Joh Bjelke-Petersen
Australian politician
Died when: 94 years 100 days (1131 months)Star Sign: Capricorn
Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen KCMG (13 January 1911 – 23 April 2005), known as Joh Bjelke-Petersen, 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 that became synonymous with his later leadership.
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 notorious system of electoral malapportionment that resulted in rural votes having a greater value than those cast in city electorates.
The effect earned Bjelke-Petersen the nickname of "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 was a divisive figure and 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 frequent 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 Bjelke-Petersen was deemed too old to face a second trial.
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