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

I'm one of the rare people in this place that has actually been through the grinding machine. I was one of the two ministers in Queensland who made the decision to bring on the Fitzgerald inquiry, which changed the politics of Queensland—hopefully forever, but certainly for the last 20 or 30 years. There were 54 murders or murder-suicides that had taken place in Queensland, and it turned out that they were attributable to one small group of policemen. It was referred to as 'the joke' in North Queensland by Steve Austin, the famous journalist. It was referred to as the 'Crooked Creek Cattle Company' in North Queensland. The first person to make noise was an ALP member. When I rang him up about it, he said he knew nothing about it and continued to say he knew nothing about it, and then hung up on me on the telephone. He was obviously terrified. But in an environment where 54 people have been murdered, it gets very, very scary indeed. So a decision was taken to have the inquiry.

If we'd had the Criminal Justice Commission, as we call it in Queensland, seven or eight or nine years before, would we have stopped all of those murders?

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