Mr Rouse later told the royal commission set up to investigate the bribery attempt that he had tried to convince Mr Gray to offer Mr Cox the speakership or a ministry to support his government.

When Mr Gray refused, Mr Rouse went ahead with his plan to bribe Mr Cox by offering him $110,000.

Mr Rouse said later that he had been prompted by concern for the Australian economy and the prospect of the Greens holding the balance of power in Tasmania.

For Mr Cox, now 64, as he contemplates retirement from politics, the bribery scandal seems almost a life-time ago - but still something that the articulate politician finds difficult to put into words.

"I don't think I realised how it affected me until it was well and truly under way - it was a nightmare, it was basically a nightmare," he says.

"It totally saps away your self- confidence.

"It almost created a disbelief in myself.

"You'd pick up the paper each day and look at it and think, `that's just not right, it's not true'."

He talks about one incident, horrific for a parent, that he says his family has only lately been able to dismiss as humorous.

"We had police living in the house," he says.

"My son came home one night - a car pulled up in the driveway, he'd come home with a different one of his mates.

"One of the policemen said to me, `do you know whose car that is?' and I said, `no I don't,' and my son has walked in the door with a gun stuck firmly between his eyes and the policeman saying, `Don't move, who are you?"'

From a political perspective, the bribery scandal, which made newspaper headlines nationally for days and locally for weeks, affected Mr Cox just as deeply.

"It was the Labor-Green accord and the majority of Labor voters at the time hated us for what we had done," he says.

"No one quite knew whether I was involved in the Rouse thing.

"There was no defining line of `yes you did,' or `no you didn't,'

"There was always the scuttlebutt of `maybe he did', or `maybe he knew something'.

"A combination of those two things cost me my seat in 1992."

Mr Cox decided at that time to turn his back forever on a political career and is still unclear on what changed his mind.

It was probably his son.

"I knew I had been wronged and I knew what had happened wasn't right," he says.

"My son said something to me about, `you shouldn't let them do this to you,' and for reasons that I don't want to go into, that stuck with me later on.

"It was a defining statement that didn't come home to me until the 1996 election."

By this time, his son had tragically died.

Mr Cox had also started taking calls from former Labor colleagues urging him to restand in 1996.

"So I went out and ran a very basic campaign of `Put Jim back in Bass,' and they did and kept on doing it," he says.

His voters have stayed with him ever since.

In his first election, in 1992, Mr Cox won 2088 votes. In 1996, he won 3305.

At the next election, the Cox vote was 6741 and the election after that, he topped the poll in Bass with 10,000 votes.

Mr Cox's dramatic entry to politics has shaped his career since.

"It didn't make me more understanding. It took me a long time to stop being angry," he says.

"The biggest thing that it did was affect my self-confidence and I didn't realise that until some time after."

As the young politician matured, he says that he got over his anger at Mr Rouse.

"I got over it - I said to one of the people involved, I saw that person at social events from time to time and he would sort of go out of the way and avoid me and it was always the whispering and the nonsense.

"I fronted him one day and said, `For whatever, this is over. It's done. What happened happened and we should all move on."'