Governor
Campbell succeeded Sir James Ramsay as Governor of Queensland on 22 July 1985. There has been some conjecture that the Bjelke-Petersen government may have elevated Campbell to this position in order to remove him from the Chief Justiceship.All of the controversies surrounding Campbell appear to be merely projections of the very controversies affecting Joh Bjelke-Petersen and his government, with Campbell's inauguration as Governor attracting complaint from the Queensland Trades and Labour Council that they had been ostracised from the swearing-in ceremony due to political manoeuvring by the State Government.
This tradition of controversy involving Campbell and the government came to crisis in 1987 when there was internal strife within the National Party between Bjelke-Petersen and his cabinet which almost caused a constitutional crisis in Queensland governance. There had already been murmurs in early 1987 of a vice-regal intervention in Queensland politics when The Australian newspaper in March featured a front page article detailing the threat by State Opposition leader Nev Warburton to ask Governor Campbell to dismiss the Bjelke-Petersen ministry over allegations of illegal conduct by the Government. These suggestions came to nothing. However, later in the year when Bjelke-Petersen lost the confidence of his cabinet, the question was again raised as to what role Campbell as Governor would play in the event of a constitutional crisis.
On 23 November 1987, Premier Bjelke-Petersen visited Campbell at Government House to discuss a restructuring of his ministry. It was Bjelke-Petersen's wish to dissolve his entire ministry and be recommissioned as Premier with a new distribution of ministerial portfolios, however Campbell's advice was for the Premier to seek the individual resignations of those ministers he wanted removed from the ministry. After having approached five ministers about resigning from their offices and being refused by each one, the Premier returned to Campbell on 24 November and requested the termination of the commissions of three of the five ministers, to which Campbell agreed. While the government's problems were already serious, the difficulty for Campbell began on 26 November, when one of the dismissed ministers, Mike Ahern, became Leader of the Parliamentary National Party and wrote to Campbell seeking a new commission that would replace Bjelke-Petersen as Premier with Ahern. As the Sydney Morning Herald had succinctly described the situation, Queensland now had a "Premier who is not leader" and the National Party a "Leader who is not Premier". There was a tense period where Bjelke-Petersen refused to resign his commission and Campbell refused to prematurely terminate it. The legal advice Campbell had received dictated that his course of action should be to only contemplate dismissing Bjelke-Petersen without the Premier's consent if he refused to resign after failing a vote of no confidence, however there were also fears that the Premier might advise Campbell to dissolve Parliament and call elections. Some sections of the press attacked Campbell for his apparent inactivity during the crisis, while other voices within the legal and political world supported his course of action. It was Bjelke-Petersen's eventual resignation, effective from 1 December, that ended the crisis, with Campbell receiving the subsequent praise of many in the media for his handling of the undesirable situation.
In March 1988, Campbell gave a lecture on The Role of a State Governor to the Royal Australian Institute of Public Administration, Queensland Division, in which he described the various functions carried out by state governors, the legal and constitutional framework of the office and numerous historical accounts of different situations involving vice-regal figures in Queensland and other Commonwealth domains.
The Brisbane Expo of 1988 also technically brought a short respite to Campbell's vice-regal duties as Queen Elizabeth was present in Queensland for the official opening and would have been capable of performing any of the functions of the Crown should the government have wished.
Read more about this topic: Walter Campbell (judge)
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