The last time the Coalition split it was News Corp’s fault too

The Rizzo and Kenickie-like relationship between the Liberals and the Nationals is on a break. As was noted when the Coalition split was announced, the last time this happened was in 1987, after the farcical “Joh for PM” (later renamed the less ambitious “Joh for Canberra”) push.

Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the “hillbilly dictator”, was entering what would turn out to be the final year of his 19-year-long tenure as premier of Queensland. While his administration had always been fairly synonymous with corruption, and particularly with repressive policing, the wheels were starting to fall off. It seems symbolic that at the same time, he was starting his relationship with the doomed tyrant Nicolae Ceaușescu, possibly as brutal and repressive a Stalinist dictator as 20th-century communism produced. Joh had been knighted in 1984, prompting then PM Bob Hawke to discontinue the honour in Australia (which lasted until, well, we all remember…)

It was in this atmosphere of decadence that the 75-year-old Bjelke-Petersen, as Australian political historian Professor Paul Strangio put it, “succumbed to a kind of manic grandiosity that climaxed in the delusory and self-destructive ‘Joh for PM’ campaign”.

The campaign said that Bjelke-Petersen, coming off the 1986 Queensland election win — the biggest of his seven consecutive victories — would make a more formidable opponent to Hawke than then-opposition leader John Howard. It was funded largely by a group of Gold Coast property developers known as the “white shoe brigade” and supported by such influential conservatives as Geoffrey Blainey and John Stone (not to mention a young political operative called Clive Palmer). It was made public in January 1987, and here we encounter perhaps the biggest parallel with the crisis of 2025: the key role of News Corp.

In the lead up to the 2025 election, opposition leader Peter Dutton’s overwhelming preference for conducting interviews in the relatively friendly surrounds of Sky News meant he was adrift during an election campaign where he was forced to engage with a wider palette of media. In 1987, Joh enjoyed months of interest, if not out-and-out support, from News Corp papers.

In its 50th anniversary special, The Australian recounts how Sir Joh confided in then editor-in-chief Les Hollings about “his plans to cobble together a conservative force to take over in Canberra”. It then adds, with a faint air of defensiveness: “The inside knowledge led Hollings to get the scoop announcement and encouraged him to provide coverage of such intensity, it was widely interpreted as support.”

At the same time, Queensland tabloid The Courier-Mail wrote approvingly in January 1987 that for all the derision of Queensland’s “hillbilly dictator’’, many saw him as “a modern day Moses — parting the murky waters of political debate and leading conservative forces to the promised land”.

The piece continued:

Bjelke-Petersen is an old hand at taking on Canberra. Since he took over the state’s top political job in 1968, he has repeatedly clashed with federal governments over a multitude of issues.

Sir Joh’s role in bringing down the Whitlam Government in 1975 is part of Australian folklore. Twelve years later the circumstances are vastly different, but the great survivor of Australian politics is equally determined to remove the ALP from national office.

In February, the Queensland National Party withdrew its 12 federal MPs from the Coalition in support of Bjelke-Petersen’s campaign.

Back at the Ozveteran writer Errol Simper would later recall:

Day after day Hollings would lead The Australian‘s front page with one aspect or another of what was already an over-hyped campaign. It seemed quite odd, really, because it’s probable that Hollings, on good terms with Howard, would privately have liked to see Howard overcome Hawke. Yet readers were constantly regaled with each and every manoeuvre from the ‘Joh For Canberra’ bunker.

Hollings apparently told Simper: “Look, you might think Joh being prime minister is ridiculous, completely mad. But thousands and thousands of people don’t. For tonnes of folks Joh is a hero and they’d dearly love to see him in The Lodge.”

“Besides,” Hollings apparently added with a grin, “it’s a good story.”

But this level of attention was for a campaign that was not, as it turned out, all that well thought through. As historians John Wanna and Tracey Arklay wrote in their 1957-1989 history of Queensland Parliament: “If ‘Canberra Joh’ had chosen to run for federal office, he would, of course, have had to resign from State Parliament (and the premiership). It is not clear from the unfolding events when he realised that this would be the certain consequence.”

Further, Bjelke-Petersen was not a member of the Liberal Party, which would, obviously, be the senior party in any Coalition that could form government.

In early May, the Coalition formally split. That same month, Hawke pounced, calling a double dissolution election which Labor won comfortably. Bjelke-Petersen, who at the time was in the US, had not nominated for a federal seat. Soon would come damning media revelations about his fiefdom in Queensland via Four Cornersand the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption in the state that would see him and many of his close colleagues disgraced.

For its part, News Corp has never liked the implication that it helped delay its future messiah John Howard’s access to The Lodge by nearly a decade. As the man at the centre of the coverage, Les Hollings, would later say: “I got a lot of blame for the fact that Howard lost the election, when in fact all I had was an insight into what Joh was going to do.”