“It’s the Bjelke-Petersen era again,” is the meme every time a centre-right party moots a policy on just about anything in Queensland.

But the hecklers, invariably from the left, forget that Bjelke-Petersen was just a late twentieth-century riff on the themes of the previous half a century’s Labor corruption.

Petersen was accused of stifling free speech, but his free speech critics of the day are silent now as their comrades implement restrictions of their own.