Remembering Errol O’Neill

errol2From the eulogy by Mary Kelly

 

Errol was born on 8 March 1945 at Old Cleveland Rd Coorparoo. His parents -Francis Patrick O’Neill (called Frank or Bluey), and Gladys May Lutvey (whose parents were Lebanese migrants) – already had two boys – Dan then 7, and Michael then 2. Errol was to be the last – the youngest of the three O’Neill brothers. The family had moved from Gayndah to Brisbane a few years previously, first living at the Stones Corner shop with Gladdy’s three sisters Mona, Mary and Rose, and later settling in Nicklin Street.  ‘Bluey’ was a taxi driver and they lived the typical Catholic working-class family life of the 1950s with a focus on church, family and the practicalities of making ends meet. His schooling was at St James’s Primary School Coorparoo and Villanova College.

In 1968, he  studied philosophy and theology at the Gregorian University, Rome, before deciding the priesthood was not for him. Returning to Brisbane, he studied an Arts Degree at the University of Queensland (majoring in English Language and Literature) and began seriously to develop his skills in writing and acting, and just as seriously to involve himself in the issues and politics of Queensland.

By the time he finished his degree, Errol had been deeply involved in a number of revues at the University, honing his satirical writing and acting skills; had been summonsed to court for his refusal to register for national service and thus be drafted into the Vietnam war; had been in many demonstrations and protests; and had experienced his first main stage acting role at the Queensland Theatre Company.

For the next 40 or more years he pursued these themes and threads, successfully forging a career in a notoriously difficult industry, and doing so with a steadfast focus on politics and social change. (Perhaps this focus and this pursuit was assisted by the fact that he was sacked from his first ever job in the public service after 2 weeks because of his Special Branch record.)

Later it would be taxi-driving, just like his father had done, which would fill the gaps between theatre jobs, and again his sharp observational skills meant these experiences became short stories about the characters and situations he came across. Errol could take a minute exchange and weave it into something funny and tragic, and he performed his taxi stories by reading aloud many times over the years.

From 1977 to 1982, he was a performer and then writer-director with the Popular Theatre Troupe, a Brisbane-based company specialising in political satire.

After his stint in the Troupe, he was essentially free-lance for the rest of his working life during which he wrote more than a dozen plays on aspects of Australian society, politics and history which were produced by main stage companies in Brisbane and interstate; acted in nearly 20 films and a dozen television series; performed in numerous training films and corporate videos, radio plays, voice-overs and narrations; directed a number of productions; and acted in well over 50 plays. He also wrote short stories and other prose.

For someone who had so many run-ins with the law, he played a surprisingly large number of policeman roles – from the unrecognisably aggressive Sergeant Simmonds in ‘The Removalists’ to the more affable Len in ‘East of Everything’.

In the quest for work, Errol was entrepreneurial and relentless. With friends, he started a new theatre company – the Brisbane Theatre Company – and later in life the collective called ‘The Forgetting of Wisdom’ to help generate opportunities to perform.

He also involved himself in organisations dedicated to improving the performing arts industry such as the Australia Council, the Writers’ Guild, the Literature Board, and his union Actors’ Equity. A centenary medal in 2003 and the Alan Edwards Lifetime Achievement award in the same year were public acknowledgement of his contribution.

 

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The playwright of Queensland Labour history

errolBy John Jiggens

 

Errol O’Neill died on the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, his timing as always a marvel.

Like Shakespeare, Errol had a great love of history and like Shakespeare he translated his history to the stage. He wrote 12 plays, and the core of his work is a quintet of plays dealing with the history of the labour movement in Queensland: On the Whipping Side, Red Soil White Sugar, Faces in the Street, Popular Front and The Hope of the World.

While Shakespeare wrote in an age of kings, and had kings as his heroes, Errol O’Neill wrote about a time, now vanished, that was called ‘the era of the common man’ and his heroes were the men and women who built the labour movement in Queensland.

Shakespeare employed a class-based rhetoric: his nobles spoke in beautiful blank verse, while the lower classes spoke in prose. Blank verse is a relative rarity in Queensland, but Errol O’Neill’s dialogue was similar to Shakespeare in his lower register, when he was writing for the proles: often crude, disrespectful, very funny, and exhibiting a deep love of the language of the low.

I knew Errol O’Neill from my Queensland University days, when he was one of an extraordinary group of actors and directors, including Geoffrey Rush, Bille Brown and William Yang, who were associated with the Architecture Revue and DramSoc. While Geoffrey Rush and company left to conquer the world, Errol stayed behind, striving to create a local theatre in Brisbane.

I worked most closely with Errol in the 1990s, when he was the Chair of the Brisbane Theatre Company (BTC) when he championed a vision of a local theatre that was concerned about Brisbane, which produced and workshopped plays by Brisbane writers, with scripts and subjects that were important for Brisbane.

We edited the BTC’s publication Brisbane Theatre Magazine together. I handled production and design, while Errol was the commissioning editor.  As commissioning editor, he organised great pieces from the likes of Lorna Bols, Sue Rider, Sean Mee, and the other directors and writers of the Brisbane theatre community, many of whom were also members of the BTC and who also championed the project for a theatre that spoke to us about our city and our lives. Although Errol initiated the Brisbane Theatre Company, it was a shared aspiration, the culmination of a collective vision for theatre in Brisbane. Errol O’Neill was its intellectual leader, but he was an ensemble player, who blended and harmonised, listened respectfully, and never dominated. Like one of his heroes, Fred Patterson, Errol O’Neill was always the first amongst equals.

Although the Brisbane Theatre Company failed, this was when Mary and Errol started their family. In later years our sons would play together while Errol and I talked about politics and history and writing and the projects we were working on, while he prepared another marvellous meal. He and Mary were fantastic hosts, both for the Brisbane diaspora and for locals.

As an actor, I make a passable extra. The only play I performed in with Errol was in the grounds of Ithica Creek State School, which our sons attended. It was a play for the children, performed by their parents, about the Gold rush, a humorous romp, which Errol had written. Errol played starring roles in all the major theatres in Brisbane and he performed at humbler, spontaneous spaces in street-theatre, at protests, in factories, and in school yards with the same sense of bon-hommie.

In forty-five years I never had one quarrel or argument with him. My face would always light up with a smile whenever I saw him, as it did on the last day we met, the week before he died. He cocked his head slightly in reply, and smiled that wry, Errol smile. He’d been researching the conscription debate during the First World War because he’d been commissioned to write a play about it. He was happy, that happy feeling writers get when their minds are engaged and their creative juices are flowing. For a writer with his love of radical history, the subject was ideal. In its day, the conscription referenda debate split the nation. And there were two of them, because Prime Minster Hughes did not accept the decision of the first. What a plot twist that would be! Errol would have Queensland Premier T.J. Ryan as one of his heroes, and Archbishop Mannix as the other, with Billy Hughes as villain!

I received the news of his passing by email. I cried and swore obscenity after obscenity. It was the worst sentence I have ever read: Errol O’Neill is dead.

 

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Democracy and Community in West End

Brisbane City Councillors Head Shots

Brisbane City Councillors Head Shots

Democracy and Community in West End
An interview with Councillor Jonathon Jonathan Sri
Earlier this year, the Greens claimed their first victory in Queensland’s local government elections with their candidate Jonathan Sri, 28, musician, poet, and law graduate, who won the inner Brisbane ward of The Gabba. The Greens won 31.7% of the ward’s vote, up from 17.7% in 2012. Although Sri’s vote fell behind the LNP’s 35.8%, he won the ward with the help of ALP preferences. Sri is no stranger to the electorate. He ran for the Greens for the seat of South Brisbane during the 2015 state election against current Qld Deputy Premier Jackie Trad, where he won nearly 22% of the primary vote.
Sri’s victory can be attributed to the more than 200 volunteers who assisted with his campaign. Many of the volunteers were motivated by the rapid urban development that is rapidly changing the unique bohemian character that identifies The Gabba ward’s suburbs of West End, South Brisbane, Highgate Hill and Woolloongabba. Sri’s election campaign put the spotlight on housing affordability and urban transport, two issues of especial concern to the ward’s younger residents. Many young people live in sharehouses, a rite of passage to adulthood for the students enrolled at nearby tertiary institutions, and a necessity for low-income workers that keep the city functioning. Former West End resident and lecturer at UQ’s School of Communication & Arts, Dr Kitty Van Vuuren, recently caught up with Cr Sri to reflect on his first month in office.
In the first month after being sworn in as a councillor, the mainstream media have already labelled Cr Jonathan Sri, Brisbane City Council’s first Green Councillor, as ‘combative’ and ‘controversial’. Sri won The Gabba ward with the help of ALP preferences, but he faces an overwhelming LNP majority in Council Chambers. So, just how can a single Greens councillor make a difference?
Sri asserts that “none of the policies I’ve been pushing and none of the stances I’ve taken are particularly extreme or controversial. It’s just that our current political landscape is very homogenous and unadventurous when it comes to policy-making.”
He admits that his approach “seems a bit unconventional,” but points out that direct action and broad-based social campaigns are common practices in other democracies.
‘Unconventional’ is one way to put it, but Brisbane’s Lord Mayor Graham Quirk, wasted no time to suggest that Sri’s approach encourages ‘illegal’ protest, and that a councillor has a responsibility to be a lawmaker, not a lawbreaker.
“I think it’s a shallow response to a complex issue. As an elected representative I do have some responsibility to uphold the rule of law, but I was elected to change the law, to change the system. I made no bones about that during my election campaign. I don’t think anyone who voted for me could reasonably feel surprised with the strategic approach I’ve taken,” he said.
Sri points out that laws are not written in a vacuum, but are written to preserve the interests of the people who are in control of the system.
“I guess on some level direct action does challenge established laws, but it’s important to recognize that the laws which govern our society have been written by a subset of people who benefit from the current system.”
“So for me, if the laws don’t represent the democratic will of the people and they don’t uphold the long-term interest of society, then those laws are illegitimate.”
Sri is currently working on the Right to the City campaign, based on the idea that ordinary residents deserve a say in how the city evolves. A key value underpinning the campaign is the idea that decisions about urban planning and development should not simply depend on property rights, and that all citizens who are part of the city (including renters and those on low incomes) have the right to influence how their city is shaped.
”Previously in Brisbane a sustainable development campaign has been too easily framed as wealthy owner-occupiers who are just NIMBY’s and trying to protect their own property values. We have shifted that discourse to be about housing affordability and renters’ rights, and so a whole generation of people who don’t own any land and don’t really have a long-term stake in the community in that sense, are now stepping up and saying ‘yeah we do want affordable housing and we do want better rights for renters’.”
“So for me, if the laws don’t represent the democratic will of the people and they don’t uphold the long-term interest of society, then those laws are illegitimate.”
Sri is currently working on the Right to the City campaign, based on the idea that ordinary residents deserve a say in how the city evolves. A key value underpinning the campaign is the idea that decisions about urban planning and development should not simply depend on property rights, and that all citizens who are part of the city (including renters and those on low incomes) have the right to influence how their city is shaped.
”Previously in Brisbane a sustainable development campaign has been too easily framed as wealthy owner-occupiers who are just NIMBY’s and trying to protect their own property values. We have shifted that discourse to be about housing affordability and renters’ rights, and so a whole generation of people who don’t own any land and don’t really have a long-term stake in the community in that sense, are now stepping up and saying ‘yeah we do want affordable housing and we do want better rights for renters’.”
Part of Sri’s sustainability agenda is to increase the number of dedicated bike lanes. Brisbane’s topography and climate are amenable to cycling and walking, but the city lags behind Sydney and Melbourne in promoting safer cycling infrastructure.
“The fact that we still have such a car-centric approach to urban planning and traffic management is just unimaginative, it’s regressive,” he said.
Sri believes that being the only Green in Council Chambers can be an advantage to achieving more sustainable planning. He claims that Council is concerned about the political backlash expected from reclaiming street parking to put in bike lanes.
“It puts me in a situation where I can play the diplomat and look for areas where my priorities might line up with the LNP administration, and basically convince them that what I’m proposing might be a good idea,”
“I’ve been able to say to the LNP, ‘look I think people voted me in because they care about cycle safety, so I’m willing to wear a bit of the flak from the people who are annoyed about losing a bit of street parking’, because the long-term goal is to make cycling safer and therefore get more people on their bikes.”
While open to political alignment, Sri strongly supports broad-based community campaigns to achieve positive outcomes for residents. His ward office is a hive of activity with the comings and goings of supporters, from within as well as outside the ward. As part of his political agenda, Sri aims to support a collectively oriented culture.
“We do have a moral responsibility, and it is in our own long term self-interest to look out for other people, and recognise that particularly in cities, our fates as residents are all inextricably linked. So I think it’s silly and naïve to say that we shouldn’t collaborate and think collectively, particularly on things like urban planning. The way that that’s been left up to the free market is just ridiculous.”
With a federal election set for July 2, Cr Sri is well aware that his style of representation may influence the Greens’ federal electoral success.
“I’m very conscious that how I conduct myself will reflect on the Greens throughout Queensland. It’s a huge honour and privilege as well, because it means to some extent we get to shape the direction of the Greens in Queensland.”
“I’d like to think that I’m a responsive and responsible representative. One thing we have demonstrated is that even a lone Greens Councilor can get issues onto the agenda and can put a lot of pressure on the system to change.”
“What’s exciting about the way that we’ve gone about it is that we’ve put together a policy agenda that is relatively radical in the current system, and we’ve stuck to it.”
“You need not abandon who you are and you can stay true to yourself and push for change to the system. That excites me and that excites a lot of Greens supporters.”

Brisbane City Councillors Head Shots

Brisbane City Councillors Head Shots

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Coal seam gas – a pot of poison

The unconventional gas industry claim there are no proven incidents of fracking polluting underground water, while suppressing any independent attempts to research the topic. However, people who live in gas fields know their water supplies are being polluted and their health imperiled. JOHN FENTON is a Wyoming farmer recently brought to Australia by Lock the Gate. He writes that the coal seam gas industry’s solution to underground pollution is to bury the proof.

 

In 2008, we noticed the water from our wells had turned bad. It changed colour and smelt of diesel. We asked the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate. They drilled monitoring bores and, in 2011, released a report that found the shallow and deep aquifers had been contaminated with chemicals linked to fracking and gas extraction. Benzene was present at 50 times the level that is considered safe for consumption. Phenols  – another dangerous carcinogen – acetone toluene, naphthalene, methane and 13 different compounds associated with hydro-fracking were found in the water. Our community was warned not to drink water from our wells and to shower with the windows open, to prevent a build up of explosive gas. My neighbour’s water well exploded because of high-pressure gas. Although the gas company refuses to admit fault, it trucks in drinking water to farmers and has installed reverse osmosis units.

The industry was furious about the EPA report. They knew it was a smoking gun. Gas lobbyists could no longer assert that fracking was safe. Backed by the state of Wyoming, the gas industry lobbied and donated heavily in Washington. Enormous pressure was put on the EPA and eventually they buckled. Further investigation into our polluted water was turned over to the state of Wyoming. To add insult to injury, the gas company Encana provided funding of $1.5 million for another study. The EPA has also caved in to pressure and dropped two other investigations. EPA investigators resigned in protest.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. According to a 2003 Schlumberger oilfield review, 5 per cent of well bores fail immediately and, over a 30-year time frame, failure rates exceed 50 per cent. The pattern in the US is that when water contamination surfaces, the gas company pays an undisclosed sum of money in return for a non-disclosure agreement that prevents people talking about their water contamination. It is the gas industry itself, with its teams of lawyers and deep pockets, that actively prevents investigations into water contamination. That’s why industry lobbyists can say there is no ”proven” case of fracking contaminating the water.

When you turn on your tap and the water smells like diesel and explodes with methane, you know the water has been polluted. In Wyoming, the coal seam gas industry has already come and gone as the price of gas crashed. The industry has moved on to fracking shale for oil, leaving 3000 coal seam gas wells abandoned. The taxpayers of Wyoming will now have to foot the bill to cap these gas wells.

The risks of fracked gas are not worth taking. The gas industry will tell you it’s a pot of gold, but it has become our pot of poison.

John Fenton

 

 

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Queensland’s green economic future

Drew at Bentleyby Drew Hutton
A quiet revolution, one to rival the digital revolution three decades ago, has been occurring for years in the world of energy economics, right under their noses but most pundits didn’t recognize it. Not only did they not recognise it but the business owners whose fortunes depended on reading the signs did not either. Perhaps this is the hallmark of any revolution: that those with vested interest in the old order, who frequent the same business and social bubbles that reinforce their prejudices and distort their capacity for reason, will not accurately read the signs and will become the victims of cataclysmic events. They will keep repeating mantras like, “Renewable energy will never provide baseload power”, or “Renewable energy is too expensive” as the liquidators move in.
Nevertheless, the fossil fuel industries are still powerful and capable of putting up a fight to the end and, even if significant transition is made over the next decade to renewables. To make the transition from fossil fuels to renewables as quickly and efficiently as possible there need to be mass movements that stop coal, oil and gas mining, pressure for divestment from fossil fuels and pressure governments for radical policy changes. More broadly, a judicious mixture of government intervention and markets – a recipe detested by the neo-liberals – will be needed to bring fairness and accountability to the system. Such a system should be jobs-rich; have in-built flexibility to promote innovation and diverse family and social arrangements; provide welfare and other measures to ensure some in society are not left behind in a changing environment or by such events as disastrous climate change; and enable workers to have a strong say in the direction of their enterprises and communities a strong involvement in determining their futures.
In the meantime there will also be many new-economy jobs, fixing up the mess that the old economy left behind, particularly in mining. If we take the coal-rich Bowen Basin for example, there are over 40 coal mines with 94,600 square kilometres of land disturbed by mining. Rehabilitating such sites involves re-shaping and re-contouring spoil heaps and waste rock dumps, covering tailings dams to prevent leakage of often highly toxic material, and dealing with large voids left over after open cut mining, which often contain high levels of acid, heavy metals or salt. Progressive rehabilitation of the sites is usually specified in environmental authorities for the mines but this is rarely done in any sort of systematic way. Less than 20 per cent of all the sites in the Bowen Basin have been rehabilitated. The cost of rehabilitating these Bowen basin mines varies from $8bn to $16bn. Queensland governments have been notoriously lax about collecting financial assurances from the companies. Over the years, many companies have been allowed to simply walk away from their mines without doing adequate rehabilitation. To the credit of the current Labor government the financial assurances for all mining in the state has been increased to $4.6m but this is still well short of a figure that would ensure taxpayers did not have to foot the bill. The Palaszczuk government has also passed through the Parliament amendments to the Environmental Protection Act that enable it to trace back the chain of responsibility for any mine where the owners have walked away from their rehabilitation responsibilities. That is important because we already have something like 15,000 abandoned mines in the state, about 400 of which are “high risk”.
It is important to know this background because we need to recognise that interventionist government and regulatory enforcement are essential to the creation of so many jobs in the new economy and certainly they are in the area of rehabilitating mine sites. Rehabilitation is not something that companies should be free to choose to do. It is part of the obligations they sign up to when they are given approval to extract minerals. Therefore private money, backed by financial assurances and regulatory enforcement can create thousands of jobs in regional Queensland. The key to creating this situation is motivating the companies to change their cultures so they no longer see environmental management issues as an optional extra but as an integral part of their operations.
We have been working on a case study of Blair Athol, a very old mine in central Queensland which has not been worked since 2012. The mine has 1166ha still to rehabilitate and only 14 workers are left on site after 170 were sacked in 2012. If they started now, they would create about 40 full-time jobs for the next 6-10 years. Multiply that across the Bowen Basin and there would be something like 2000-3000 jobs created at a time when no one is being employed in mining in regional Queensland. For the first time I can remember I can walk into a Government Minister’s office and say, “I can show you how to protect the environment and create jobs.”

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Drew at Bentley Jobs in a low-carbon economy

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Marihuana Weirdo Remembrance Day

Marihuana Weirdo Remembrance Day

The 10th August 2013 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Brisbane’s first marijuana arrest, the marihuana weirdo raid, which was announced in a lurid story, “Marihuana seized by police in swoop on weirdos”, which was the front page story on 11th August 1963 for Brisbane’s Sunday Truth.

The marihuana weirdo raid marked the beginning of fifty years of marihuana persecutions, police corruption and the misuse of the drug laws. It is something to condemn but also to acknowledge and commemorate.

The back story to the Marihuana weirdo raid is examined by Steven Bishop in his book The most dangerous detective. What follows is largely excerpted from this book, which I recommend as a fascinating history of Queensland’s Rat Pack, and Queensland very own killer cop.

– Dr John Jiggens.

 

A lie called the Truth

In August 1963, the corrupt practices of Queensland detective and future Rat Pack leader, Glen Patrick Hallahan, had drawn the attention of the Appeal Court. An appeal by Garry Campbell, one of Hallahan’s victims, was due to come before three of the state’s most senior judges. Hallahan’s method in obtaining convictions was to threaten those he arrested that he would load them up with far more serious offences unless they pleaded guilty. If they pleaded guilty, he promised to go easy, and tell the judge they helped him in his investigations. Hallahan invariably promised he would put in a good word for them with the judge and they would pay only a small fine. Campbell’s appeal was based on the claim that Hallahan had blackmailed and bullied him into pleading guilty.

Hallahan wanted a major advertisement for himself before the appeal court sat in judgement on him, and he contrived with the Sunday Truth’s crime reporter, Ron Richards for a story of a raid on a gay party where it was expected that one of Brisbane’s top television personalities would be attending: this would become the marihuana weirdo raid.
The raid took place at midnight on a Friday night, which meant that no one else would be able to beat Truth to the story. As Saturday August 10 approached, Ron Richards and a photographer waited outside a Herston address.

Veteran journalist Steve Bishop described the resulting marihuana weirdo raid story as “a Hallahan extravaganza across the whole of the front page and page 3… the front page carried a photo of a besuited Hallahan, wearing a thick sweater under his jacket to keep out the cold, with “a firm grip on a male strip tease dancer being bundled from a weirdos’ party at Herston. The dancer appeared to be naked apart from a tiny towel that might have been the final part of his act. The headlines were: Brisbane rocked by vice exposure; marijuana seized in swoop by police on weirdos; television personality questioned.”

The Truth version of the marihuana weirdo raid was, “Right on midnight police rushed in to a unit at Herston where they found a near naked man entertaining the “potted” guests with a male strip-tease.” What was left unsaid in the Truth report was that the raid was a set-up from the start, staged by Hallahan and his friends in the CIB for the benefit of beat-up expert Ron Richards to whip into Truth’s fantastic marihuana weirdo concoction. Hallahan’s friend Billy Phillips organised the party; Hallahan organised the raid and probably the marihuana. Ron Richards did the rest.

There is a quote famously attributed to Rupert Murdoch by WA Premier Charles Court. Reputedly, Murdoch told Court, “You can have a headline a day, or a bucket of shit!” The marihuana weirdo story was Hallahan’s headline. By pulling some poor soul from a Herston party, Ron Richards contrived to transform Glen Patrick Hallahan into a detective hero, saving Brisbane from the scourge of drugs and vice.

The whole of page 3 was dedicated to the story, with four more photos of police leading “weirdos” away. According to the Truth, “Some of the men called each other by women’s names like Rosa, Gypsy, Molly and Roma… Police say the seizure of the marihuana at the Herston party is the first breakthrough in proving their belief that sex drugs are being used on a wide scale at Brisbane vice parties.”

The biggest photo featured another close friend of Hallahan and Richards, Detective Don ‘Shady’ Lane, future corrupt Bjelke-Petersen minister and jailbird. Hallahan also brought along in his raiding party his accomplice in the Sundown Murders frame-up, Norm Bauer, head of the CIB, who would succeed Bischof as police commissioner. The photos of the marihuana weirdo raiders portray a glittering parade of future stars; a cabinet minister, a police commissioner, and a chief investigator for Suncorp Insurance.

Next Friday, Hallahan was in court as the three senior judges heard the appeal from Gary Campbell. Campbell’s lawyer argued that Hallahan had blackmailed Campbell into pleading guilty. The judges reserved their verdicts to a later date, which meant there was time for one more pro-Hallahan beat-up in the Sunday Truth before the verdict was delivered in a page 5 story called: Dramatic sequel to city sex raid: Drug ring forced into “smoke”.

As Ron Richards furiously whipped the ingredients together, ace detective, Glen Hallahan, was now “smashing the dope-running gangs” through his undercover investigations into the drug trade. The story began: “Australia’s top gangland drug traffickers have gone into hiding following weeks of undercover investigation by Brisbane and Sydney detectives. The first breakthrough in smashing the dope-running gangs follows directly on the dramatic police raids on a marihuana party in the Brisbane suburb of Herston on August 10… Last week one of the guests at the Herston party was dramatically arrested at Eagle Farm airport by Detectives G P Hallahan and R Price as he was about to leave for Melbourne. He was fined 100 pounds after he told stipendiary magistrate Mr Baker that he had given Detective Hallahan valuable information on the source of the sex drug in Sydney.”

Like most of the Truth’s marihuana weirdo make-believe, this was thousands of light-years from the truth. Hallahan, the great anti-marihuana crusader, was one of Brisbane’s few potheads in 1963. His then confidente and lover, Shirley Brifman, recalled how Glen ‘hit the pot’ in this period. Far from smashing dope-running gangs, Hallahan would move on to direct them. In the 1970s, John Milligan, a major heroin trafficker, would tell the Narcotics Bureau he was terrified of Hallahan, who was bankrolling his heroin importations. Milligan told the bureau that if he talked his life would be in danger. He informed them that Hallahan had claimed that he had already murdered a prostitute named Shirley Brifman.

Uninfluenced by Ron Richards and the Truth’s promotion of Hallahan, the Full Court delivered a damning verdict on Hallahan. Justice Stanley, who had already studied Hallahan’s behaviour in at least two cases, took the lead in reporting:
“Campbell alleges he was induced to plead guilty to vagrancy in these circumstances: Detectives took him away from the place where he was employed and searched his flat for blankets, sheets and pillow slips alleged by them to be missing from premises formerly occupied by him. Not finding any such articles, Hallahan said to him: “If you haven’t got them, you know who has got them and we will charge you with having house-breaking instruments. We’ll load you right up and make sure you get put away.” Campbell replied: “I don’t know where the blankets and other things are.” Hallahan said: “How much money have you got?” Campbell replied: “About four or five shillings.” Hallahan said: “We will charge you with vagrancy.” Campbell alleges he then told Hallahan about his employment history. “He had, in fact, obtained part-time employment at the Top Cat Sound Lounge, 74 Elizabeth Street, Brisbane. He was required to work each Friday and Saturday evening, being paid three pounds per night. He worked on Saturday, June 22, and he was at work at that address on Friday June 28 when taken away by Hallahan. “Campbell alleges that having told Hallahan this, Hallahan said: “If you don’t plead guilty we will go to your flat with house-breaking house-breaking instruments and then charge you with having possession of them. You’ll get at least 12 months’ imprisonment. But if you plead guilty, you will get out of the vagrancy charge.” He alleges Hallahan also told him what to say in court and said: “If you say what I tell you, I will not rubbish you in court. If I get you out of this charge I want you out of town by Tuesday. In truth, Campbell was in work and taken away by the police while on duty at his place of employment.”

The misnamed Sunday Truth was the megaphone for the Rat Pack, glamorising crooks like Hallahan.

 

COLIN JAMES BENNETT AND THE NATIONAL HOTEL INQUIRY

Colin Bennett, born on 10 May 1919 in Townsville, died in 2002, was a lawyer and parliamentarian who was one of the Rat Pack’s few foes, and their most powerful adversary.

Speaking in the Queensland Parliament shortly after the weirdo raid and the court’s verdict on Hallahan, Bennett told how the Full Court of Queensland had found “that the top glamour detective of Queensland was guilty of perpetrating a fraud on one of the courts”, yet Commissioner Bischof was supporting Hallahan.  Bennett said:

“That is perhaps one of the most serious offences that anybody in Queensland could commit, and it is even more serious when it is committed by an allegedly trusted police officer. But, lo and behold, the Commissioner of Police does not accept the unanimous decision of the Full Court and will have the decision investigated departmentally. What a shocking impertinence from any public servant or any other person in the community. There have been many occasions when this Commissioner has suspended policemen and dismissed them. On this occasion… he does not even suspend the police officer concerned. What is more this particular officer glamourises himself by dragging some poor individual, draped only in a little towel, not arrested – he still has not been charged – yet this officer assaults him by dragging him from private premises. No action has been taken and I know none will be taken. He drags him out from private premises and either arranges or had pre-arranged for a weekend newspaper to make an incursion into this individual’s privacy and dignity by having a photograph taken.”

On October 29, 1963,  Bennett rose again to condemn Commissioner Bischof and the Rat Pack of corrupt detectives, who were his bagmen: “I propose to concentrate my attention on the police department and the police force of Queensland,”  he said, before imparting some advice to the Commissioner and his friends: “I do not wish to dally too long on this subject, but I should say that the Commissioner and his colleagues who frequent the National Hotel, encouraging and condoning the callgirl service that operates there, would be better occupied in preventing such activities rather than tolerating them.”

Sunday Truth commented on its front page: “The campaign Mr Colin Bennett MLA is waging against the police commissioner Mr Bischof is now completely out of control and in the public interest the State Government can move only one way. It must order an immediate Royal Commission.” The reason it gave for needing an inquiry was:

“The facts are that the honour and integrity of the Queensland police commissioner have been attacked. His name has got to be cleared.”

Thanks to the urgings of the Truth for the government to counter the statements in Parliament by Bennet, the National Hotel Inquiry would be announced shortly thereafter, with its terms of reference limited to enable Justice Harry Gibbs to clear  the reputations of the crooked Commissioner Bischof and his ratty friends.

Most of this (with a bit of editing and rewriting) from:
Bishop, Steve . The Most Dangerous Detective: The Outrageous Glen Patrick Hallahan  Kindle Edition. $12.95

More info on the finding against Hallahan

The three judges constituting the appeal court, Stanley, Mack and Wanstall, did not believe Hallahan’s denial that he was blackmailing those he arrested into pleading guilty. The allegations were he would threaten to load them up for a far more serious crime if they didn’t plead guilty; or he would threaten to detain them over the weekend and not notify their families. The judges were so concerned by his behaviour that they laid down a course of action that all magistrates should follow if a defendant appeared before them without a legal representative and pleaded guilty. They said: “The magistrate should not only inquire whether anyone connected with the police has made any suggestion that he should plead guilty and advise the accused to plead not guilty unless he receives from the accused a prompt and convincing disclaimer.
The case went into the legal lexicon as ‘Hallahan v Kryloff, ex-parte Kryloff’ and has been frequently quoted in Queensland judgements ever since.

Another example of Hallahan’s technique in gaining guilty pleas concerned a man who pleaded guilty to a crime which was never even committed. Writes Bishop:
“So why had Cavanagh confessed to a crime that not only did he not commit, but which had never occurred in the first place? He told his solicitor that on the Saturday morning he had been threatened by Hallahan: You can either plead guilty, go before the court today and be home with your wife this afternoon or we’ll throw you in jail until you come clean and your wife will be worried sick at home. “I know I pleaded guilty but I challenge anyone else placed in similar circumstances to do anything different,” said Cavanagh. “I’d been taken away by the police and faced with a weekend in the watchhouse if I pleaded not guilty.”

Bishop, Steve (2012-11-06). The Most Dangerous Detective: The Outrageous Glen Patrick Hallahan (p. 63).  Kindle Edition.

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How many cones? How many pills? How many lines of coke?

A s a researcher into the illicit drug trade, I am intrigued by the question of the size of Australia’s market in illicit drugs. Cannabis, it is said, is the biggest cash crop in Australia, but how can we know how many tonnes of cannabis Australians inhale each year?
What is the size of Australia’s market for illicit drugs?
How much is our illicit drug trade worth?
What is the potential for taxing and regulating this industry?
We can gain some idea of how big Australia’s illicit drug trade is from the many re-ports of drug seizures that regularly feature in our news broadcasts. In the seven month period between October 2012 and April 2013, the ABC alone ran about 500 stories related to drugs and drug seizures. Reading these stories gives an indication of the market’s size. For the sake of analysis, I categorised the biggest seizures as mon-ster (value greater than $250 million street value); massive (seizures in the $50 million to $250 million street value range); enormous ($10million to $50 million); and big ($1 million to $10 million).
In the past nine months there were two monster seizure above the $250 million range. On 30 July 2012, Customs and police found 558kg of illicit drugs valued at around $500 million street value in a shipment of terracotta pots bound for Sydney: 306 kilo-grams of crystal methamphetamine (ice) and 252 kilograms of heroin. This was our third largest seizure of heroin and the largest seizure of ice in Australian history at that time. This Australian record for ice did not last long. On 28 February, 2013, the Australian black market achieved a new personal best, 585 kilos of ice, worth an esti-mated $440 million dollars.
Commenting on this first monster seizure, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Deputy Commissioner Andrew Colvin talked up the success of the AFP, “This operation fol-lows the AFP’s most successful year in terms of drug seizures. In the 2011/12 finan-cial year, the AFP and its partner agencies seized almost 14 tonnes of illicit sub-stances bound for drug distribution networks across Australia.” With drug seizures approaching the two billion dollar mark, 2012/13 is shaping up to be another bumper year for the AFP. But is the big picture really one of continuing police success, as Deputy Commissioner Colvin spun the story, or one of a country swimming in illicit drugs?
Below these two monster busts were reports of five massive seizures valued in the $50 million to $250 million range:$77m cocaine ring smashed: AFP, Foreign nation-als arrested over $237m drug seizure, Trio charged over 50kg heroin drug bust, Joint policing operation nets 200kg cocaine in shipwreck, along with the related story , Body on Tonga drugs yacht identified. As well as these, there was another massive cocaine haul, 300 kilograms seized in Bundaberg in November 2012.
Dr John Jiggens is a writer who has published several books including Marijuana Australiana, The killer cop and the murder of Donald Mackay and Sir Joseph Banks and the Question of Hemp. His academic works on Australian drug markets include The Economics of Drug Prohibition in Australia, Estimating the Size of the Australian Heroin Market: A New Method, and Australian Heroin Seizures and the causes of the 2001 Australian Heroin Shortage.
How many cones? How many pills?
page 3
Australia’s biggest anti-cannabis operation was the annual police helicopter raids on the NSW North Coast, a lengthy eradication program that began in the New England district in November and wrapped up in the Coffs Harbour district in April, having swept over the entire NSW north coast. According to Drug Squad Commander, Superinten-dent Nick Bingham, it yielded almost 14,000 can-nabis plants, valued at $25 million. With more than a hint of wishful thinking Bingham declared: “Our aim is to disrupt the supply chain, to go and find and pull as many plants as we can and get that can-nabis off the street and hopefully either drive prices up or keep prices stable and that will discourage people, we hope, (from using) cannabis.” As Bingham conceded, massive police operations are needed simply to keep the price of drugs at their present price. As cannabis activists have often joked, the Drug Squad are the Price Maintenance Squad for organised crime! But this is more than a joke: this is the essence of Prohibition. Prohibition acts as a multiplier for the black market. Every dollar we spend on drug law enforcement is worth $10 to the black market. Currently, Australia spends about $1.5 billion on drug law enforcement: this generates a black market worth approximately $15 billion dollars for organised and disorganised crime. It is the weight of police, courts and prisons pushing down that drives up the price of illicit drugs and makes them more valuable than gold.
Following the current record ice seizure in March 2013 about 350 heavily-armed police officers raided 30 properties across Sydney, the Illawarra and Port Stephens and 18 people were arrested. New South Wales Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione declared. “Today you have seen evidence of the police at their very best. The one thing you can take away clearly is, in terms of organised crime, New South Wales police and the Crime Commission have you people firmly in our sights. We’re not going away.”
But neither are the drugs. Despite seizing close to two billion dollars worth of illicit drugs so far this year, all these massive police operations have had no significant impact on the availability of illicit drugs.
Four decades ago, when President Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs, free market econo-mist, Milton Friedman, declared that the failure of prohibition was inevitable because of corruption as officials succumbed to the lure of easy money: Said Friedman: “So long as large sums of money are involved—and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal—it is literally hopeless to expect to end the traffic or even to reduce seriously its scope.” Sto-ries like, Customs officers suspected in airport smuggling ring, Customs corruption extends to waterfront, SAS officer not fit to plead, Police Commissioner’s son breaches parole, Police officer facing drug charges, demonstrated the accuracy of his prediction. For those who enjoy irony there was, Police take heart in more reported drug offences, where Senior Sergeant Marty Haime from Geraldton police ex-plained a 30.6 per cent increase in drug offences in the Gascoyne area as positive because it was show-ing results that would yield a ‘generational change’ in ‘five to 10 years’. Said Sergeant Haime, “We’d like to think we’re changing behaviours as time goes by.” However, the big drug story of the past year was not about Australia. It was the success of the vote for legalising cannabis in the US states of Colorado and Washington. In 1976 The Australian inter-viewed a group of Sydney 16-year-olds about how they saw the future. To these 16-year olds, the le-galisation of drugs was inevitable. A schoolboy predicted, “The use of drugs will be so common it will be legalised. This will be a great advantage because it will no longer be a big business issue with dealers becoming millionaires overnight.” Another said, “I also think it should be legalised because the more you say ‘don’t do this it’s bad’ the more the person’s going to do it.” Watching the results of the legalisation vote in Washington and Colorado in November 2012, were these former teenagers (now in their fifties) about to see their prediction vindicated?

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Which drugs do we prosecute most?

R egime of Prohibition (RoP) is a measure of how hard governments and police crack down on drug users measured by the ratio of the number of drug offences per thousand drug users. Not all illicit drugs are prosecuted equally in Australia. If the illicit drugs were being policed in terms of their harmfulness (the potential for fatal overdoses and addiction) then cannabis, which is the least addictive, and which is never associated with fatal overdoses, should have the lowest relative Regime of Prohibition, followed by the amphetamine type stimulants, then cocaine and heroin. Instead, the war on drugs in Australia is a war on cannabis, the softest drug, while cocaine, a far more addictive drug, is almost decriminalised. The reason seems to be class: cocaine is the drug of choice of the highest socioeconomic groups and is rarely policed. Relative Regime of Prohibition compares the offences/1000 users of the various illicit drugs to cocaine’s Regime of Prohibition, which was 2.1 offences per 1000 users in 2010.
The main target of the War on Drugs in Australia is cannabis: 70% of all illicit drug offences are for cannabis. Among cannabis seizures, by far the biggest operation is the annual helicopter raids on the alternative communities on the NSW north coast. In the US, drug prohibition falls disproportionally on black Americans. Not so, it seems, in Australia. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander account for 26% of the total Australian prisoner population, an imprisonment rate 14 times more than the non-Indigenous rate. However, they constitute only 4% of the population imprisoned for illicit drugs. As well, they use cannabis and meth/amphetamines, the drugs most Australians get arrested for, at twice the national rate. In this regard, Australia’s drug laws are not racially discriminatory. Drug prosecutions in Australia seem to be about lifestyle and class, rather than colour.

 

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Australia’s Illicit Drug Markets

The ecstasy market

Ecstasy is the second most commonly used illicit drug in Australia after cannabis, used by 3% of the population over 14, or about 600,000 Australians. In 2008, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) declared that Australia had the highest annual prevalence of ecstasy use in the world. However, the global MDMA crisis intervened in 2009.

Between 2007 and 2010, use of ecstasy declined from 3.5% to 3% of the Australian population over 14.

Estimated market size 40 million pills in 2011.

Estimated market value $1,400 million.

The cocaine market

Of Australia’s big five illicit drug markets, the cocaine market is expanding most rapidly. Cocaine has grown in popularity at the expense of ecstasy. Seizures are on the increase. Cocaine featured in four of the five massive seizures in the final months of 2012, and 750 kilograms of cocaine were seized.

There were an estimated 390 000 recent cocaine users in Australia in 2010, but only 839 cocaine arrests, an arrest rate of 2.1 arrests per thousand users. The cannabis arrests rate of 30.9 arrests per thousand users was fifteen times higher.

Australia’s annual cocaine market is approximately 4.7 tonnes.

Estimated market value $2.5 billion.

Market size equates to about 94 million lines of coke.

The methamphetamine market

Methamphetamine use declined from 3.4% to 2.1% of the population over 14 between 2001 and 2010. However, methamphetamine arrests recorded the most substantial increase of all drug types, increasing by 62 per cent over the same decade.

The past two years witnessed an extraordinary succession of record-breaking meth seizures.

Estimated number of users is 390,000.

Estimated market size is 6.8 tonnes.

Estimated street value is $5 billion.

The cannabis market

Cannabis is Australia’s most popular illicit drug with an estimated 2 million users. About 250,000 Australians use cannabis daily.

70% of all illicit drug users are cannabis users. 70% of all illicit drug offences are for cannabis. 75% of drug seizures are for cannabis.

Market size is estimated to be between 150 tonnes and 300 tonnes of cannabis.

The value of the cannabis market is estimated at $6 billion.

Depending on how you pack your cone , the estimated market size equates to 2400 million hits from the bong.

The heroin market

A revival of opium production in Southeast Asia seems to be contributing to a revival of Australia’s heroin market. Heroin seizures are at decade-high levels.

Estimated size of the Australian heroin market is two tonnes. This equates to forty million hits.

The estimated street value is $2 billion.

Australia’s illicit drug trade

The Australian illicit drug trade consists of a market of about three million Australians, composed of a cannabis market of between 150-300 tonnes, worth about $6 billion, 2 tonnes of heroin ($2 billion), 4.7 tonnes of cocaine ($2.5 billion), 40 million ecstasy tablets ($1.4 billion), and 6.8 tonnes of methamphetamine ($5 billion), giving an estimated value of the Australian illicit drug market of about $17 billion.
About 90,000 drug offences are prosecuted each year in Australia while an estimated 2680 million drug offences are committed each year (2400 million cones, 40 million pills, 40 million hits, etc.) or about 1 prosecution per 30,000 offences; the cocaine rate is about one prosecution for every 110,000 lines of coke.

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