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Not all of the information uncovered by the Fitzgerald inquiry about Queensland's seedy underbelly saw the light of day. A decade after Tony Fitzgerald's corruption probe began, the spectre of influence in high places again has raised its head. National affairs editor Peter Charlton investigates.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

RUSSELL John Grenning, sometime Telegraph and ABC journalist, sometime adviser to Queensland National Party and federal Liberal ministers, was the subject of a "dirt file" kept in one of Terry Lewis's private safes.

The file contained allegations that Grenning bought pornographic material. However, according to a notation on the file, no action was taken "for political reasons".

During the Fitzgerald inquiry, that file, with others, was seized by investigators including current Police Commissioner James Patrick O'Sullivan.

The Fitzgerald inquiry held no public hearings relating to the file or the allegations; the report, handed down in July 1989, makes no reference to any allegations. In his report, G.E. Fitzgerald, QC, noted: "The work started by this commission has not been completed. The problems are so complex as to be difficult to articulate, let alone solve . . ."

"The public sittings of this inquiry could have gone on indefinitely . . ."

Data collected by the Fitzgerald inquiry was handed over to the newly-formed Criminal Justice Commission where, presumably, the originals of these files are to be found.

At least one copy was made of sections of the Lewis "dirt files" and was kept by an "interested party" for nearly a decade.

After the election of the Goss Labor government in December 1989, Grenning's career went into decline.

Out of favour as a political adviser since the decline of his former ministerial boss, Russell James Hinze, Grenning transferred to the Mains Road Department, where he occupied a relatively senior but politically neutral public relations position.

Here, he waited for a more favourable political climate for someone who had spent much of his working life in conservative political advisory roles.

That climate change occurred after the near-defeat of the Goss government and in the run-up to the crucial Mundingburra poll re-run earlier last year, in which the police union ran an expensive and virulent law-and-order campaign aimed at the Goss government _ a campaign in which the police union acted as a proxy for the Opposition.

Before that election and according to his own evidence to the Carruthers inquiry, Grenning played a significant role in brokering the deal that led to the memorandum of understanding between then opposition leader Rob Borbidge, police spokesman Russell Cooper and the police union. Grenning conceded he was the author of the final document.

That MOU would have given the police union the kind of powers it enjoyed - and used improperly - in the pre-Fitzgerald days.

As Commissioner Fitzgerald remarked in his report: "The union . . . has been both the means by which and the forum in which honest police have been dissuaded from doing their duty and reporting misconduct."

Among those powers agreed on in the 1996 MOU was a police union veto over the government's choice as police commissioner. Had the MOU been implemented after the government changed last year, Commissioner O'Sullivan's days would have been numbered. And the police union would have been in a position to ensure its candidate got the top job.

OF COURSE, it would be unfair and unwise to draw any adverse conclusion from the fact that a former corrupt police commissioner kept a "dirt file" on the political adviser who, many years later, brokered the MOU deal.

It is useful, however, to ask why the allegations against Grenning were never investigated; why the material found its way into a file in Lewis's office; and what use, if any, Lewis thought the file might have been in the past. And further, what use might the file, and the information contained in it, be in the present political climate?

In considering these questions, it is not inconceivable that the police union knew of the Grenning file during the negotiations.

Police Minister Russell Cooper says he did not know of the file on Grenning until told by The Courier-Mail.

He also says such a file could have had no influence on the MOU negotiations.

And Grenning says there could have been no possible links between any file and the negotiations under the MOU. The former staffer also says it is "outrageous" that the allegations against him were never investigated properly.

It is. In an important sense, Grenning is a victim . . . a victim of Lewis's obsession with the political and personal weaknesses of his opponents.

According to Grenning, had Lewis had the "dirt" on him, it would have been used in the mid-1980s when he worked for racing minister Russ Hinze.

It is also no secret that Lewis and Hinze despised each other. In such an atmosphere, Lewis must have thought there was some benefit in holding a file on Grenning, with a note that a potentially damaging investigation was stopped "for political reasons", whether that was the reason or not. It is also important to draw a clear distinction between Grenning's homosexuality and unproved, unsubstantiated - and for that matter uninvestigated - allegations of involvement with pornographic photographs.

Yesterday Grenning said the photographs were "non-pornographic figure studies of clothed adults".

He was, however, less adamant on Monday when questioned by Courier-Mail reporters. Asked about the subject of the photographs, Grenning replied: "None of your business."

It seems clear from the Victorian police that the photographs bought by Grenning were of more interest than "non-pornographic figure studies of adults".

Yesterday Grenning said: "It's not secret I'm gay. I don't think that's a hanging offence - yet.

"But you know what the atmosphere was like in the 1980s. Then poofs were lumped in with blacks, street-marchers and child molesters."

All this might seem like ancient political history and current latent homophobia, except for Grenning's key role in what would seem to be a re-emergence of the old police culture.

And it also seems that Grenning was sufficiently perturbed by persistent rumours about him that he sought from the Criminal Justice Commission a clearance that he was not under investigation - a clearance which was supplied.

The value of this clearance, however, is less than it seems at face value. Grenning approached the commission and said he had been the subject of rumours. The CJC checked with its staff, established that Grenning was not the subject of an investigation and gave him a letter to that effect.

But as the CJC said on Thursday, investigation of this kind of allegation is not its province.

But this is the same CJC that the Queensland Coalition Government - Grenning's loyal employer until he retired with stress earlier this year - cheerfully would see dismembered. The same CJC that the Borbidge Government has spent, through the now-found-to-be-biased Connolly Ryan inquiry, $11 million trying to discredit.

And it is the same CJC established as a result of the Fitzgerald inquiry into police corruption.

It is now a matter of historical record that Gerald Edward "Tony" Fitzgerald, QC, spent little time looking at what might be called "sexual/political blackmail". Given the circumstances leading up to the inquiry, this might be considered surprising. But from that defining day, Friday, August 28, 1987 when "Dirty Harry" Burgess confessed - or "rolled over" - Fitzgerald was off along paths of huge financial corruption.

A sizeable slice of the Queensland Police Service, it seems, was in on "The Joke". Then on November 9, 1988, the late Donald Frederick "Shady" Lane, a former special branch officer and Liberal-turned-National minister in the Bjelke-Petersen government, started to give evidence - and confessed that he had misused his ministerial expenses and cash advances.

A week later, on November 15 and sobbing as he did, Lane also accused 14 other current or former ministers of the same creative accounting.

It was, at the time, a convenient explanation for $100,000 of unexplained income which Fitzgerald inquiry accounts had managed to find. Ian Callinan, QC, appearing for the other ministers, suggested that by so confessing, Lane deflected "criticism of corrupt monies from other sources". By then sobbing convulsively, Lane conceded that might be so.

What had started as an inquiry into police corruption had turned into an inquiry into public administration. It seemed that everywhere Fitzgerald looked, corrupt practices existed.

AMID the high drama of a Cabinet minister tearfully confessing that he had been "rorting" the system for years, it was easy enough to overlook the release from prison of former senior constable Dave Moore. Yet it happened the same day. (Journalists employed by metropolitan newspapers were on strike on that day.)

Moore had served 17 months of a 30-month sentence for a series of offences involving boys. Ironically, his sentence coincided with the Fitzgerald hearings; he was not called to give evidence although Douglas Drummond, QC, counsel assisting Fitzgerald, extracted more than one lie from Lewis over his protection of Moore and his misleading of then police minister Bill Glasson.

In short, Lewis lied and deceived to protect Moore and to continue a cover-up that had started in the early 1980s.

Yet from this time in the early 1980s, Snr-Constable Dave Moore was a very public face of the Queensland Police Service. He appeared on children's television programmes as a conventionally good-looking young man without an obvious weight problem or a face that had seen too many late nights. Married with a young family, Moore should have been the kind of young police officer used on recruiting posters - except that he was an indiscriminate homosexual and enthusiastic paedophile.

His behaviour, around the known beats of lavatories in public parks and in gay pubs such as the then-Hacienda in the Valley, was a matter of public notoriety.

Parents began to make allegations about Moore's behaviour as early as April 1982. Executives from the television channel that provided the police with free positive publicity using "Constable Dave", as he was styled, heard the rumours and raised them with Lewis; the commissioner gave Moore what has been described as a "clean bill of health".

EVEN the police union, which had a refreshingly old-fashioned objection to a suspected paedophile being used as the public face of the police service, was concerned enough to approach Lewis. The commissioner remained unperturbed.

The senior constable's reputation and behaviour were matters for public ribaldry. At one point, Moore's name was linked by rumour with a well-known rugby league footballer, to the extent that the irreverent crowd at Lang Park took to chanting "Dave Moore, Dave Moore" when this footballer touched the ball.

Still, Lewis did nothing and remained, to the public at least, supremely confident.

That same confidence about Moore extended to evidence Lewis gave to the Fitzgerald inquiry on October 20, 1988, the 203rd day of its hearing. But Moore had resigned from the police service on November 22, 1984. In June 1987, after an earlier conviction was set aside, Moore was convicted on homosexual charges and sentenced to 21/2 years' jail.

In 1982, around the time allegations about Moore began surfacing, the consorting squad led by Det-Sgt Peter Gallagher raided a city apartment and seized a collection of pornographic photographs. These photographs showed Moore was associated with people involved in pornography.

In November 1984, rising young Labor politician Wayne Goss started to put on notice a series of questions to then police minister Bill Glasson about an unnamed police officer and a child pornography ring. In discussions between Glasson and Lewis, the police commissioner scoffed at the idea that Snr-Constable Moore was involved with William Hurrey.

William John "Bill" Hurrey was a well-known ABC radio announcer of the time, on whose programme Moore appeared frequently in his capacity as the public face of the police service.

Through November, the heat under Moore was turned up. Lewis also started to feel it. I remember submitting a series of questions to Lewis, through his then media spokesman Ian Hatcher, about Moore, Hurrey and child pornography.

Those questions went unanswered, although they were published in The Courier-Mail at the time.

Moore resigned from the police service on November 22, 1984. During a telephone conversation the next day on the topic, Lewis failed to tell his minister that the service's most public senior constable had resigned. Glasson found out when he took a call from a television reporter.

Glasson conceded later that he felt "like a fool". Importantly, however, he continued to rely on his police commissioner.

On Tuesday, November 27, Glasson, briefed by Lewis, accused Goss of ruining Moore's life. Again acting on Lewis's advice, Glasson said there was insufficient evidence to charge Moore but conceded that Moore had used a police vehicle to deliver boys to the home of a well-known homosexual.

That Wednesday, Lewis noted in his diary, "Saw Sir Edward Lyons re Hon Glasson's handling of the Moore matter". Lyons, or "Top-Level" Ted, was the eminence grise-cum-fixer of the Bjelke-Petersen government.

The interest of this newspaper, and its now chief reporter Tony Koch, was sparked. On December 10, Koch reported that a child-pornography and male prostitution racket operated in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast.

"Some of the children and prostitutes say the ringleaders pay off crooked policemen so the racket can operate," the report read.

AFTER the report, the government appointed well-known Brisbane criminal lawyer Desmond Sturgess, QC, to carry out an investigation into child abuse and ancillary matters. Two police officers appointed to assist Sturgess were ordered to report to their police superiors.

Sturgess, assisted by Koch, reported in November 1985. Among his conclusions, that corruption was an inference from the unimpeded operation of brothels, both male and female.

Lewis at first sought to submerge the report by means of a study committee but it leaked the following February and was tabled in Parliament but without a key annex listing the names of the brothel owners.

Bjelke-Petersen and Lewis later said they did not read the Sturgess Report.

In December 1986, Courier-Mail reporter Phil Dickie started inquiries into brothel ownership, using the addresses supplied in the Sturgess Report and checking records held by the Valuer-General's Department, the Brisbane City Council and the Corporate Affairs Commission.

A month later, Dickie reported under a Courier-Mail headline, "A year after Sturgess, the sex-for-sale business survives unchallenged".

The police service issued the usual denials and Lewis flew to Western Australia with Lyons for the America's Cup yacht races. Meanwhile the "Joh for Canberra" push became the "Joh for PM" campaign, and deputy premier Bill Gunn was left to run the state.

In May, at the height of the "Joh for PM" push, ABC Four Corners broadcast The Moonlight State by Chris Masters. Traversing much of the same material published by Dickie, the Four Corners programme detonated in National Party homeland outside Brisbane.

Gunn acted, appointed a royal commission, progressively widened its terms of references and so started the Fitzgerald inquiry from which one of the big losers was the Queensland police union. Gone was its influence in appointing senior officers, including the now disgraced commissioner Lewis.