Sir Johannes "Joh" Bjelke-Petersen, KCMG (/ˈbiːɛlkiːˈpiːtərsən/, 13 January 1911–23 April 2005) was an Australian politician. He was the longest-serving and longest-lived Premier of Queensland, holding office from 1968 to 1987, during which time the state enjoyed considerable economic development. His uncompromising conservatism (including his role in the downfall of the Whitlam federal government), his political longevity, and his leadership of a government that, in its later years, was revealed to be institutionally corrupt, made him one of the best-known and most controversial political figures of 20th century Australia.
Bjelke-Petersen's Country (later National) Party controlled Queensland despite consistently receiving the smallest number of votes out of the state's leading three 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". Yet 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 his party and doubled the party's percentage vote, reducing his Liberal coalition partners to a mere six seats in the 1983 election. In 1985 Bjelke-Petersen launched a campaign to move into federal politics to become prime minister, though the campaign was eventually aborted.
The media, which I am a very small but picturesque part of, gleefully jumped on this finding ... I find this depressing ... Former Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen made this observation when he labelled his press conferences as “feeding the chooks” ... 1.
“It was a Friday or Saturday night, and I was going off to the cinema,” recalls Ivor Hay ...The state was run by a hard-right premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and it was not a place in which youthful exuberance was encouraged ... View image in fullscreen ... .
Its intent appears to be to track an ideological path connecting the first “blood crazed Imperialist lackeys” who commanded the penal colony of Brisbane to the sunshine state’s peanut-growing former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
Is there a tax on Earth more despised than inheritance tax? ...Australia abolished inheritance taxes in July 1979, a year after Queensland's eccentric National Country Party premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen led the charge to get rid of death duties ... .
“It forms a ring,” she says. “As if it’s gone up in a cloud and then fallen” ...Photograph ... Cole grew up not far from here and well knows the electorate long ruled by Kingaroy peanut farmer – and Queensland’s longest-serving premier – Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
Despite the claims of the former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who said daylight saving confused milking cows, Sillince – who is also the managing director of PetsAustralia – says animals ...
In fact, the Queensland premier and National party fox, Joh Bjelke-Petersen – a man with unfulfilled federal ambitions – was begged not to speak, in spite of calls from the crowd ... “[Bjelke-Petersen] ...
The most infamous of them all was that of Flo Bjelke-Petersen, the former senator, wife of former Queensland premier Joh and maker of pumpkin scones ... In March 1973, then premier Bjelke-Petersen ...
“I think there is no more beautiful place in Brisbane,” the former senator says ...View image in fullscreen ... Photograph ... This was Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland, an era in which many of the city’s built icons were sacrificed upon the altar of progress ... .
...1939 in which a group of disgruntled farmers armed with barbed wire and batons tried to hold the government hostage – and one last used more than 30 years ago under the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government.
The video tells the story of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the so-called “hillbilly dictator” politician who ran the Queensland government for many years, banning protests and targeting punks until his own corruption ended his reign ... .
