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Sir Johannes "Joh" Bjelke-Petersen, (, 13 January 191123 April 2005) was an Australian politician. He was the longest-serving and longest-lived Premier of Queensland,〔("Sir Joh celebrates 93rd birthday", ''Australian Broadcasting Corporation'' ) 13 January 2004.〕 holding office from 1968 to 1987, during which time the state enjoyed considerable economic development.〔("Sir Joh, our home-grown banana republican" ), ''The Age'', 25 April 2005.〕 His uncompromising conservatism (including his role in the downfall of the Whitlam federal government), his political longevity, and his leadership of a government that, in its later years, was revealed to be institutionally corrupt, made him one of the best-known and most controversial political figures of 20th century Australia. Bjelke-Petersen's Country (later National) Party controlled Queensland despite consistently receiving the smallest number of votes out of the state's leading three parties, achieving the result through a notorious system of electoral malapportionment that resulted in rural votes having a greater value than those cast in city electorates.〔Peter Charlton, "Law and order the making of unlikely leader," ''The Courier-Mail'', 25 April 2005, pg 25.〕 The effect earned Bjelke-Petersen the nickname of "the Hillbilly Dictator". Yet he was a highly popular figure among conservative voters and over the course of his 19 years as premier he tripled the number of people who voted for his party and doubled the party's percentage vote, reducing his Liberal coalition partners to a mere six seats in the 1983 election. In 1985 Bjelke-Petersen launched a campaign to move into federal politics to become prime minister, though the campaign was eventually aborted. Bjelke-Petersen was a divisive premier and earned himself a reputation as a "law and order" politician with his repeated use of police force against street demonstrators〔 and strongarm tactics with trade unions, leading to frequent descriptions of Queensland under his leadership as a police state. From 1987 his administration came under the scrutiny of a royal commission into police corruption and its links with state government ministers. Bjelke-Petersen was unable to recover from the series of damaging findings and after initially resisting a party vote that replaced him as leader, resigned from politics on 1 December 1987. Two of his state ministers, as well as the police commissioner Bjelke-Petersen had appointed and later knighted, were jailed for corruption offences and in 1991 Bjelke-Petersen, too, was tried for perjury over his evidence to the royal commission; the jury failed to reach a verdict and Bjelke-Petersen was deemed too old to face a second trial. ==Early life== Bjelke-Petersen was born in Dannevirke in the southern Hawke's Bay region of New Zealand,〔("Joh Bjelke-Petersen", ''Courier Mail'' ) Birth of our Nation, 2001. 〕 and lived in Waipukurau, a small town in Hawke's Bay. The Australian Bjelke-Petersen family are of Danish and Swedish descent. Joh Bjelke-Petersen's parents were both Danish immigrants, and his father, Carl (known to the family as George), was a Lutheran pastor. In 1913 the family moved to Australia, establishing a farm, "Bethany", near Kingaroy in south-eastern Queensland. The young Bjelke-Petersen suffered from polio, leaving him with a lifelong limp. The family was poor, and Carl Bjelke-Petersen was frequently in poor health. Bjelke-Petersen finished formal schooling at age 14 to work with his mother on the farm, though he later enrolled in correspondence school and later undertook a University of Queensland extension course on the "Art of Writing". He taught Sunday school, delivered sermons regularly in nearby towns and joined the Kingaroy debating society. In 1933, Bjelke-Petersen began work land-clearing and peanut farming on the family's newly-acquired second property. His efforts eventually allowed him to begin work as a contract land-clearer and to acquire further capital which he invested in farm equipment and natural resource exploration. He developed a technique for quickly clearing scrub by connecting a heavy anchor chain between two bulldozers. By the time he was 30, he was a prosperous farmer and businessman.〔 Obtaining a pilot's licence early in his adult life, Bjelke-Petersen also started aerial spraying and grass seeding to further speed up pasture development in Queensland. After failing in a 1944 plebiscite against the sitting member to gain Country Party endorsement in the state seat of Nanango, based on Kingaroy, Bjelke-Petersen was elected in 1946 to the Kingaroy Shire Council, where he developed a profile in the Country Party. With the support of local federal member and shire council chairman Sir Charles Adermann and Sir Frank Nicklin, he gained Country Party endorsement for Nanango and was elected a year later at age 36, going on to give regular radio talks and becoming secretary of the local Nationals branch.〔 He would hold this seat, renamed Barambah in 1950, for the next 40 years. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) had held power in Queensland since 1932 and Bjelke-Petersen spent eleven years as an opposition member. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Joh Bjelke-Petersen」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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