This paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of tourism in Queensland through analysing the history of tourism in Hawaii. Both Queensland and Hawaii are heavily dependent on tourism, with the future of tourism being a constant focus of public debate in each case. Since Hawaii embarked on tourism development decades before Queensland, the history of Hawaiian tourism may present some important lessons for tourism in Queensland. Also, Hawaii is Queensland's most important competitor for the Japanese and emerging Asian markets (such as South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China) in sun-and-surf tourism.

Brisbane is the kind of city that if it did not exist would have to be invented — and indeed it has by many of its writers. Its history of settlement and its political conservatism of the slash, burn and bulldoze variety has urged writers like Sam Watson in his novel The Kadaitcha Sung to depict it as a place of punishment, violence, racism and red-necked parochialism. The same sense of oppression informs David Malouf's mixed nostalgic references to the city as a place of beauty and boredom, a city you can love and hate in Johnno. In similar vein, Jessica Anderson in Tirra Lirra by the River, Angelika Fremd in The Glass Inferno and Janette Turner Hospital in both short stories and novels, depict Brisbane as a place one needs to leave but also a place where epiphanies are possible, and where the past haunts the present with a ferocious insistence. For novelists Rosie Scott, Janette Turner Hospital and Venero Armanno, Brisbane is simultaneously Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Many writers depict Brisbane as a great place to grow up in but you wouldn't want to live there — unless you are Hugh Lunn. Brisbane has been, and arguably still is by some writers, seen both favourably and unfavourably as a provincial backwater, unsophisticated and straight — still a frontier town in the popular and literary imagination if not in reality, a place where it is likely that you will know somebody who knows somebody you know. This is pointed out repeatedly by John Birmingham, author of the whimsical He Died With a Felafel in his Hand, by way of a distinguishing feature of flat life in Brisbane in contrast to other (Southern) capitals. In Brisbane, Birmingham writes:

Queensland's Fitzgerald Inquiry was expected to last six weeks. It ran for two years (1987–1989). The inquiry was established to look at suspected police misconduct. It ended up exposing vertical corruption and widespread abuse of power in the Police Force; a less than arms-length relationship between police and the National Party government which contributed to the lack of effective police accountability processes; other official misconduct by non-police public servants; and political dishonesty and corruption.

The 1989 Fitzgerald Report into police and governmental corruption in Queensland has been a model for public sector reform in Australia. It is especially timely to consider the impact of those reforms in light of the current overhaul of the largest police agency in Australia, the New South Wales Police Service, and of continuing problems with public sector probity in other states. Queensland made significant advances in improving electoral and administrative processes, and creating external independent oversight of the police. Nonetheless, unforeseen gaps in the Fitzgerald agenda allowed reactionary forces to dilute the reform process. Three primary areas remain ‘unreconstructed’. Reform has not been firmly established from the top down, beginning with progressing the system of representative democracy and opening up cabinet. Additionally, the Police Service appears to have successfully resisted the prescribed re-orientation away from law enforcement to community policing. Detection and control of misconduct also remain weak. A more interventionist Criminal Justice Commission is needed, with more proactive strategies for developing compliance with ethical standards.

Brisbane in the 1980s provides a case study of how a small, but intensely self-conscious experimental art-scene could be created by a very few people marginalised within a conservative culture. This was a uniquely Australian phenomenon, possible only in a country of densely-populated, capital cities, isolated from each other by great distances.

The interest in the evaluation of police work has been growing rapidly over the last eight years. The economic growth of the early 1980s has been replaced with the economic stringency of the 1990s. There has been an adoption of the private sector approach to evaluating public services. Value for money has never been more important, and all public services have been called to demonstrate efficiency in operation. Performance indicators have been developed for the police to aid in demonstrating this.

In 1945, as Australians unknowingly entered the last year of the Second World War, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in Queensland undertook a unique radio history project that ran for two years. The original intention of the programme, as suggested by its title The Q Story, appears to have been propagandist and thus in keeping with official policy: to provide morale-boosting entertainment with a nationalist theme in the context of wartime. As the programme progressed, however, it appears to have developed an alternative legitimacy in response to public demand.

The British scientist Lord Kelvin once asserted that if something can be measured, it can be understood. To the extent that this is true, social scientists who want to understand political corruption or police misconduct would seem to be in big trouble, for some fairly obvious reasons. Corruption and misconduct by their nature usually involve prohibited actions committed by consenting adults in private, the offenders sometimes occupy positions of considerable power, any victim is often as compromised as the offenders or (especially in the case of an organisation) is unaware of being victimised, and whistleblowers historically have got such a raw deal from their departments and from the authorities that only the most heroic have persevered with their claims. No doubt its covert nature and reach into the upper echelons of power are reasons why there is still debate about how much corruption there really was in Queensland prior to the Fitzgerald Inquiry, and why there is continuing controversy about whether the Criminal Justice Commission (CJC), set up in late 1989 to continue the work of the Inquiry, has been a success or a failure.

The general consensus of historians is that Queensland was economically dependent on primary production, and that, compared to the southern states, its manufacturing sector was relatively underdeveloped and unsophisticated. Generally speaking, however, the discipline of economic history has not paid sufficient attention to Queensland history, nor has economic analysis in the general body of Queensland historiography been as rigorous and encompassing as it could be. Some of the main themes on economic development considered in Queensland historiography are the patterns of expansion and dominance of the pastoral industry, the growth in agricultural activity associated with closer settlement schemes, and from after the First World War, the institutionalised responses intended to give primary producers control over marketing their own commodities. This reflects the obvious rural bias that infused the political economy of the period. However, close empirical analysis of the economic processes and sectoral composition of Queensland's industrial base demonstrates that the economic significance of the secondary industry sector has been somewhat understated historiographically. Furthermore, the impact of internal and external political, financial and ideological forces that effectively marginalised early Labor government plans to encourage the development of secondary industries have not been adequately researched. To illustrate the context of this, an examination of the dominant patterns of government sponsored developmental policy needs first to be undertaken.

The paper takes as its point of departure the proposition that for the Liberals to return as a significant electoral force in Queensland state politics they need to be far more successful in metropolitan electorates than in the 1983–92 period.

The extent of the electoral advancement in the greater metropolitan area in 1995 is examined by a classification of seat types and by voting patterns in the recent past. It is found that such success was variable, heavily dependent upon the legacy of the National urban vote (1989–92) and the propensity of erstwhile ALP voters to opt for Others, rather than the Liberals when registering their primary vote.

On 24 September 1997 the Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) released a comprehensive report entitled Integrity in the Queensland Police Service: Implementation and Impact of the Fitzgerald Inquiry Reforms, in line with its statutory obligation to report to Parliament on the implementation of the recommendations of the Inquiry. Earlier reports have examined the implementation of the Inquiry's recommendations relating to recruitment and training and the restructuring of the police service (see CJC 1993, 1994). This most recent report addresses issues such as whether the Fitzgerald reforms have enhanced the effectiveness of the complaints investigation process, led to improved standards of behaviour within the Queensland Police Service (QPS), reduced the incidence of corruption and weakened the influence of the police ‘code of silence’. In addition to providing a retrospective assessment of the ‘Fitzgerald reforms’, the report identifies key areas where further action is required by the QPS and provides a reference point against which to measure future progress. This article summarises the key findings of the report and briefly discusses the implications for further reform of the QPS and the role of the CJC in that process.

In the 1830s and 40s, in the absence of any real law enforcement body, uncontained conflict between settlers and Aborigines in what was to become southern Queensland resulted in a spiral of violence that was at times gratuitous. Some whites killed blacks out-of-hand. For their part, Aborigines retaliated when and how they could. One settler, for example, told how in a little over two years fifteen of his shepherds had been murdered and whole herds of his animals had been butchered simply for the fat their kidneys contained.

In Australia, the role of police unions has assumed a prominence in contemporary debates surrounding the legitimate role of police in today's society. There is a perception that police unions in particular exercise undue influence over the political process, management practice and law reform. These perceptions are invariably grounded in “orthodox” accounts of policing that are based in part on the assumption that the police force, as an institution, is part of the “natural order of things”, that is, that the role of police is simply to “enforce the law as laid down by Parliament and the courts on behalf of the community”. Contemporary studies of policing have begun to challenge these views. Their observations suggest that the police are not merely passive instruments of the state but are actively engaged in influencing the processes of police administration and law reform. This body of work however does not specifically address the issue of police organisation and its impact on these processes. If we are to resolve contemporary concerns regarding police participation in the political sphere, a more adequate account of police practices and the institutions within which these practices have evolved is required.

Throughout the history of British colonies, the intermingling of commerce and ‘civility’ produced the kinds of colonies that Britain (like other imperial nations) most needed — colonies which not only produced raw materials or space for recalcitrant criminals, but also spaces in which imperialist discourses could educate, convert, and expand what was known of human consciousness. The imperial ‘duty’ was to civilise and conquer the unknown non-Western world for imperial consumption and ‘native’ edification. Through education, both religious and secular, European missionaries sought to inculcate native minds and bodies with the tenets of Western Christianity and culture. Whilst many recent studies have examined the ways in which imperial discourses conquered and codified ‘other’ cultures and peoples, the history of the missionary movement exemplifies a particularly overt form of the dissemination of imperial/Christian discourses. Through Christian teachings, which not only codified religious thinking but also appropriate social behaviour, imperial discourses shaped the manner in which life was experienced under Christian and imperial rule. This paper will explore the ways that missionary activity assisted and effected colonial control.

On 11 November 1996 the Premier of Victoria, Jeff Kennett announced that his government would refer its powers over industrial relations to the Commonwealth. This decision, he said, “reflects the overwhelming consensus among industrial relations experts that a single industrial relations system is both desirable and inevitable”. The announcement was greeted enthusiastically by the proposed recipients: to the Prime Minister, John Howard, it was a “practical example of cooperative Commonwealth/State relations” and “a ringing endorsement of the Federal Government's industrial relations reforms”. The Minister for Industrial Relations, Peter Reith (who was credited with successful negotiation of the intergovernmental agreement on the terms of referral) hailed it as “a major micro-reform initiative.” Media commentary was only marginally less optimistic. It was reported that the other key national players — the ACTU, employers, the federal Opposition and the Democrats — also welcomed the move to a unitary industrial system. Benefits were seen in the elimination of duplication and administrative hurdles, making the state more attractive for overseas investors, and in the provision of an enhanced safety net for Victorian workers. The general theme of the coverage was summed up in the comment that the decision was “a victory for the national interest”.

In December 1995 I spent a week with the Aboriginal community of Palm Island. Here seven elderly men and women shared with me their life stories; stories of families torn apart by police deportations, of confinement in dormitories, of hunger and hardship, of decades of forced unpaid labour, and recent years of struggle on partial wages. These Aboriginal workers have been fighting for ten years to force the Queensland government to abide by the laws of the nation. Citing 1975 Federal anti-discrimination legislation which confirms that no worker should be paid less than the legal entitlement solely on the grounds of race, religious beliefs, or gender, these workers had turned to the Human Rights Commission for justice.