"Premier..... there is an assassin booked on the flight."
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It is 1983 during the Franklin Dam controversy.
Premier Robin Gray and his wife Judy are at the airport headed for a week's break in New Zealand.
They are surprised to be met by the Governor's security officer who, when asked what he was doing there, replied: "Premier I'm coming with you and your wife to New Zealand because there is an assassin booked on the flight."
"To any reader who finds this situation implausible, one can only again confirm that the personal threats from the conservation movement against us had been numerous and imaginative," Gray writes in his book penned 25 years after his departure from politics.
As it turned out the flight was uneventful but the Grays had police accompany them every minute of the trip with an officer climbing on a motel roof one night only to find flapping roof iron but no assassin.
Gray details the police security to protect he and his family from "irresponsible radicals" including his three children being driven to and from school by plain clothes detectives, and police marksmen on top of the airport building in Canberra.
On Christmas Day 1982 the Grays invited the police on duty to join them for Christmas dinner - a photo in the book shows the officers did.
On a lighter note Judy Gray writes of baking in the kitchen in her pyjamas just after 5 o'clock one morning when a loud voice said: "Police, don't move, hands up or I will shoot."
The security measures were deemed necessary as the world-wide environmental fight over the Franklin Dam gathered momentum.
Gray devotes two comprehensive chapters - and 50 pages of the 430 - to the Franklin controversy which was eventually stopped by the High Court.
The book is sure to further inflame conservationists but Gray has kind words for former state MHA and later national Greens leader Christine Milne. He says he admired her "intellectual capacity". Two years in the writing with his co-author and former journalist and chief of staff Andrew Tilt, Gray wants the achievements of his government - of which he documents many - to be told or risk them being "forgotten forever".
"We address the important hydro-electric story, the dams debate that really began post Lake Pedder, then split the Labor Party, right up to the Franklin dam, the High Court case and my negotiations with (Malcolm) Fraser and then (Bob) Hawke," Gray explains.
"It was of national significance of course, as the High Court decision on the Franklin Dam changed forever the balance of powers between the commonwealth and the states.
"This changed the way our Constitution operates. Canberra gained enormous new powers over the states, and things haven't been the same since."
Unsurprisingly, Gray accuses "the Green minority" of economic vandalism, destroying thousands of jobs in the forestry industry and stopping value-adding pulp mill projects that would "have created thousands more (jobs)".
"The book has two clear maps that show when we came to government in 1982 only 15 per cent of the state was locked up in parks, reserves and similar areas that could not be utilised," Gray says.
"A second map shows it is now 49 per cent.
"Regional Tasmanians need jobs. That is crazy."
It is jobs that were the cornerstone of Gray's time as premier. and drove him ti support the doomed dam and pulp mill.
In large part the book also is a lesson to would be politicians about honouring their promises and always being in touch with the electorate, including door-knocking all year round. It is not a book to settle political scores.
It is straight shooting like Gray himself.
He singles out not only Liberal colleagues for praise but also former Labor MPs including Gill James, Dr Julian Amos and Michael Polley. Of Lennon, he says: "Paul was the equal best or best of the premiers who have succeeded me."
While many will rush to the index to see if they get a mention they will be disappointed.
Gray and Tilt, 68, say it is about the period not individuals.
He does, however, single out in his dedication - and name - the individuals who supported him during the low point of his political career, the Royal Commission into the 1989 political bribery scandal called by Labor Premier Michael Field.
Former Tasmanian businessman, the late Edmund Rouse, was jailed for three years for trying to bribe then Labor MP Jim Cox to cross the floor of State Parliament after the election delivered a hung parliament.
"At a time when moral support would have been appreciated many of my Liberal Party colleagues stayed away from attending commission hearings for fear that someone may point a finger at them," he writes.
"I name those who stood firm here because the support they gave me, along with that of my family kept me going at times when I might have lost faith in fairness and loyalty."
Gray spent 28 hours in the witness box by himself.
"...what evolved through this Royal Commission was one of the worst examples of the malicious use of executive power by a government that Australia has see," he writes.
"I believe it was created solely to attack a political opponent, a fishing expedition, with the aim of destroying them either politically, financially, personally, or all of the above."
Gray includes in the book a letter asking the Governor to call a fresh election after the hung parliament.
Field, whose party won 34 per cent of the vote, compared to Gray's Liberals with 47 per cent, formed an accord with the Greens to form government.
The scars from losing government and the humiliating Royal Commission clearly still run deep.
As does his defeat as leader by Ray Groom in 1991 and the involvement of Senator Eric Abetz in his demise.
His colleagues saw him as damaged goods and he refers to a group of Hobart businessmen, who supported Groom and were known as the GROG committee - Get Rid Of Gray.
But Gray had the last laugh when he received 18,751 votes - more than any other candidate - and 2,5 quotas for the Liberals in Lyons.
As well as being a valuable history of his own political success, Judy Gray, a nurse, also provides a rare, and at times humorous, insight into political and family life.
Gray was the first political candidate to use a mobile van when he first stood and won topping the poll in 1976 and he and Judy door-knocked much of the Wilmot, and later the sprawling Lyons, electorate.
"I think it is important for future generations to understand what a political life was like in those days," he says.
In the days well before fax machines and mobile phones, he tells of calling from public phone boxes to find out what was happening on the campaign trail and in the media.
Gray was born in Victoria and won a scholarship to study agriculture. He still lives in the Norwood house where he and Judy moved to in 1969.
He pays tribute to his father a chaplain and war veteran - a Labor man who Gray saw cry for the first time when he told him Labor PM Ben Chifley had died - as being a wonderful role model.
Gray left Parliament without a farewell speech and no government sinecure.
About 800 copies of the book have been printed.