Here we Joh again? The spectre of Bjelke-Petersen still looms large over Queensland

The LNP’s unapologetic moves on crime, transgender healthcare and police-led suppression of protests are a throwback to days many thought had come and gone

Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast

A sign stopped Aunty Sandra King in her tracks. The elder of the Yagara, Quandamooka and Bundjalung people, now in her 70s, spoke at a protest last month against plans to build an Olympic stadium in the heart of Brisbane’s Victoria Park.

In the crowd a man held aloft a homemade placard with the words “I Preferred Joh”.

In Queensland , regressive government decisions are often compared to the repressive decades led by the “hillbilly dictator”, the former premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

For those who lived through those years, like Aunty Sandra, such comparisons are never made lightly.

“At first I got a bit shocked by seeing [the sign],” she told the rally.

But she says the LNP’s unapologetic moves to remove Indigenous people and programs from government are a throwback to the sorts of days many thought had come and gone.

“That is going back to Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who we did not like,” she says. “Who was just against us.

“No, Joh was not better, I can say. None of them, no Liberal party’s better for us.”

This month the prominent Indigenous barrister Joshua Creamer told ABC Radio he had heard the government’s quiet purge of First Nations people, policies and programs described by a public servant as “project invisibility”. This has included the defunding of programs like Murri Watch – which provides services to Indigenous children in watch houses – as well as plans to contest all native title claims .

“There’s an organised strategy and that is to ultimately eliminate, remove, reduce the Indigenous affairs, Indigenous initiatives, Indigenous voices,” Creamer said.

A simple calculation

In her 2008 essay, Disruptive Influences, the academic and author Julianne Schultz writes about a cohort of Queenslanders, shaped by tumultuous times, who had emerged at the forefront of national public life. They were “a product of a time and place that was uniquely volatile”.

Almost two decades on, many of those now in positions of influence are from subsequent generations. There are fewer institutional memories; fewer voices to warn about the slippery slope.

Schultz says First Nations people were an early target of the Bjelke-Petersen government.

“A lot of the early starting point was around race, about Aboriginal rights,” she says. “It’s always been, and always will be, the thin end of the wedge.”

Many of the government’s shifts that have most concerned civil libertarians rely on a simple calculation: that the issues are marginal for most suburban and regional voters, whose concerns are mostly the cost of living, and crime.

This sort of calculation was central to the government’s “adult time” crime laws, introduced after a populist election campaign that focused on juvenile crime and included accusations of “radicalised dog whistling” .

The same calculation underscores banning of puberty blockers for transgender healthcare in public hospitals, or “hate speech” laws that have banned expressions linked to pro-Palestine protests.

Several groups compared arrests under those laws to police-led suppression of protests under the Bjelke-Petersen government, particularly its 1977 ban on all protest marches and declaration of a state of emergency during a tour of the state by an all-white rugby team from apartheid South Africa.

Others have pointed out that even Bjelke-Petersen didn’t go so far as to ban expressions where the meaning is contested.

The government has exempted its planned Olympics venues from 15 state laws, including the heritage and planning acts, drawing comparisons with Bjelke-Petersen’s enabling act for the 1988 World Expo which compulsorily acquired 40 hectares of inner-city riverfront land.

Cultural institutions like the state library pulped books in the 1980s. Last year, apparently on political orders, the library stripped author Karen Wyld of her $15,000 black&write! fellowship , less than five hours before it was to have been awarded to her, over comments about the conflict in Gaza.

Controversial political legacies

The Queensland premier, David Crisafulli , has to cast back almost 70 years for a palatable political hero. Crisafulli has repeatedly – as recently as last week – compared himself to “honest” Frank Nicklin, who became premier in 1957 after a long period in opposition.

Since Nicklin, the other only conservative leaders to win general elections in Queensland are Bjelke-Petersen and Campbell Newman. And both have controversial political legacies.

Privately at least one senior Liberal describes Bjelke-Petersen as the “best premier Queensland ever had”, but such a comment is rarely made publicly.

In recent years, Crisafulli has commented several times about how long it had been since a Queensland government had abolished a tax, but omitted any mention of the premier (Bjelke-Petersen) who scrapped death duties in the 1970s.

Three weeks ago, in a video posted to YouTube, the mining magnate Gina Rinehart told the same story. But Rinehart – a key financial backer of the insurgent rightwing populist One Nation – was clear and unashamed in her praise of Bjelke-Petersen’s government.

Many voters in Bjelke-Petersen’s heartland of rural Queensland appear to be splitting from the conservative establishment .

Paul Williams, an associate professor of politics and journalism at Griffith University, says Queensland voters tend to “think the LNP is a centrist government, or at least centre-right”.

“But it’s not,” he says. “It’s a capital-C conservative government.

“The electorate does see the government as a moderate, centre right, ‘don’t scare the horses’, sensible, amiable government. There’s a disconnect. I think we might be at the cusp of a change of gears in the way the electorate is perceiving the government.”

Even so, Williams says comparisons between the Crisafulli government and the Bjelke-Petersen era are “exaggerated” and unhelpful.

“A One Nation state government would be a repeat of Joh.”

Polling shows the LNP government has protected itself, to some extent, from the damage inflicted on the Liberal and National parties elsewhere by the rise in support for One Nation.

For the time being, the government appears to have offered just enough to maintain its appeal in rural Queensland and regional cities, where there is a perception that crime is biting and where voters have decided they want harsh populist solutions.

At the same time the government has managed to present itself to urban and suburban voters as a different type of conservative government: more moderate and less scary than the sort that would sack thousands of public servants and drastically cut spending, or the sort that would tear condom machines from the walls of university campuses.

Whether that tightrope can hold in the long term – particularly as the realities of agendas like “project invisibility” come out of the shadows – remains to be seen.

Ben Smee is Guardian Australia’s Queensland correspondent. Additional reporting by Joe Hinchliffe and Andrew Messenger