High-level huddle . . . premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and party secretary Mike Evans discuss something top secret at a 1973 state Country Party conference. Picture: Mike Moores

QUEENSLAND has always been a conservative place. A state where change takes place slowly. Climate has a lot to do with it; heat and humidity rarely provide the kind of environment where sudden and major changes are tolerated.

"We've always done it this way, mate" is the usual line. "Why should we change now?" Or as we heard so often during the debate over the republic — a change overwhelmingly rejected by Queenslanders — "If it ain't broke, then don't fix it."

For all last century, Queensland was ruled by conservative politicians. They were either conservative from the Labor side or conservative from the Country (later National) Party side.

Another great influence on the essential conservatism of Queenslanders has been education or, more accurately, lack of it. Many older Queenslanders left school after "scholarship" at the age of 13 or so, virtually uneducated by today's standards. The scholarship system, which meant most school-leavers had virtually no secondary education, persisted until 1962.

Labor governments liked the idea. It meant young boys and girls could leave school early and help their parents, providing a cheap source of farm labour.

No secondary schools were built in Queensland between the 1930s and the early 1950s; the predominantly Catholic Labor Party, in office all that time, was not interested in education and particularly not for Protestants. It believed, with some justification, that an educated electorate would not vote Labor.

University-educated leaders such as Wayne Goss and Peter Beattie have been a relatively modern phenomenon, although the imposing figure of Thomas Joseph Ryan, right, premier from 1915 to 1919, provides an early exception to this rule. As a barrister, Ryan won some momentous cases in the Queensland Supreme Court; as a politician, he had a running battle with prime minister Billy Hughes.

But the suspicion prevailed and was shared, to a slightly lesser extent, in the old Country Party which was profoundly suspicious of people with university degrees.

On the whole, Queensland has been ruled by powerful, self-made men, largely suspicious of new ideas and happy not to make changes.

It might not have seemed obvious at the height of the Bjelke-Petersen era, but Queensland politics has been dominated by the Labor Party. It won office in 1915 under T.J. Ryan and held it to 1929, and then from 1932 to 1957.

The key to Labor's long success? The power of the conservative Australian Workers Union, with its membership of bush workers, canecutters, shearers, miners and railway labourers. Labor today still has strong links with the AWU.

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