Researchers at Griffith University’s Policy Innovation Hub considered more than 2000 submissions to Cabinet in their review of the 1986 Queensland Cabinet Minutes, released today (January 1) by the Queensland State Archives.
Deputy Director of the Policy Innovation Hub, Jennifer Menzies, and Dr Tracey Arklay, Senior Lecturer at the School of Government and International Relations, focused on the effect of governance and policy during the last full year of the Bjelke-Petersen government.
Joh Bjelke-Peterson
“A reading of the full Cabinet record for 1986 shows a Queensland which was a reluctant moderniser and a Cabinet with a limited number of economic interests and an absence of strategy,” they write in their overview.
ANALYSIS: The Machinery of Government
Their review steps back into an era when Queensland’s National Party Government was at its most powerful; and into a year where a notable emphasis was placed on the coal and sugar industries. A new focus on investment in