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

With so many of the cases that are being referred to here, I cannot help but give reality to what the honourable member is proposing. The reality comes from arguably the most courageous journalist I've seen in my lifetime, Steve Austin, who was with the ABC in Brisbane. He did the expose which was one of the major lightning rods for the inquiry in Queensland which overcame the problem of continual murders by a group of policemen in that state. Steve did a 'Crooked Creek Cattle Company' series—which was the most startling and remarkable thing I'd ever heard on radio—with enormous courage, because he knew the number of people that had been murdered already, the number that had been set up on charges and the number of journalists that had been sacked. Yet he had the courage to go on and do the job.

It's no secret that the centre of the corruption was a Detective Sergeant Murphy, who was running what they called 'the Joke' throughout Queensland, and he had a house at Hedges Avenue on the Gold Coast, which is the most expensive address in Australia. Steve had the camera there—this was the second thing that he did; and he called me in and showed me—and he interviewed him. Tony Murphy came out, and Steve said, 'Detective Sergeant Murphy, you have a house in the most expensive address in Australia and two top-of-the-range Mercedes-Benz in the garage. Could you explain how you do this on a take-home pay of 70 grand a year?' I said to Steve Austin, 'I'm not going near you. I'm going to get caught in a ricochet. You've got a life expectancy of days.'

The point I want to make, in backing up the honourable member for Goldstein on this amendment, is that he was ordered not to use that tape exposing Tony Murphy. The ABC boss in Melbourne told him that not only was he not to use it but he was to send the reels down to Melbourne. Now, to show you the extraordinary courage of this man, he did send the tapes down to Melbourne, but he put copied tapes that night on national television. Whilst it was posthumous assistance for the 42 that were dead—of those 42, there were 21 burnt to death at Whisky Au Go Go. They hadn't paid their protection money, so their nightclub was burnt to the ground. But someone had locked the exit doors from the outside, and the people couldn't get out and were incinerated to death. In retrospect, I believe that these terrible happenings could have been avoided if people like Steve Austin had been given much greater licence and power to do the job that they wanted to do. So I very, very strongly back the amendment moved by the honourable member for Goldstein.

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