WHEN Stephan Knoll was in grade three, his Sydney primary school held an open day. Parents were invited to admire the handiwork of their offspring. A teacher asked his mother Barbara Knoll to identify which one of the junior artworks on the wall was the responsibility of her son, the future South Australian Liberal transport minister.

A circuit of the classroom left her none the wiser, so the teacher helped out. And took her to the right one.

Father Franz Knoll takes over the story.

“It was a picture of Bob Hawke and he (Stephan) said ‘I want to be that guy’,” Knoll senior recalls.

Hawke was prime minister at the time and while the political stripes were the wrong colour, the intent was clear.

“Stephan has always been political,” says his father, who was elected as an Adelaide City councillor last year.

“His mind has always been very political, even when he ran the business.”

The business is Barossa Fine Foods, which the younger Knoll stepped away from when he was elected as the member for Schubert in 2014 having just turned 30.

Since then his political career has been one long ascent.

After the Liberals broke their long election drought in March last year, new premier Steven Marshall surprised many by elevating Knoll to the challenging transport, planning and infrastructure portfolios.

Since then he has become the Liberal face you are most likely to see in the pages of The Advertiser or on the 6 o’clock news.

Pick an issue that has erupted in the new government’s first 12 months and the odds are that Knoll will be somewhere close by.

Right-hand turns for trams, cuts to bus routes, the hotel at Adelaide Oval, the fate of dolphins in the Port, tunnels under South Rd, council planning changes, rate capping.

It’s a long list.

“I am in charge of when the sun rises and the sun sets,” Knoll adds when we meet in his North Tce office with sweeping views towards the Adelaide Oval.

He is joking. Kind of.

But one of the Acts he is responsible for is the Proof of Sunrise and Sunset Act 1923, which sets out the time when the sun is judged to have officially risen and set.

All of which is to say, it’s a big job.

Knoll, after almost a year in the chair, professes to love it all.

The good and the bad.

“Politicians aren’t allowed to look like they are having this much fun,” he says. “I pinch myself every morning and say a little prayer every night to say thank you.”

Much has been made of his relative youth. He is 36 but could probably still pass for someone in his late 20s.

Labor warrior Tom Koutsantonis has taken to calling him “the kid” and some in the Opposition are convinced it gets under his skin.

Knoll laughs at that, and points out he has three brothers.

“Nothing he says to me compares in any way to growing up with three brothers,” he says. “There is nothing he could say to me that could compare.”

Instead, he likens his relationship with Koutsantonis to that of the cartoon characters “Ralph and Sam”, the wolf and sheepdog who spend all day battling each other, before clocking off at the end of the day and departing in an amicable manner.

Knoll claims though he is Sam, the sheepdog trying to keep the wolf at bay.

Knoll is an easy bloke to have a chat with. There is a comfort in his own skin that, if it doesn’t quite border on arrogance, certainly suggests someone happily confident in their own abilities and just as happy to share his opinions.

He believes his business background has helped ease the jump into such a massive portfolio with its attendant bureaucracy.

“We had a very flat organisational structure (in Barossa Fine Foods) so having to be across every inch of that business was second nature,” he says.

“So with this, my instinct is to do the same thing.”

Not that he considers himself as a micromanager.

“No, I just like to know everything. I read everything. There is just so much interesting stuff.”

Knoll grew up in the business.

By the time he was nine the family was back in Adelaide, after stints in Darwin and Sydney. Knoll would set up a card table outside the family’s stall in the Central Market, dressed smartly in a bow tie, being paid $5 a day to sell mettwurst and Polish sticks.

All the family was involved.

The brothers worked every school holiday. Knoll says he missed his high school graduation after-party at Christian Brothers College because Christmas was looming and hams had to be made.

The result was Knoll learned how every part of the company worked.

He can make sausages, he can make salami. The worst job in the factory he reckoned was making the presswurst.

“You take a boiling hot pig’s head, stick it in cold water and try to peel of all the meat before your fingers burn.”

Which seems a sound preparation for a life in parliament. “We boys always did it because being younger than everybody else you have to earn respect by doing the things that no one else wants to do.”

At the risk of belabouring the analogy — possibly just like being gifted the always problematic transport portfolio.

He studied commerce at university, ran pub crawls and was a DJ at the London Tavern on North Tce in the city for five years (track guaranteed to fill a dance floor? — Fatman Scoop’s Be Faithful), but says he always wanted to move into the family business.

He was helped by the attitude of his father Franz, who wanted to expose his sons to as much responsibility as possible at as young an age as possible.

Not only Stephan, but his brothers Dieter, Andreas and Alex as well.

“My rule was to give them a 10-year head start,” Franz Knoll says.

“Not money, it was all the other things you need to be, that you need to have, so you get there well before your peers. Which means he can perform a lot more maturely than others that are similar to him because he has already made the mistakes, he has already had problems, some of them quite large, with how he deals with things.”

At an early age his son was meeting chains like David Jones.

“I was 21 years old and I looked like I was 18,” Stephan Knoll says.

“They were looking at you and going ‘where is the person who is really in charge?’ In the end I bought myself some business cards that said general manager on it so people would take me seriously.”

The move into politics started with the Young Liberals.

He was motivated to join after watching John Howard lose the 2007 election. Knoll says he was looking for a hobby that didn’t involve talking about “sport, cars or girls”.

There was enough of that in the factory.

“It was nerdy,” he concedes.

“I was just amazed to find people, who were smart and wanted to talk about politics and the way the electricity market works.”

Knoll says the family didn’t talk much about politics at home, but his father says there is some family history in the area, some of it tragic and brutal.

Franz Knoll’s grandfather was chairman of the Conservative Party in his region in northern Germany in the 1930s.

He was an outspoken type and was taken away by the Nazi Party, held for several months, returned home beaten and castrated.

Another grandfather, who was a cheese maker, fled the Russians after World War II. “Yes, we are political, that is one way of saying it,” Franz Knoll says.

Franz Knoll’s father Hans and mother Anna came to Australia in 1957 and started Bavaria Smallgoods.

When it was sold in 1987, it started the Knoll family’s trip around Australia before they returned to South Australia to start Barossa Fine Foods in the Central Market in 1991.

It was Cory Bernardi who provided the push that sent Knoll into representative politics.

At the time Bernardi was a significant figure on the Right of the Liberal Party, before later leaving to start the Australian Conservatives.

Knoll’s wife Amy would also work in Bernardi’s office for a time, and Knoll is aligned to the Right.

“He was someone with a business background, who was motivated,” Bernardi says.

“Once you have someone with talent and skill, and capacity and self-belief, you need to identify where the greatest opportunities are for them.”

For a short time Knoll was involved with Bernardi’s Conservative Leadership Foundation, which runs programs in areas such as media training and public speaking.

Bernardi says he knew there would be an opportunity in the Liberal stronghold of Schubert as sitting member Ivan Venning was retiring and encouraged Knoll to move his family to the Barossa.

“To his credit he embraced that fully, his wife embraced that fully, they immersed themselves in the community. They did the work on the ground to put themselves in a position to win pre selection.”

Knoll says he took some persuading. He says it was the new test that he was after.

“For me the business was fun. It was engaging and I enjoyed it but it was safe,” he says. “This (politics) was decidedly less so and decidedly more difficult and I thought that was a worthy challenge.”

The 2014 election itself was easy enough.

Knoll had no real competition in such a safe Liberal seat but entered a party room in shock after losing an election most had predicted they would win.

Knoll says there wasn’t anger or disappointment about the loss, but there was a sense of “resignation”.

More upheaval soon followed when former leader Martin Hamilton-Smith quit to join the Labor cabinet.

“When Marty left I was expecting some backlash but there was only relief,” he says.

“The party room afterwards was one of the funniest ones I have ever been in.”

He says the departure of Hamilton-Smith took much of the tension out of the party and allowed Marshall the clear air he needed to win the 2018 election.

Right from the start, Knoll was earmarked as someone to watch.

A potential future leader or treasurer. His smooth rise through the ranks only hitting a small hillock in 2015 when he was caught up in the global Ashley Madison scandal when details of the adultery website were hacked and leaked.

His credit card was among those exposed.

The news made page one. His excuse was that he had only joined up as a joke after a dare from his sister-in-law.

At the time he said he was “intensely stupid” and had never used the site.

Now he says it was a “wake-up call” to how vulnerable the public eye can leave you. Still, there was at least one upside.

“As one federal MP put it to me ‘Stephan you are not a true politician until you have been beaten up good and proper in the paper’.”

He hasn’t had his troubles to seek since taking on his giant portfolio either.

Labor has taken a square aim at decisions to cut back some bus routes and to close three ServiceSA centres.

It would be a stretch to conclude he welcomes being centre of the action, but there’s a sense he relishes the confrontation.

Knoll projects a confidence that he can deal with anything thrown at him.

Watching whether Labor can puncture Knoll’s armour will be one of the more fascinating subplots of the next three years before the next election.

Even when he stuffs up, as he did when he proclaimed the start date for the much-delayed North Tce tram was “set in stone”, or when forced to back down on Steven Marshall’s election promise for a right-hand turn on to North Tce, he maintains at least a facade that this was the plan all along.

“I would do it again,” he says of the much-derided “set in stone” comment. “It was a great cut through line.”

Although he did learn at least one lesson that is crucial in politics. “I think we will be a bit more cautious about deadlines, but it was an unforeseen problem.”

And he is forecasting the rate of change will accelerate, now that the new government has had a year to settle in.

He says he is serious about investigating whether tunnels under South Rd are possible.

“This is intergenerational, this is huge,” he says.

“And we have to get it right. You have to think 30 to 50 years ahead. It’s definitely in the mix but we have to be pretty honest about whether it stacks up or not. It’s too much public money to muck around with. It’s billions, you have to get it right.”

How well he handles it will determine his own future. Whatever happens on South Rd will cost enormous money, there will be delays and cost blowouts and fractious locals.

Given Knoll’s relative youth, and his safe seat in the Barossa, he can almost be in parliament as long as he desires.

In typical politician fashion he won’t address the question of how far his own ambitions extend, but when discussion turns to who leads the Liberals after Steven Marshall his name will figure. “I look at Marshall right and this is a guy who has promoted me four times in four years basically. I personally, and the Liberal Party, owe that guy everything. He has my support and loyalty for as long as he wants it.”

Politics is a strange and demanding business.

To climb that greasy pole, fighting off not only the daily barbs from the Labor opposition, but also to keep pulling yourself up faster than those similarly motivated in your own party, is no easy thing.

It takes dedication. A thick skin. And a furious work ethic.

Knoll and wife Amy have two young daughters, Ruby who is six and two-year-old Macey, so he has to ensure he carves out a niche for family life.

“When I walk in the door we have a rule, that I don’t break very often, that I switch over to private life,” he says.

Traditionally, Friday is the day MPs spend in their electorate offices, so Knoll takes the kids to school that day as well as picking them up.

He also ensures at least one weekend day is free of political commitments.

“We make a very strong focus on quality time over quantity of time,” he says.

He also finds solace in gardening and religion.

Knoll is a Catholic and was an altar boy as a child. He says, like many, he drifted away from religion in his teens but as he ages he finds himself increasingly returning to his faith.

“With how much that we still don’t know about this world in which we live, or why we are here, or how we got here, or how this universe started, the concept of the divine is something that sits right with me,” he says.

Knoll doesn’t see his religious beliefs as an intrusion on the idea that church and state must remain separate but also says “it doesn’t mean you can’t be religious and have that influence your policy”.

Knoll says he voted against euthanasia but that wasn’t related to his faith.

He voted no in the 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite because he believes heterosexual marriage had worked over a long period of time.

He believes climate change is man-made “to an extent”.

“There is evidence that there is something happening,” he says.

He also believes a move to become more energy efficient as a society makes sound economic as well as environmental sense.

“Some people like the coming of electric cars because it will reduce greenhouse gases, that’s one element,” he says.

“But the other element is that it’s going to provide cheaper transport. And they are quieter.”

Knoll will remain crucial to the Liberal Party’s strategy over the next three years and therefore front and centre as a main target for Labor.

Still, Knoll reckons the biggest number of calls he received to his office on any subject was when it appeared he had changed the pronunciation of his surname.

Since his election in 2014, it was routinely said with a silent K. At some point the hard K had somehow worked its way in.

In traditional Liberal fashion, Knoll blames the ABC for this, albeit tongue-in-cheek.

His story is he always said his name with the hard K but one day, a year before the election, an ABC producer picked up on it and entered it into their database of how to properly say names and the presenters started saying it the “correct” way.

“I had more calls to my office on that issue than any other,” he says with a laugh.

Mostly because people thought the ABC was deliberately saying it wrongly to make fun of him.

For the record, Knoll says he doesn’t care how you say his name.

On March 17, the Liberals will celebrate a year in office.

Knoll is forecasting the pace of government will pick up. And if a few people are upset along the way, that is a price he is prepared to pay.

“We have been elected to government, it’s the first time in 16 years,” he says.

“We don’t want to sit back and do nothing. The only path left is to figure out what you believe in, make those decisions and then fight for them. And that is fine by me.”