A ‘Super Bureaucrat’ to the Rescue? Push and Pull Factors in the Creation of the Queensland Ombudsman, 1963–74

Reflecting on the first nine months of his role as Queensland's first State Ombudsman (then titled Parliamentary Commissioner for Administrative Investigations), David Longland noted that support for this independent watchdog of local and state government administration had not always been forthcoming: When the question of the appointment of a Queensland Ombudsman was first raised, there was consistently an opinion that the services of an Ombudsman were not necessary, but with the growth of administrative action commensurate with the wider field of legislation born of a variety of governments, negative argument was reduced and eventually became positive argument. So effluxion of time brought the adoption of policy for the appointment of an Ombudsman by the Queensland Government. Such an explanation belies the variety of factors that both aided and hampered the Queensland Ombudsman's creation throughout much of the 1960s and early 1970s. Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen made official announcement of Longland's appointment on 12 August 1974 through the provisions of the Parliamentary Commissioner Act 1974 that had entered into force on 1 July 1974. Longland's appointment ended more than a decade of lobbying in Queensland, providing the community with an important means of addressing complaints of administrative error in an apolitical and non-adversarial manner. Most scholarship on this topic has assessed election promises, lobbying efforts from academics, internal political negotiations and the opposition of Joh Bjelke-Petersen to the Ombudsman concept. While each is an essential component of the Ombudsman's foundation in Queensland, there has been no effort to understand how the political debate was influenced by other policy actors, particularly high-ranking public servants.