The Queensland state electorate of South Brisbane was held from 1929 to 1932 by Neil MacGroarty, Attorney-General in the government of Arthur Moore.

MacGroarty was influential in creating the Mungana Royal Commission to destroy the political career of Ted Theodore,[3] and reportedly incurred the displeasure of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane, James Duhig.

[citation needed] Gair worked at consolidating his hold on the marginal electorate, at which he was largely successful except in the 1938 election, when a newly formed Protestant Labor Party targeted his seat.

[4] Gair was a backbencher for ten years during the William Forgan Smith government before being appointed as Secretary for Mines under the elderly Frank Cooper in 1942.

The Industrial Groups (whose members were known as Groupers) were supported by Gair, who hoped to use them to cement his personal power base within the party's organisational wing, as well as by union leader Joe Bukowski and the AWU.

[5] Gair came into conflict with Bukowski when the AWU in 1955 began making allegations that there was corruption in the process of granting and extending pastoral leases in the state.

Gair immediately set up a royal commission, which resulted in the laying of criminal charges against Lands Minister Tom Foley.

[6] Gair discovered that the AWU had gained its information about the scandal from a senior public official, Vivian Creighton.

[2] When the AWU uncharacteristically endorsed strike action by shearers, Gair raised the union movement's ire by negotiating with the federal government in order to secure the export of wool shorn by non-union labour.

He was ultimately successful in a negotiated end to the strike, but the effect was to cement an unlikely anti-Gair alliance between the Queensland Trades and Labour Council (TLC) (represented by Boilermaker's Union secretary Jack Egerton) and the AWU.

[2] The majority of Gair's Cabinet refused to accept what it saw as direction from the Central Executive, and in February 1956, Bukowski and Egerton organised the numbers at the next Labor Party convention to vote in favour of a leave increase.

After the election, however, State Treasurer Ted Walsh revealed that Queensland's budget was in deficit and Gair claimed that extending leave would be financially irresponsible.

[2] The parliamentary ALP found itself in deadlock with the organisational wing and the trade unions, with the TLC and the Central Executive maintaining pressure on Gair throughout early 1957.

He took a total of 25 defectors from the ALP Caucus with him, including all the Cabinet except Deputy Premier Jack Duggan, to form the Queensland Labor Party (QLP).

Gradually his anti-Communist views became outdated but he stubbornly refused to modify them in the face of developments like Richard Nixon's détente with China and Russia in the early 1970s.

[2] The then Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen decided to thwart Whitlam by causing the issue of writs for the usual five Senate vacancies before Gair could resign.

[11] In Canberra, a group of Country Party senators kept Gair occupied in their office, away from the President of the Senate Magnus Cormack (to whom he needed to give his resignation), drinking beer and eating prawns, until 6pm (the Commonwealth Electoral Act provided that writs would be deemed to have been issued at 6pm irrespective of the time that they were actually issued).

As a result, Gair failed to resign his Senate position in time for there to be six vacancies instead of five, thus thwarting Whitlam's plan.

The 1974 election marked the electoral demise of the DLP, which lost all four of its remaining seats, largely as a backlash against Gair's actions.

After the Fraser government was confirmed to office at the 1975 election, Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock had Gair recalled on 21 January 1976, not for political reasons, but because he was unfit for diplomacy.