceedings be adjourned for twenty-four hours?
“I believe you, Commissioner,” he said. “But my mob won’t.”
I suggested he go into the hospital to talk to the matron himself. He did this and on his return addressed the crowd through a megaphone. The situation in the hospital was serious, he said. Come back tomorrow and we’ll have another go. Everyone went home.
By the next night I had brought in a large number of country police to reinforce the metropolitan members of the Force. Country police are not used to being tolerant of political protest, especially when it is couched in the terms that some of the protesters were then using in their taunts. We were Nazis and fascists and we ought to go back to Germany. I divided my men into three shifts and rotated them every quarter of an hour. During the half-hour they had away from the front line, the hotel supplied them with sandwiches and tea. As the seven o’clock news approached and things were getting rowdy, I was standing in a room on the first floor of the hotel surveying the scene with a loudspeaker in my hand. A brick was thrown through the window, landing at my feet. I realised that the time for passively absorbing the provocation was past. I spoke to the crowd through the loudspeaker, telling them we were going to clear the street in three minutes and asking them to disperse. Everyone waited for three minutes. The police charged. Some protesters were knocked over; most ran away. The police clearly took the action very seriously. I got the impression that many of the demonstrators were treating the proceedings as a game. As the demonstrators and the pursuing police disappeared down the hill, I used the loudspeaker to recall my men. They didn’t hear me.
The next morning I received a visit from Zelman Cowan. He said that the university had had senior academics in the crowd to monitor police behaviour. The general feeling was that I had over-reacted in ordering the street cleared. I put my side of the story to him and I think he half-accepted that I couldn’t have stood passively by while the hotel’s windows were being broken.
I received a bitter note from some postgraduate (and therefore presumably more mature) students, charging me with betrayal of our joint understanding that police were not to be used to repress dissent but only to maintain civil order. Then it became known that the police union had passed a motion of no confidence in me because of my policy of using as little violence as possible — called “gentleness”—in dealing with demonstrators. It also became public knowledge that the premier had signalled which side he was supporting by granting the police extra leave without any application for this from me. The postgraduates then sent a note of apology for their earlier letter. As it was, the Tower Mill Hotel was blacklisted by the trade unions. It went rapidly downhill and the owners had considerable difficulty selling it.
It was another student demonstration that played a major role in my final showdown with the premier. Joh had decreed that there were to be no street demonstrations without permits from the police. He had instructed me to issue no permits. The students had decided to march from the university to the city. I talked to the leaders and told them I couldn’t issue a permit and advised them that if they were going to march, it would be best to do it on the footpath. Of course, they didn’t keep to the footpath. Their route took them under a bridge, which provided a useful vantage point for the television cameras. It was just before this bridge that the inspector in charge of the Motor Traffic Branch used his men to stop the demonstrators. A slight, seventeen-year-old girl with a placard on a stick directly confronted the inspector. The inspector grabbed the stick. The girl held on. The inspector hit her over the head with his baton. The cameras on the bridge captured all the action and I, like most Queenslanders, saw it on the TV news that night.
Zelman Cowan and the president of the Student Union came to see me. I told them I would inquire into the matter. On their way out of Police Headquarters, the student leader said to the waiting press: “The Commissioner is going to investigate this.” It was a tactical error, although obviously unintentional. All I had told him was that I was going to “inquire”. This meant getting a report on the incident, which I could do as a routine internal procedure. But when the fact that I was going to investigate the incident was published in the midday press, Joh immediately issued a decree that I was not to conduct an investigation. If I was to investigate anything, he said, I was to investigate what the students were doing on the road without a permit. I still thought it was my right to inquire into the conduct of one of my own officers and that the premier’s pronouncement breached the doctrine of the separation of powers. But to conduct an inquiry I would have needed the cooperation of the members of the Motor Traffic Branch. Now that the premier had issued his decree, I doubted that I would be able to obtain this cooperation. If I couldn’t obtain it, the way would then be open for charges that my men had revolted, mutinied. I couldn’t afford to run the risk of this happening. I backed down and there was no inquiry. This did my reputation with the students no good.
The raid on the Cedar Bay commune was a different matter. Here I could go against the dictates of the premier because I could use officers whom I trusted. The Cedar Bay raid had been carried out by local police on a hippie commune in the far north of the state. About a hundred people had been involved in the raid, which included the use of a naval patrol boat. It appeared to have been an extreme over-reaction — the hippies were alleged to have been growing marijuana. In the raid, property had been destroyed and vegetable patches trampled, but no charges were laid. People from the commune complained to me and again I said I would arrange for an inquiry. When the premier heard of this he decreed that I was not to send any officers north of Cairns to investigate. Cedar Bay is north of Cairns. I called in Norm Gulbransen and a junior officer whom I knew I could trust. I told them that I was issuing a direct order to them in contravention of the premier’s directive to me: they were to go to Cedar Bay and investigate. They indicated that this was good enough for them and proceeded to Cedar Bay. Their report was critical of the local police’s actions.
When later I announced I would be leaving the Queensland Police Force, the president of the Students’ Union at the University of Queensland sent me a card endorsed with the words: “We are very sorry that you are leaving. You gave us hope.” It was the nicest thing that happened to me.
Nigel Powell has made a strong plea not to take police problems out of their social context. Police come from, marry into, survive and retire in a social milieu. In this regard, Jill Bolen quoted a number of social commentators who described the culture of Queensland society during my time in office as “populist, conservative, anti-intellectual, and authoritarian”. I found Queenslanders to be cheerful, self-reliant, family- and community-orientated and industrious, but overall my experiences in that state did nothing to disprove the commentators’ descriptions.
These characteristics explained the public support for the policies of the hillbilly dictator, Sir Joh, and his continuing endorsement of the long reign of Commissioner Lewis. Lewis was more a true son of this culture than I ever could be. At best I was an adopted son from a different, and therefore inferior, culture — a “Mexican” from south of the border. I did not condone a black — albeit prosperous — economy supported by the delivery of large sums of money in brown paper bags.
In my foreword to Jill Bolen’s book, Reform in Policing: Lessons from the Whitrod Era, I suggest that the material in it may justify the upgrading of the folk saying, “A community gets the type of police force it deserves” into an accepted social principle. And this is true in a general sense. But it was my predecessor, Frank Bischof, who bequeathed the particular network of corruption and resistance to change that ultimately drove me to resign. As I have said, I came to the conclusion that Bischof, in his own way, was an astute operator. His selection of Tony Murphy, Glen Hallahan and Terry Lewis as his personal team showed considerable managerial acumen. What the exact relationship had been between these three and the commissioner I never knew. But I discovered that Detective Hallahan had enjoyed t
he freedom of travelling interstate whenever he chose. I had come across some references to him when I was Commonwealth commissioner, which had placed him in a western country town when some counterfeit notes were being unloaded. And later, on Shirley Brifman’s information, I learnt that Hallahan was mixed up with eastern states colleagues in the distribution of counterfeit notes.
Soon after I had arrived in Brisbane, I was called upon by a young barrister. He told me he had been given the task of defending a man who had been charged with breaking and entering a warehouse and stealing a large stock of goods. The barrister said that Hallahan had given evidence that he had found the man in possession of the stolen goods and consequently the man, who had a criminal record, was convicted and sentenced to four years’ gaol. The barrister told me that the criminal had complained that he actually had nothing to do with this particular break and enter; it was a set-up by Glen Hallahan. The criminal said that Hallahan had loaded him with a portion of the goods, having disposed of the rest for his own profit. I said I’d make inquiries. I sent for Inspector Bill Simpson, who was then head of the CIB. I thought Bill Simpson was a friend of mine because I knew him from the course that McKinna and I had run some years earlier in Canberra and we’d got on well together. I told him I’d received a complaint about Glen Hallahan, that he’d loaded up a criminal with goods he didn’t steal.