Senator BRANDIS (12:00 AM) —I wish to pay a tribute tonight to the late Sir William Knox, a distinguished former Deputy Premier and Treasurer of Queensland who died in Brisbane last Saturday at the age of 73. William Knox was born in Melbourne on 14 December 1927 and was educated at Melbourne High School. He settled in Brisbane as a young man and involved himself in many community activities, of which his participation in politics was a natural extension. In the early 1950s, he succeeded Sir James Killen to become the second Queensland president of the Young Liberal Movement.

At the time of the Labor split in 1957, Knox was elected as the member for Nundah in the state parliament, a seat which he was to hold continuously for 32 years. He was defeated in 1989 at the landslide which saw the election of the Goss government. He thus had the unique claim of having a career which spanned precisely the long period of coalition and then National Party government which commenced with the defeat of Gair and ended with the election of Goss. By the time he left parliament in 1989, he had achieved the dignity of `father of the House'.

Sir William was the leader of the Liberal Party in the Queensland parliament, and the Deputy Premier and Treasurer from 1976 to 1978. Prior to that time, he had enjoyed a successful ministerial career, which began in 1965 when he became Minister for Transport in the Nicklin government at the age of 36. He was, at that time, the youngest person ever to have been appointed to the ministry in Queensland's history. His success in that portfolio led to swift advancement, and he was appointed as the Attorney-General and Minister for Justice in 1971. It was during Knox's time as Attorney-General that Queensland led Australia in law reform, with the establishment of the first law reform commission, the first office of ombudsman, and the most advanced legal aid system known to Australia at the time.

With the retirement of Sir Gordon Chalk in 1976, Knox was the obvious choice as leader of the party—a position which, in those days, carried with it the deputy premiership and the position of Treasurer. He continued that distinguished line of Liberal Treasurers—notably, Sir Thomas Hiley and Sir Gordon Chalk—who acted, in effect, as the chief executives of the Queensland government during the coalition years, and were responsible, far more than anyone else, for the economic development and growing prosperity the state enjoyed during the 1960s and 1970s.

It was Bill Knox's misfortune that his period as deputy premier coincided with some of the excesses of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen—made arrogant and reckless by his stunning victory in the 1974 election on a tide of anti-Whitlam sentiment. It is an unglamorous role in politics to be the person who prevents bad things happening—who stands in the way of wrong decisions—by stubborn, unyielding resistance. And it is a thankless role as well when that resistance is made in the face of a popular demagogue, when the victories are anonymous, and when the achievements are essentially negative. But it can be a necessary role, and in Queensland in the late 1970s it was an important one. We have Bill Knox and his Liberal colleagues to thank for putting the brakes on Bjelke-Petersen at a dangerous time—how dangerous we were not to know until a decade later, when the Fitzgerald inquiry revealed all, and the Liberals, whom Bjelke-Petersen spurned at the time as do-gooders and trendies, were revealed to have been men and women of integrity and courage.

Knox was deposed in a party room coup in 1978, but remained in cabinet as Minister for Health. After the end of the coalition government in 1983, he never occupied ministerial office again. But it was, paradoxically, at that very time that his full stature as a man was made plain for all to see. The Liberals paid the price for standing up to Bjelke-Petersen—still an enormously popular figure—by losing all but eight of their 22 seats at the 1983 election. Then, with the defection of the Liberal Party's two most infamous rats, Lane and Austin, their numbers were reduced to six, and the National Party, for the first and no doubt the last time, formed a government in its own right. Bjelke-Petersen, who recognised Knox's great talent as a minister, offered him the opportunity to return to the positions of Treasurer and Deputy Premier, if he would betray the Liberal Party. It was commonly believed at the time that Bjelke-Petersen had also offered him the succession to the premiership, if he would betray his party. Of course, he did not. He settled, instead, for the thankless and in many ways humiliating task of leading a rump of five other members of parliament on the cross-benches.

But the most important thing to note about Knox is that, when the temptation was offered to him by Bjelke-Petersen, it just never crossed anyone's mind that he would succumb to it. The key to understanding Bill Knox was to understand that he was a man of pure, stubborn, granite integrity. He could have had every political prize he had sought. He could have returned to the high offices from which his own party had sacked him. He could probably have been Premier. But he did not, because he was just not made like that. No matter how much his own party may have hurt him, no matter how much he may have despaired of some of the decisions of its organisational wing at the time, the idea that Bill Knox would ever be disloyal to the Liberal Party was simply unthinkable. Over the next three years, he held the party together through its greatest test. They were difficult and thankless years, but he was there when the party needed him most, and nobody but he could have done it.

That is my tribute to the late Sir William Knox, who I knew well when I was a young man, and from whom I gleaned much wisdom. He won, and he lost, many of the most glittering prizes politics has to offer, but it is not for the prizes we remember him. We remember him, in a sense, for the opposite reason—for his willingness to forgo the prizes, to take the hard road, because for him there were more important things in public life: loyalty, integrity, honour.

When Sir William Knox died last weekend, he died with many accomplishments and many high offices to his name. But none of his accomplishments was greater than this: he died as a man who, in 32 years of active, significant public life, left parliament with a reputation which was as stainless and pure as the day he was first elected.