Arrogant Beattie takes the Joh path
21.10.2006
Tony Koch
THERE is something greatly worrying about a government that actively participates in the denigration of its own institutions, particularly when one of those institutions is the justice system.
But this is the course the Beattie Government has embarked on in Queensland.
Six weeks ago, Premier Peter Beattie's Labor administration was returned for a fourth term with a ringing endorsement.
A week later, the state's Deputy Coroner Christine Clements brought down her findings on the inquest into the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee, an Aboriginal man who died in police custody on Palm Island on November19, 2004.
He had been arrested for swearing and being drunk, and the evidence was that he struck his arresting officer, Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, at the Palm Island watch house. But an hour or so later he was found dead in the cell, with four broken ribs and his liver cleaved in two.
Clements, after hearing weeks of evidence over a 12-month period, found that Hurley was responsible for the violent death of Doomadgee. When those findings were released, the Queensland Police Union launched a scathing personal attack on Clements for which it later apologised.
And Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson chose the softest of all options in not suspending Hurley but merely relegating him on full pay to desk duties.
Beattie and Police Minister Judy Spence supported that move publicly.
But Beattie did little to defend Clements and her office, allowing the recalcitrant police union to unleash its bile.
Last week The Australian broke the story about negotiations last June between the Beattie Government and lawyers for negligent surgeon Jayant Patel, whose extradition from the US is being sought.
Patel's lawyers made the offer that he would come back, provided he could do so without publicity.
They also did not want the Government to oppose bail, so that Patel could return to the US between hearings.
Attorney-General Linda Lavarch did not allow the Director of Public Prosecutions to accept the deal, despite a written recommendation from the DPP that it was the best option.
When the story broke, Beattie denied the assertion that his Government had rejected the DPP's advice because having Patel back in the country could have upset his election plans. He then launched into an incredible attack on the deal proposed by Patel's lawyers and its acceptance by the DPP, describing it as corrupt, unacceptable and a ``dog of a deal''.
In the ensuing argy-bargy, Beattie has mouthed the right words, talking about the ``fierce independence'' of the DPP's office. But it was he who had attacked that office and, by inference, its head, Leanne Clare.
He was asked by Patel's lawyers to apologise to Clare last Wednesday but refused, saying it was The Australian that should apologise for its ostensibly disgraceful reporting of the issue.
It is beyond political arrogance when a government assumes that it can control the justice system and further assumes it can cast slurs, by direct statement or considered omission, on members of the judiciary or the justice bureaucracy.
That was the modus operandi adopted by the tyrannical Bjelke-Petersen government in the 1980s, revealed publicly in all its horror by Tony Fitzgerald in his 1989 inquiry report on Queensland's administration.
Beattie is a lawyer. He lived through the Bjelke-Petersen years and even appeared for the goodies at Fitzgerald's inquiry.
He knows the deception he is adopting and should be aware of where it can lead.
To have abandoned Clements to appease the police union was appalling political cowardice.
To turn on the DPP to escape embarrassment over demonstrated ineptitude is desperate and dangerous stuff.
Tripping on the thin blue line
