Queensland Treasurer Cameron Dick, the man who will this week deliver the most important document in the state’s $500 billion economy, spent one year doing his Master of Law at the 700-year-old Trinity Hall Cambridge, one of the most prestigious universities on the planet.

Yet he didn’t even mention Cambridge in his maiden speech when he won Greenslopes in 2009, offering instead “Marshall Road State School’’ as his alma mater.

And Cameron is enough of a politician to never mention it here at the Diggers Services Club in the heart of his electorate of Woodridge.

He strolls in smiling, mentions Queensland’s Origin win the night before, orders a XXXX Gold and agrees with me that we’ll be having the “Steak Special’’.

The punters greet him affably enough - one of the managers even comes over for a chat as soon as he arrives.

Yet here in one of the southeast’s more economically challenged electorates, any evidence of a Cambridge education might (much like supporting the Blues come Origin season) too readily identify a person as an outsider.

When Malcolm Fraser became Prime Minister in 1975 most Australians knew he went to Oxford because the status of such an education was widely recognised.

Today it may have lost some of its sheen and may quite possibly inspire a type of class-conscious resentment. Yet there’s still a sort of intellectual mystique among common folk such as myself about that whole Oxbridge Harvard/Yale world of global super swots.

It was 1997 when he got there, and he’d already exceeded the expectations of dad Allan and mum Joan by becoming a lawyer and then joining the Australia Volunteers Abroad program.

He emerged as, of all things, the Attorney-General of the tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu well before he had reached his 30th birthday.

Yet when he was accepted into Cambridge for his Master of Law, the achievement added an unquestionable gloss to his youthful aura.

“I think it was one of the proudest days in my parents’ life,’’ he recalls.

“What was it like at Cambridge?’’ I ask lamely, envisaging rowdy nights drinking pints in tweed jackets and bouncing round rural England in a battered MG sports car.

“It was incredible, really, both intellectually and personally,’’ he says.

“You meet brilliant people who come from right around the world and some of those friendships you keep for life.’’

At age 27 Cameron was too old for booze and undergraduate hyjinx, but he was drawn to the politics.

The economic star of Friedrich Hayek, which had flared back into life in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, was still casting its light across the developed world.

Muscular, right wing, small government, market-led administrations such as Ronald Reagan’s America were still in vogue but Cameron was warming to people associated with more left leaning social democratic movements throughout Europe,

He was deeply inspired by British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “Middle Way’’ which was attempting to meld an energetic capitalism with a commitment to social justice.

Australia’s Hawke and Keating administrations had the same vision, supporting the private sector but not the brutal slash and burn philosophy of cutting government services and welfare.

It was at Cambridge his politics might have crytalised, but the political seeds were sown in him by Allan and Joan.

Actually, Cameron believes everything he has ever learned came, at some level, from Allan and Joan.

They must have been good teachers because they also taught the Federal Speaker Milton Dick as well as sister Susan, an accomplished schoolteacher.

His parents were not really ALP supporters but small businesspeople running a butcher shop who believed in offering a helping hand to anyone in the community who needed it.

Allan, the World War II naval veteran, would always give a bloke down on his luck a job in the butcher shop, and those gestures have rebounded across the decades back into Cameron’s life.

“A lot of those men will still come up to me and say - ‘Cam, your dad gave me a job when no one else would.’’

On a more personal note, Cameron has a deeply poignant memory of his father who, in later life, found the physical side of being a butcher too much and took up taxi driving.

Cameron, in his early 20s, had just been formally accredited as a solicitor and, feeling somewhat pleased with himself, was walking through Brisbane towards George Street when a taxi ploughing through the traffic gave him a cheerful little toot.

It was his dad, merely saying hello to his son in a chance encounter.

But Cameron remembers the moment vividly, largely because it was a powerful and timely reminded of precisely who had provided the updrafts which had shot him into his new, privileged world.

His parents had a mantra - “education’’ - and instilled in all the kids the power of education to improve your life.

“They taught us a work ethic but also that you never leave anyone behind and you always look out for people needing a hand up,’’ he says.

The social justice side of politics, or lack of it, was what angered him most when he lost his seat of Greenslopes to the Campbell Newman-led landslide which he didn’t quite see coming, but which tossed him out of government after one term.

Woodridge gave him a second chance and now he professes to a deep, philosophical distaste for what the LNP represented in those years between 2012 and 2015.

”I just think the harshness of that government and how it treated Queenslanders in what I believe was a harsh and disrespectful fashion was wrong,’’ he says.

“It was a government retreating from helping Queenslanders.’’

He has an anecdote to tell me of a constituent who contacted his office recently inquiring about the $1000 rebate on electricity promised by his Steven Miles-led government, along with the $300 rebate from Federal Labor.

Assured that the money was forthcoming, the elderly pensioners said: “I was really worried about turning on the heater - now I can turn it on.’’

It’s the sort of anecdote often told by Labor politicians explaining why they got into politics, but Cameron is not being merely sentimental or self-indulgent in relaying the story.

Moments like that are, he insists, the heart and soul of the reason he got into politics.

“You’ll be Premier soon,’’ I say, almost blithely, as if making an observation rather than a prediction.

And he becomes slightly animated, insisting, as if on a point of honour, that he really, genuinely, has no direct ambition to be Queensland Premier.

“You say that,’’ he reminds me, in a warning not to put words into his mouth.

“But you don’t emerge from Cambridge, become a front bencher in your first term and never imagine, at some point, you are going to be Premier,’’ I insist.

“Michael!’’ he says.

“I want to continue as Deputy Premier and Treasurer and, after October, I want to deliver another four budgets.

“I’ll be honest with you - I didn’t join the Labor Party to become Premier.

“I never joined the Labor Party for offices, or titles, or positions.

“I joined because I wanted to be part of what I think is the greatest political movement in our history.’’

The steaks done I walk out with him, chatting happily, but failing to pay the bill.

It takes the Treasurer to remind me there’s always a cost associated with goods and services, and I return to the cashier to be stunned by the prices they’re charging.

Its $30 for two good, medium rare steaks complete with chips and salad for me and mash and veg for Cameron, along with sauces.

This has to be the most cost competitively priced “High Steaks’’ meal I’ve discovered in the greater Brisbane area.

Cameron who agrees, that, given the prices and the service, the meal is a 10/10, maintains his commitment to social justice.

“You have to remember the cliental,’’ he says.

“There are quite a few people on lower incomes around here, so they have to keep prices as low as possible.’’