The term is a portmanteau of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's surname with the word "Gerrymander", where electoral boundaries are redrawn in an unnatural way with the dominant intention of favouring one political party or grouping over its rivals.
As a party drawing its votes mainly from the Brisbane area, the Liberals were regarded by Bjelke-Petersen as "small-l-liberal" and averse to rural interests.
Although difficulties in transport and communication were given as the reasons to reduce the size of remote and thinly-populated electorates, the effect was to give a huge advantage to the Labor Party, which at that time drew its voting strength from rural areas, a consequence of the party's formation in the outback Queensland town of Barcaldine half a century earlier.
The new map was used as the basis for the May 1972 election, from which Bjelke-Petersen emerged victorious as Premier despite only receiving 20% of the vote, a smaller percentage than the Liberals (22.2%) or Labor (46.7%).
But due to the Country Party's heavy concentration of support in the rural and remote zones, it won 26 seats.
In addition, it contained vast areas of desert and the few communities in the electorate were poorly served by road and rail links.
The difficulties of keeping in touch with the population over such enormous and diverse regions were cited by Labor in 1949, and the Country Party in 1971, as reasons for malapportionment.
The resignation of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen in 1987, and the defeat of the National Party by Labor under Wayne Goss in 1989, led to the implementation of more equitable electoral boundaries, which was achieved by a redistribution in 1991 that took effect at the 1992 election.
Only five of the 89 districts qualified for this special loading, but since these were (a) huge in area, and (b) not solidly National (for instance, Mount Isa and Cook have been regularly held by Labor since 1989), the retention of this small degree of rural vote-weighting was not any longer a matter of political controversy in Queensland.
In 2017, the Queensland Legislative Assembly was expanded to 93 seats, and the special loading was removed, with Brisbane electing a majority of the Parliament for the first time since 1949.