CITATION: Tony Fitzgerald

Former Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald has been recognized for his open and repeated disclosures about the state of corruption in Queensland.

Those statements, made about the time of the Conference on Corruption, raised the prospect that Queensland had returned to corruption levels that existed before the corruption Inquiry that carries his name. This has been of enormous support to the campaign for investigation and reform being undertaken by whistleblowers and other concerned Queenslanders and Australians.

Col Dillon, for example, the police whistleblower who gave the Fitzgerald Inquiry its momentum for the revelations of corruption in the police service, has stated that the corruption is worse now than before the Fitzgerald Inquiry.

The Police Service and the Crime & Misconduct Commission dismissed his claims. The cultures, that saw nothing going on before the Fitzgerald Inquiry was held, were seeing nothing again when Col Dillon made his new disclosure.

Now it is Tony Fitzgerald who is giving momentum to ‘Dillon’s Inquiry’, and to similar claims by others.

Also supportive to whistleblowers is the retort that Justice Tony Fitzgerald drew from a former Premier, who sought to explain Fitzgerald’s condemnation by claiming that the judge had a grudge. Now, every whistleblower who receives this political put-down can reply, with appropriate tone, "Yes, Tony Fitzgerald and I, we both just have a grudge."

The disclosures by two Awardees, in combination, demonstrate that the largely ‘blind eye’ that may have been shown by the establishment in Queensland, its police force, its judiciary, and its legal profession, to the allegations of crimes and misconduct in government, has not yielded any dividend.

Barry O’Keefe has brought to our attention the primary example of the alleged ‘blind-eye’, and is expressing concern as an Australian. Tony Fitzgerald’s statements are describing the absence of any dividend for this and other alleged avoidances by authorities of their duty.

Ignoring the allegations of the rorts of parliamentary expenses, the hundreds of public servants assigned to gulags, the common destruction of documents wanted for legal proceedings, the failures of police to act on abuse of children and the elderly in care, the loss of capability by a politicized public service, the capture of watchdog authorities, the terminations of whistleblowers, and the politicization of journalism and of academic research, all may have been for naught.