David Jull (Fadden, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It came fourth in the Melbourne Cup. From memory, those four gentlemen were the owners of Wellington Road, and there were great tales about that horse.

Later in his career, Sir James also served the racing industry as a member of the Queensland Racing Appeals Tribunal. Tribute should be given to Sir James because, after he retired from the parliament, not only did he go back into his legal practice but he also made a very real contribution in a number of organisations. For example, he headed the judge’s salary tribunal in Queensland, and he took that very seriously. I remember him telling me that he had very great difficulty getting judges to allow him to approach them in court, but when he was reviewing their salaries and conditions he had never been invited to lunch by so many judges in all his life. He also said that, if people were critical of parliamentarians and the way they approached some of their conditions of employment, parliamentarians were rank amateurs compared to the judiciary—but I am not quite sure whether I should say things like that in this place!

On coming to government in 1996, the Howard government appointed Sir James to the Council of the Order of Australia. That was another position that he took terribly seriously. I was the minister responsible at the time and I remember speaking to Sir James about the council. He was worried about the way that the council met and the way they conducted their business, and he suggested some very good reforms. People do not realise that there are about 14,000 to 15,000 nominations a year for awards under the Order of Australia and it is a major achievement to work out who gets what. He made some very real suggestions and there has been some great reform of the work of that council. Sir James should be acknowledged for that.

He also told me a story of the first time that the council met. The nominations arrived for his perusal, at his home in Chapel Hill, in three suitcases, and the suitcases had combination locks on them. They arrived on a weekend and nobody had told him what the combination was. He rang Government House but there was no answer. Then he remembered that, when he was Special Minister of State, Government House used to send him quite a number of boxes and they also had combination locks. So he went to one of his old diaries and found the old combination lock number, tried it on the suitcase and it opened immediately. Nothing had changed.

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