Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have been through the fiery furnace of the notorious Fitzgerald inquiry in Queensland. I was one of the two people who called it on. We weren't aware of the extent of the corruption of the Police Force in Queensland, but we knew there were a number of murders. It turned out there were 42 murders. If we'd had an ICAC or a Criminal Justice Commission, as it was later called in Queensland, it would never have got to that stage. Twenty-one of those deaths were at the infamous Whiskey Au Go Go, in a fire started by the mobsters' cabaret protection racket. The club hadn't paid their protection money, and up went the Whiskey Au Go Go, with no inquiry or punishment of anyone. The door was closed from the outside and 21 people were killed. Quite apart from that, there were another 21 murders, six of them in North Queensland.

So, if you don't have something like this, you leave members of parliament—and I was one of those members in parliament—in very, very scary territory. You leave decent policemen in very scary territory. I would estimate that over 20 police had their lives completely destroyed by evil police putting obscene child pornography on their computers. To this very day, I am so scarred and scared that I still will not use a computer, because I saw what happened to all these innocent people during that inquiry. Judge Vasta, whose son is in this place and whose other son is a Federal Court judge, was hanged, drawn and quartered without a single scintilla of evidence ever being produced against him, because he was from the wrong side of the tracks. I am quoting from a speech by Lin Powell, who was touted as a future premier in Queensland. The sin of Vasta was that he wasn't a member of the legal club in Brisbane. He hadn't gone to the GPS/TAS schools. He was a canecutter's son from North Queensland. Those were the sins. The people that they put to judge him, the judges in Brisbane, were the very people who resented him being there.

So I've given you two or three examples of the terrible downside of a proposal of this type, but the alternative to that is to watch what happened in Queensland, where, if you tried to assail them, they assailed you long before you got close to them. That's why I'm backing an independent body such as is proposed by the honourable member, who, like me, represents a regional area in this place. That's why I'm backing her rather courageous and wonderful initiative today. But I ask everyone please to be conscious of the downside to these sorts of inquiries.

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