Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen (13 January 191123 April 2005), known as Joh Bjelke-Petersen or simply Sir Joh, was a conservative Australian politician. He was the longest-serving and longest-lived premier of Queensland, holding office from 1968 to 1987, during which time the state underwent considerable economic development. He has become one of the most well-known and controversial figures of 20th-century Australian politics because of his uncompromising conservatism (including his role in the downfall of the Whitlam federal government), political longevity, and the institutional corruption of his government.
Bjelke-Petersen's Country (later National) Party controlled Queensland despite frequently receiving a smaller number of votes than the state's two other major parties, achieving the result through a system of electoral malapportionment that resulted in rural votes having a greater value than those cast in city electorates. The system earned Bjelke-Petersen the nickname "the Hillbilly Dictator". Regardless, he was a highly popular figure among conservative voters and over the course of his 19 years as premier he tripled the number of people who voted for the CP and doubled the party's percentage vote. After the Liberal Party pulled out of the coalition government in 1983, Bjelke-Petersen reduced his former partners to a mere eight seats in an election held later that year. In 1985 Bjelke-Petersen launched a campaign to move into federal politics to become prime minister, though the campaign was eventually aborted.
Bjelke-Petersen earned himself a reputation as a "law and order" politician with his repeated use of police force against street demonstrators and strongarm tactics with trade unions, leading to descriptions of Queensland under his leadership as a police state. From 1987 his administration came under the scrutiny of a royal commission into police corruption and its links with state government ministers. Bjelke-Petersen was unable to recover from the series of damaging findings and after initially resisting a party vote that replaced him as leader, resigned from politics on 1 December 1987. Two of his state ministers, as well as the police commissioner Bjelke-Petersen had appointed and later knighted, were jailed for corruption offences and in 1991 Bjelke-Petersen, too, was tried for perjury over his evidence to the royal commission; the jury failed to reach a verdict as the jury foreman was a member of the Young Nationals and a member of the "Friends of Joh" group, and Bjelke-Petersen was deemed too old to face a second trial.
Early life
Bjelke-Petersen was born in Dannevirke which was part of the Hawke's Bay Region of New Zealand, (Now the Tararua District) and lived in Waipukurau, a small town in Hawke's Bay. The Australian Bjelke-Petersen family are of Danish descent.
Bjelke-Petersen's parents were both Danish immigrants, and his father, Carl (known to the family as George), was a Lutheran pastor. In 1913 the family moved to Australia, establishing a farm, "Bethany", near Kingaroy in south-eastern Queensland.
The young Bjelke-Petersen suffered from polio, leaving him with a lifelong limp. The family was poor, and Carl Bjelke-Petersen was frequently in poor health. Bjelke-Petersen left formal schooling at age 14 to work with his mother on the farm, though he later enrolled in correspondence school and undertook a University of Queensland extension course on the "Art of Writing". He taught Sunday school, delivered sermons regularly in nearby towns and joined the Kingaroy debating society.
In 1933, Bjelke-Petersen began work land-clearing and peanut farming on the family's newly acquired second property. His efforts eventually allowed him to begin work as a contract land-clearer and to acquire further capital which he invested in farm equipment and natural resource exploration. He developed a technique for quickly clearing scrub by connecting a heavy anchor chain between two bulldozers. By the time he was 30, he was a prosperous farmer and businessman. Obtaining a pilot's licence early in his adult life, Bjelke-Petersen also started aerial spraying and grass seeding to further speed up pasture development in Queensland.