By Peter Morley, Courier Mail 1st August
Many Queenslanders see One Nation as a boil on the backside of state politics that eventually will burst and rid Parliament of Pauline Hanson's advocates.
Some of the theories advanced by these tyro MPs in Thursday's seventeen hour debate establishing the Beattie minority government credentials suggest the sooner this happens the better.
Claims that gun laws were hatched in a foreign capital long before the 1996 Port Arthur gun massacre were about as fanciful as world government conspiracies.
Amid the rubbish, however, were contributions that finally appear to have lanced more than eight years of secrecy surrounding the controversial Heiner shredding affair.
It relates to the 1990 decision of the Goss Labor cabinet which, soon after it came in power, decided to shred documents relating to an inquiry into child abuse at the John Oxley detention centre.
Endless inquiries, including state investigations and Senate probes, have failed to throw light on this suspicious episode which has refused to disappear from the political agenda.
One Nation, however, has managed to shake free some relevant cabinet submissions and letters from that era which otherwise would have been hidden in archives until 2020.
In doing so the MPs have succeeded in their debut performance where people like former premier Rob Borbidge have failed.
Access to these papers previously had been denied by Peter Beattie, whose permission for release had been sought by then Premier Borbidge in requests up to the time when Beattie was opposition leader.
Beattie had argued that the principle of Cabinet confidentiality was the cornerstone of good government in the Westminster tradition.
"No good case has been made for compromising that principle," Beattie wrote when rejecting the request which Borbidge had made soon after his minority government took office in 1996.
That principle was sacrificed early yesterday morning as an exhausted Parliament approached the vote that confirmed its confidence in the Beattie minority administration.
Beattie produced the papers for public consumption but defended the actions of the 1990 cabinet which included five members of his current ministry.
Provided the Premier has not been selective, his release decision suggests that, as a lawyer, he believes they contain nothing that can point any fingers at his colleagues.
If this is the case, Queensland and other tax payers might have been saved a considerable amount of money if he had been of this opinion a couple of years ago.
The spin Beattie put on the release was that Labor, a new government anxious to get on with the job of running the state, did not deserve to be saddled with any baggage from past administration. It was time to look ahead rather than at the past.
From the language its MPs used when they called for the "Shreddergate" documents, One Nation is unlikely to let what it described as this "unresolved case of systemic corruption" rest.
One Nation MPs told Parliament that it was hard to imagine a more serious breach of public trust than a situation where a government executive decided to knowingly shred public records.
By contrast, One Nation was a bastion of democracy, standing up against continuous attack by a hateful and violent fanatical Left intent on destroying collective freedom.
Presumably all Queenslanders should applaud One Nation's appearance even though by taking its seat for the first time in Parliament on Tuesday it prompted one of the biggest protest rallies of recent times.
This was the same day that the House passed over One Nation's nominee, Shaun Nelson, and chose Labor's Ray Hollis to be Speaker in Queensland's 49th Parliament.
Becoming Queensland Parliament's 31st Speaker has to be a career pinnacle for the English-born Hollis, who has got there after working as a farmhand, galley boy, cook, steward, porter, guard and signalman, paper-mill worker, prison officer and carter.
One of his first decisions was to order the Union flag not to be flown outside Parliament House. Hardly momentous, because the flag goes up or down, depending on whether the Conservatives or Labor govern.
But the decision managed to upset One Nation and the Borbidge Boys, who threatened to gang up on the Beattie Bunch by proposing a parliamentary vote aimed at keeping the flag flying.
Surely there are more pressing matters, including the restoration of public faith in the parliamentary process and the maintenance of dignity and statesmanship that Hollis promised.
Obviously forgetting that in opposition his side once lowered the tone by producing a giant dummy in the House, Beattie went about telling his colleagues what Hollis would do as Speaker.
"If Ray is successful in this vote, he would like to be remembered as the Speaker who restored dignity to Parliament," Beattie said as the secret ballot approached.
That is an admirable goal, provided its delivery does not stifle debate and proceedings in a House here behaviour has been no better or worse than that in any other Parliament.
But wasn't it Hollis himself who did his own bit of blackening of the reputation of politicians when he was caught publicly telling a former Brisbane-based journalist that she was a bitch?