Back to the Wivenhoe, it seems that the management have been releasing significant amounts of water so that the dam can mitigate the impacts of a likely cyclonic rain event sometime during the rest of the summer. Let's not forget we have nearly 3 months of wet season still to run.

Without the foresight of Jackboots Joh that would not be possible. As much as I cheered when the old mongrel was deposed, he should have a statue erected to him for the Wivenhoe. I'd donate for that.

What makes people to look at Fitzgerald as some sort of moral gauge. I don't know the man but from what I recall he was just a lawyer who got given a ride on the Goss/Beatty bandwagon. If Fitzgerald was of such impeccable integrity how is it that Goss & Beatty never had to spend a night on an uncomfortable bunk.
It may work on most people but to bring up Joh doesn't make thinking people overlook the other shonkeys.

individual

You either know nothing about the Fitzgerald Inquiry or you are being deliberately obtuse.

Bill Gunn, Joh's deputy, put in train the Fitzgerald Enquiry.

Goss was still in the Opposition.

Beattie was not in parliament.

The Fitzgerald Enquiry dealt with the Joh era.

The Fitzgerald Enquiry is no longer running.

Fitzgerald was not 'just a lawyer'. He was the man charged with the task of running the enquiry, which he did.

From that process, other states have been forced to create structures that keep an eye on what goes on.

Victoria, ever the corrupt state, has yet to do that but maybe the new government will overturn the ALP objection to open (well, more open) government there.

This thread is about Joh, not 'other shonkeys', which is why people are writing about Joh.

Most people, but clearly not you, regard Fitzgerald as a decent man who undertook a very hard task, knowing that politicians and business people all over the state would wish him to drop dead before he finished his work.

He paid a high personal cost for the work he did, as did his family. The punters of Qld benefitted, but are now, as usual, allowing politicians and businessmen to revert to the old order.

The recent jailing of one politician, but none of the people who were also involved in the bribery, speaks volumes of the need for a 'token scalp' to be submitted to the people.

By all means individual, keep asking questions about those now hiding the truth, in parliament, in business, in the media, but it might be best not to malign Fitzgerald's work or character with a cheap shot about him here.

Come on Bluey, give it a bit of a rest.

You must have been one of the fully paid up members of Fitzgerald adoration society. I suppose it's a left thing, but I have never before, or since, seen such adoration poured on one bloke in my life. Whats more, I have never seen anyone more capable of lapping up that adoration than Fitzgerald.

It was like watching a combination of the three monkeys, & the Shakespeare of my school days. Pure as the driven snow, & every word a pearl. Feature writers would analyse every word, looking for those pearls of wisdom that they knew must be hidden there. It was so sickeningly puerile that I turned off.

Fortunately I was not in TV coverage at the time, or I may have had trouble keeping food down.

For years afterward our "B" grade journalists would quote some minor thing the man had said, as if it was if it was the word of god.

Hang about, you still think it was.

As can now be seen, Joh's government was not so much the epitome of a corruption problem, as it was a POLITICAL problem for those having a vested interest in Australian democracy remaining essentially a two-major-party-alternating system of governance.

By the time he entered Parliament in 1946 at the age of 35, Joh was already a successful self-made man, possessed of the common sense and self-confidence frequently associated with such. He did not acquire family responsibilities of his own until he married in 1957 at the age of 46. Such was a sound base upon which to build a political career. Once he had become leader of his party in 1968, the combination of his political common sense with the electoral malaportionment legislation that he had inherited from the ALP government of 1949 and adapted for National Party advantage, meant he was likely Premier for life, or until he chose to retire. Joh wasn't the retiring sort.

In that situation the ALP had a problem: they were unlikely ever to win government against Joh's popular commonsense policies. The Liberal Party had a problem: they were unlikely ever to become the major coalition partner in the formulation and direction of policy. Erstwhile influential ostensible supporters of the Queensland National Party had a problem: Joh's views had come to be the most highly regarded within the Parliamentary National Party, and would usually prevail.

So, too, did any entity with an interest in being able to put a figurative thumb on the electoral scales that might influence just which of the two major parties would form governments from time to time, as happened elsewhere in Australia, but not in Queensland, have a problem. In 1987 Queensland still kept its own State electoral rolls independently of those maintained by the then relatively newly formed Australian Electoral Commission and jointly used by the other States, and Joh was not about to change that.

Joh had therefore to be destroyed.

Hasbeen's opening post threatens the sustained attack on Joh's reputation: Wivenhoe's performance memorializes it.

Ok Blue Cross,
Let's put this into another context. What has the Fitzgerald Commission achieved, at what cost to the taxpayer & what are we getting out of it now. You seem rather enlightened on the subject so it shouldn't take too long to throw these facts on the table. Many thanks in advance.