by Ray Whitrod
I said: “Bill, what sort of chap is Hallahan? Can you give me any assessment about him?”
Simpson said: “Yes, Commissioner, he’s a first-class detective. It’s common practice for criminals to make these allegations. Don’t believe a word this bloke says. I’ll vouch for Hallahan’s honesty.”
Now I knew that Hallahan was a doubtful character, so it seemed to me that Simpson was saying: “Is this what you want me to say for the official record?” But he didn’t wink or give any indication that this was so. Or he was saying: “If you don’t know, Commissioner, you’re a dope and I’m not going to tell you.”
I said: “Thanks, Bill. That’s helped me a lot,” and he left.
All this meant, of course, that I was going to have difficulty getting through to the detective branch my vision of what I thought police work was all about.
But while Bischof had been very astute in his selection of these three young men, I think that in any circumstances they would have risen to the top just through hard work and their abilities as detectives, if they’d chosen to do it that way. Of the three, I formed the opinion that Murphy clearly was the controller. There was mention by one of the Fitzgerald witnesses that Murphy was known as “The Boss”. In comparison, Glen Hallahan was a very bright, good-looking, active young man and a very capable operator. Murphy and Hallahan were, in my view, superior to Lewis. Terry Lewis had something about him that worried me. I never knew what it was, but I thought that he was not as robust as the other two. As the years have gone by and Lewis has maintained his innocence during his seven years of imprisonment, he has surprised me. According to newspaper reports, he has shown no remorse for the crimes for which he was convicted. I think that this supports Bischof s judgment of him.
Murphy was an all-round figure of authority. He was a member of the Police Union executive and he would tackle me most aggressively any time I was invited to address the executive. He treated me with some degree of superciliousness — he clearly thought he knew a great deal more about the Queensland Police Force and the associated justice system than I did. He was able to work the system very much to his own advantage. As an example, after he retired as assistant commissioner — a position he reached despite the premier knowing his background — he was able to secure a TAB contract for himself on Stradbroke Island following a recommendation by Sir Edward Lyons, then chairman of the TAB.
I discussed with my little team at headquarters what we might do to minimise the Lewis, Murphy, Hallahan influence. We set up the Crime Intelligence Unit (CIU), as we called the small group designed to investigate police corruption, with a few very brave souls, especially Basil Hicks who really did get rough treatment later on. Just before he took up his appointment with the CIU, Basil tells about being taken to the roof of Police Headquarters by Tony Murphy, who said: “There’s no need for us to be always fighting. Why don’t you join us? There’s nine of us — Terry, Glen and I are the main three and there’s the other six. If you join us, you will be one of the main ones — there will be me, you, Terry and Glen.”
Hicks said: “What about Whitrod?”
Murphy said: “We’ll surround him.”
According to Basil Hicks, he made a vague arrangement with Murphy to meet again and left to report the conversation to Norm Gulbransen. Tony Murphy has always denied that there was any improper discussion between himself and Basil Hicks.
Two days before I left the Queensland Police Force, Basil came to me and said that he had acquired a lot of information from outside informants about the rat pack. He said that he’d given the informants his word that their identities would never be revealed to the rat pack. With me leaving, Basil was worried that he would no longer be able to shield his sources. He asked me what I thought he should do with his files.
I said: “Burn them. I’ll give you written instructions to burn them.”
He took the files home and burnt them. He had a hard time in the Queensland Police Force after I left.
We were alarmed when suddenly Shirley Brifman died so mysteriously a few days before she was due to give evidence against Murphy on four counts of perjury relating to the National Hotel Royal Commission case some years previously. Shirley Brifman was a prosecution witness. It had taken some time to find Brifman and convince her to come to Brisbane to give evidence. She had been promised police protection. Then she died very suddenly from what was found to be an overdose of drugs. She left no suicide note and questions have been asked as to whether her death was actually a suicide. The Fitzgerald Inquiry found there was no evidence to suggest Murphy was involved in any way in Brifman’s death, her death being a fatal occurrence which had since been associated with a number of other informers who had been drug users. Because of Brifinan’s untimely death it meant that Murphy’s guilt or innocence on the peijury charges was never resolved, although he is of course entitled to the presumption of innocence.
I had arranged for Murphy and Lewis to be posted to far western police stations at Longreach and Charleville in the hope that this might minimise their influence. I think that at least one newspaper has claimed that by being posted out in the far west they were able to gain closer contact with Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen and the National Party and to convince Joh that I was an ardent ALP supporter.
Whoever thought up the move to get Lewis appointed assistant commissioner was a very shrewd man. With Joh’s pronouncement that Lewis would be appointed to the position, my opponents put themselves in a win—win situation. If Lewis was appointed my assistant and I remained commissioner then there would be a direct channel that would allow Bjelke-Petersen to get things done in the way that he wanted, by simply bypassing me. I now had no avenue through which to complain. My minister, Max Hodges, had been downgraded and I had no supporter left in Parliament. On the other hand, if I decided to retire because of the appointment of Lewis — which is what I did — it meant that Lewis could be appointed commissioner at a very young age with many years in the position before him. As I say, it was a very shrewd move, made, I think, with some knowledge of the way I was likely to react. I could have stayed on and been a thorn in their side, but if I felt my name was being used to give legitimacy to activities that I did not agree with, then obviously I would eventually resign. I wondered how Joh obtained that correct assessment of my likely moves. It seems to me that the impetus or information must have come from somebody who’d known me for a long time. There is only one person I can think of who fits that description, an old drinking mate of Lewis and Murphy.
As for Joh, I have very mixed feelings about that man — very mixed. I’m sure Joh takes his problems to the Lord in prayer, but I wonder if he waits for any answer. Or, if there is an answer, perhaps the reception is very bad. I make this comment because there were times during my seven years when the little team in my office felt up against it. We would retreat to the coffee table in the corner and Ken and Linda, my secretary, and I would sit quietly for a little while and meditate, thinking about the next task, hoping we might get some inspiration about what the next step should be. We must have been getting a different set of celestial signals from Joh, because he would often veto our ideas. As I’ve said, I didn’t see much of Joh during my seven years and on the few occasions I did meet him, we had pleasant conversations. But, from a distance, it seems to me that he treated me rudely, arrogantly and ignorantly. I was the state’s police authority, chosen by his government. In practice, I was probably the most experienced and best qualified police commissioner Queensland had ever had. Yet Joh dismissed many of my suggestions out of hand. It was treatment I had never experienced before. In my other appointments, the minister, if he wanted to discuss a matter I was proposing, would ask me to visit him or give him a paper setting out the pros and cons. Such a paper would then be discussed and the minister would let me put my side of the story; he would explain his stance, and I always I felt I had received a fair hearing. As a matter of fact, in the seventeen years I had been in charge of a police force, none of my re
commendations had ever been turned down. But in Queensland, while I had a most sympathetic minister in the person of Max Hodges, it was the premier who often made the decisions. And Joh never gave me a chance to explain my reasons for introducing certain changes. Often the first news I had of a reversal of one of my policies was in the pages of the daily newspaper. He merely said: “Mr Whitrod will not be doing that.” Joh never extended me the courtesy of talking about it.
Bjelke-Petersen’s own knowledge of police principles and practices was largely confined to stories he would have been told by his police drivers. As for his knowledge of democratic theory, the Fitzgerald Inquiry exposed that as being nil. Joh had never heard of the basic principle of the separation of powers. Yet while he was prepared to dismiss my recommendations out of hand, it is obvious from the evidence of the Fitzgerald Inquiry that he listened — probably open-mouthed — to the lies that Lewis was telling him about me. For instance, Lewis told Joh that I was a staunch member of the ALP. I have never been a member of the ALP nor associated with it. After I had been replaced by Lewis, two of the trustworthy members of the Criminal Intelligence Unit went to Joh with complaints about Lewis. Joh merely listened to them and then transferred the information to Lewis himself.
In 1976 I had spent some time in a Brisbane hospital, pardy because of the stress and partly because of a recurrence of malaria. Mavis had suffered another bout as well.
I had a final showdown with the premier over the forced appointment of Lewis as my deputy, and voluntarily left the force. There was a fair bit of media coverage, with some members of the public raising a petition for me to stay. I didn’t have another job to go to but Mavis supported my decision. My superannuation was in a mess because I found that my previous credits were not transferable to the Queensland fund, and I lost considerably over the conversion. This affected our lifestyle in retirement but Mavis never complained about my actions. She truly was a two-cow wife.
On the day I left the Queensland Police Force, the editor of the Courier-Mail, wrote in a front-page article entitled “The Last of the Honest Cops” that my minister and I had done our best but we had been naive. At the time, I thought that this was an unfair comment, but as I now look back I recognise the justice of the statement. We really had no chance of bringing reforms to the Queensland Police Force.
In selecting me — an outsider — to be the state’s new commissioner, Max had chosen someone who did not have the backing of either the Masons or the Irish, the two dominant social groups. He had chosen someone to occupy a position of authority in a conservative society who was tolerant of Aborigines and other minority groups, who encouraged female participation, someone who was over-educated by local standards and therefore automatically academic in judgment, a male who each day went home for lunch instead of socialising in his club, who was barely of minimum police height and who was a former soccer player in a state which worshiped the big men of Rugby League, who preferred walking along a beach to horse racing or trotting, who had to operate in a society criss-crossed by a network of obligations and prearranged mutual benefits, who thought rationally about police policies and practices instead of parochially, who was not ill at ease and inarticulate when being televised, who had a wife who did not attend fashion shows and fraternise and, perhaps worst of all, who did not blindly accept government directions but examined them for their legal validity and community benefit — all of this in a community largely content with its existing standards of ethical conduct.
If I had given more weight to the failure of Orlando Wilson to reform the Chicago Police Department, of Patrick Murphy to reform the New York Police Department, of Sir Robert Mark to reform New Scotland Yard, I might not have been so confident of being able to achieve a worthwhile outcome with the Queensland Police Department.
As it was, I recruited numerous enthusiastic and idealistic young men and women, many of whom suffered much frustration and severe disappointment in subsequent years. One of my recruits, Jill Bolen, is now a doctoral candidate in New South Wales. She joined the Queensland Police Force in 1973 and served for twenty years, working her way up to the position of chief superintendent of a region on the Gold Coast. This was an admirable feat, since the regime in which she worked was far from sympathetic to the cause of female police officers. In her published Masters thesis, Jill Bolen analyses my years in Queensland and she notes that when I was on leave in 1973 — that is, halfway through my term — Acting Commissioner Barlow highlighted the changes made under my stewardship. These included:
the circulation of a newsletter, the construction of the Academy, reorganisation of the Information Bureau, the rebuilding and restructuring of the police operations centre, the introduction of lunch time conferences at Headquarters, setting a syllabus for police qualifying examinations, the appointment of a panel of markers to permit early notification of results, various aspects of reorganisation, enhanced numbers of women police, changes to uniforms, the formation of the Crime Intelligence Unit, enhanced education and training programs and many others. (Commissioner’s Newsletter No 84,11 July 1973 — cited in Bolen, 1997 p. 67)
Jill Bolen notes that many of the extended roles undertaken by women police officers in the Queensland Police Force were “firsts either in Australia or internationally and Whitrod took great pride in trumpeting the achievements to quell criticism of the strategy and to explain local administrative policies in relation to women” (Bolen, 1997 p. 66).
While I was in hospital for a short while in 1975, Norm Gulbransen, as acting commissioner, listed in the newsletter “just some of the real benefits gained by all police from Mr Whitrod’s administration during the past five years”. He wrote:
Those which spring quickly to mind are: Increased salaries and allowances (Mr Whitrod gave evidence in support of the Police Union case!); Increase of seven days’ recreation leave per year; Granting of seven days’ study leave per subject for Police Arts and Sciences studies; Two opportunities per year to sit for police examinations; Provision of an examinations syllabus; Opportunity to gain Senior Constable grade at seven years’ service; Extended In-Service Training courses; The Study Assistance Scheme with reimbursement of fees to members who successfully undertake approved courses; Supply of a departmental motor vehicle to each station; Provision of more comfortable and suitable uniforms. (Commissioner’s Newsletter No.167,14 Feb 1975)
With hindsight, it is still difficult for me to identify where I went wrong — if, indeed, I did go wrong. Bjelke-Petersen’s public farewell comment was that I had done nothing wrong, I had just tried to do too much too quickly I had had ten years — from age fifty-five to sixty-five — to introduce all the McKinna recommendations, recommendations that had been endorsed by Cabinet. I lasted seven years. The only recommendation that I hadn’t managed to introduce was promotion by merit, and I had tried long and hard to bring it into practice. But promotion by seniority was ingrained in the whole public service system. This made it doubly hard to introduce it in a single department. There were lots of reasons why members of Queensland’s police force would hang on to the notion of seniority. It had many advantages for them. It meant that almost everybody would retire as an inspector or superintendent, and promotion to these ranks would have come in the last twelve to eighteen months of service. The officer could leave the force with some glory and a superannuation payout commensurate with his recently gained rank. I do not know what other strategies or tactics I could have adopted. Perhaps we could have accepted the Police Union’s suggestion that we introduce promotion by merit, but with a “grandfather clause” which meant that all serving members would be exempt from the new rules. In practice, this would have divided the force; it would have meant that the force would have had two types of members: those who were winning their promotion by virtue of their skill and dedication, and those who were having it given to them by virtue of their age. But since the older group would be slowly working their way through the higher ranks, these would have been denied the younger gr
oup for many years, regardless of their ability.
I have been back to Queensland twice: once to give evidence at the Fitzgerald Inquiry and once to give a paper at a public seminar on the Inquiry. On the first visit, I discovered that fieldwork for the Inquiry was being conducted by an Inspector James Patrick O’Sullivan. He was unknown to me when I was commissioner a few years earlier. He had never come forward to join our little group of corruption fighters, he had never volunteered any information about corruption, but presumably Fitzgerald had good reasons for selecting him. He was later appointed commissioner, probably on the strength of his work for Fitzgerald. I asked some of my former colleagues at the Inquiry if they knew Inspector O’Sullivan — he must have had twenty years’ or more experience in the Force. No one knew him at all; he was an unknown quantity. How Fitzgerald had discovered him, I don’t know.
It was something of a physical effort to get to Queensland. My health has not been good these last few years and I’m normally confined to home and a walking frame, but I got to Brisbane and was pleased to be able to give evidence. I followed the daily newspaper reports of the Inquiry and was delighted with both the scope and the depth of Fitzgerald’s approach. Clearly the Inquiry would not have happened ifjoh had not been absent from the state when the decision was taken to hold it. I was grateful to Fitzgerald for pursuing his objectives as faithfully as he did. The acting premier who instituted the Inquiry, Bill Gunn, deserves a lot of thanks for his perseverance in ensuring that Fitzgerald received all the help he needed.
I have been flattered by the suggestion that perhaps I was Australia’s first modern police commissioner, but any impact I may have made on Australian policing was only possible because I was standing on the shoulders of Brigadier McKinna. He showed how even a competent and honest force like the South Australian Police could be much improved simply by utilising managerial techniques already operating elsewhere, by creating innovative programs, and by outstanding leadership. I owe much to him. He was always available when I needed to discuss plans or problems and was most generous in offering me well-considered options and practical aid. He set a personal example in commitment, innovation and integrity, not only to his own members but also to his fellow commissioners as well. Unfortunately, too few of his colleagues interstate recognised or wanted to emulate his strategies. It was his integrity in carrying out his responsibilities that subsequently brought about his too-early retirement. He certainly impressed Max Hodges when Max inspected the South Australian Police Academy at Fort Largs leaving an impression that later resulted in my appointment as commissioner of the Queensland force. McKinna was the first modern Australian police commissioner — I was merely his protégé.