QWeekend: Meet Yvette D’Ath, Queensland’s new attorney-general

SHE left high school aged 15, became an unskilled worker, and is now responsible for Queensland’s legal and justice system. Meet our new attorney-general.

QWEEKEND DO NOT USE BEFORE APRIL 4 2015 Qweekend Magazine 25/03/2015 Qld Attorney General Yvette D'Ath pic : Russell Shakespeare

YVETTE D’Ath is Queensland’s new attorney-general. Unlike her predecessor, Jarrod Bleijie, who had a highly visible media presence, D’Ath is perhaps best known from her previous incarnation as the blonde woman seated behind former prime minister Kevin Rudd on the benches of federal parliament.

She was the member for the north-western Brisbane electorate of Petrie for six years and seemed to be head cheerleader for Kevin ’07, nodding approval at his every utterance.

Now she’s gone back to her natural dark brown hair colour and after losing her seat in the 2013 Coalition landslide she’s in state parliament in George Street, Brisbane, having won the seat vacated by the LNP’s disgraced Scott Driscoll in last March’s by-election. She’s a scrap of a thing, not much more than 152cm in her bare feet, but woe betide anyone who mistakes the one-time nodding blonde for a biddable woman.

D’Ath is smart, watchful and sharp, as well as fiercely protective of her privacy. “I chose to go into politics — my family didn’t make that choice,” she says in such a determined way you can sense the sheer strength of her will. This is a woman who left Redcliffe State High School aged 15, became an unskilled worker, and is now responsible for the state’s legal and justice system. If anyone is a poster girl for working-class grit, D’Ath is it. Look closely at her eyes and the set of her mouth when she’s concentrating.

The Courier-Mail state political editor Steven Wardill snapped an unflattering photograph of her in parliament last year, displaying what can only be called a bitchy resting face. Wardill posted the snap on Twitter, joking that “nobody’s happy about being at parliament today”. D’Ath tweeted back: “This is what 3 days of listening to the LNP does to a person.”

Wardill, nil; D’Ath, one.

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Yvette D'Ath in her younger years.

THE FIRST IN HER FAMILY TO GO TO UNIVERSITY — her father, Bob, was a carpenter and her late mother, Marie, a secretary — D’Ath, now 44, moved from rented house to rented house growing up, the youngest of three, watching her parents struggling to put food on the table. She seemed destined for a future cleaning tables or serving in shops, and for a time she worked in a factory counting O-rings.

Something in D’Ath made her realise a piece of paper was the difference between a slim pay packet and a fat one.

She put two and two together: it wasn’t wealth that made for a better life but all that came with it — better health, better housing, better opportunities.

One of D’Ath’s oldest and closest friends, Sharon Durham, an operations manager, met her when they were both in their early twenties and enrolled in an associate diploma of business majoring in industrial relations at TAFE: “My first impression of Yvette was that she is so tiny! I’m six foot [183cm] and I thought, who is this little thing? That’s not to say that any of us did underestimate her but, my god, that woman! She’s so clever! There was nothing she couldn’t figure out in her head and, very quickly, she became my first pick as a study partner.”

Durham says the problem arises when people mistake the outer D’Ath — small, cute and female — for the inner.

“You know, when you don’t know someone terribly well … I remember going out after class one day to her car. I don’t know what I was expecting her to drive but she had one of those massive four-wheel-drive things and there was something wrong with it, and she had the bonnet up and was looking under it and I remember thinking, is there nothing this woman can’t do?’ ”

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Yvette D'Ath. Picture: Russell Shakespeare

D’ATH WAS BORN YVETTE JONES. HER FATHER’S side of the family is Welsh (one branch of it includes the members of hit Australian late-1950s/’60s pop group Col Joye and the Joy Boys, otherwise known as the Jacobsen brothers, Colin, Kevin and Keith). She moved with her parents and sister Cherie, who now works in hospitality, and brother Brett, a mechanic, to the Redcliffe peninsula, 23km north of Brisbane CBD and the site of the state’s first European settlement, when she was a teenager. It’s still where many struggling families find themselves, a place of cheaper rents with a significant homeless problem and a youth unemployment rate of 20 per cent, the highest in Queensland.

D’Ath went to the local high school and did the same as her siblings before her — left school after Year 10 for the workforce with a junior certificate (abolished in 1987). She didn’t know anyone who had gone to university. Her first job was in the credit section of Brisbane city department store McDonnell and East (which no longer exists).

“Part of my job was checking the obituaries in the paper every morning against [a list of] people who had store cards,” D’Ath says, laughing. On the wall of her new ministerial office in the State Law Building in Ann St is a photograph of the building in nearby George St that once housed the store — a reminder, if she needs one, of how far she has come.

Her first career ambition was to become a veterinary nurse (she loves animals) but D’Ath soon found herself in a Catch-22 situation: to get into the vet nurse course you needed to be already working in the profession, but to get a job you needed to be enrolled in the course. “It wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be. I found myself needing a job instead, so I went and applied for a clerical job and that’s where it all started,” she says.

“I never really wanted to be based in an office. I wanted something more than that but I didn’t quite know what. I’d get bored easily and move on to the next job.”

For a while, when she was 18, she worked at Expo ’88, which she loved: “It was lots of fun for a teenager. I started off in the theme park, wearing the cool space outfit.”

Seems nobody is happy about being at Parliament today #qldpol pic.twitter.com/Y3h0QCYkW1

— Steven Wardill (@stevenwardill) September 11, 2014

Eventually, D’Ath “fell into” a temporary data entry job in the public service, in the typing pool at the Industrial Registry. When the supervisor left, D’Ath was asked to step up into the role but she wasn’t yet 21 and couldn’t go into a clerical job unless she had Senior (matriculation level) English. She began to look at other jobs but most of them wanted Senior English, too.

“I decided to go back and do my Senior, so I did it in English and economics — basically that’s doing grades 11 and 12 in one year — at night school. And then by that stage industrial relations had caught my interest and so I started an associate diploma of business, majoring in industrial relations.” She was away.

It was the beginning of a 14-year educational journey. D’Ath spent more than a decade as an industrial advocate for the Australian Workers’ Union, running state wage and unfair dismissal cases, studying at night (she completed her Bachelor of Laws at Queensland University of Technology in 2003).

She was admitted to the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory in the same ceremony as her good friend and fellow ALP member, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk (both women studied externally for a graduate diploma of legal practice through Canberra’s Australian National University, which qualified them to apply for admission to the Queensland bar). “My intention at the time was to go and practise industrial law at the bar,” D’Ath says.

But, as ever, life intervened: in 2005 she was offered a place on the inaugural AWU and United Steel Workers of America exchange program to Canada and the US, which included a stint in Washington DC with the USWA’s lobbying unit on Capitol Hill. Who could resist?

“I just never got around to getting admitted because as soon as I finished the ANU course I went and worked overseas. When I came back, the [now] premier gave me a call reminding me that the next intake was June [2006] or something, and that we should do it. I thought, I really need to get around to this. I’m glad she gave me that call.”

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Queensland Attorney-General Yvette D'Ath during Question Time. Picture: Jono Searle.

BESIDES HER EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENTS and characteristic determination, the other critical part of D’Ath’s story is the long and supportive partnership with her husband, a police senior constable based on Brisbane’s northside.

She met Fijian-born George D’Ath (the name comes from D’Ath’s New Zealand-born father, Mike; his mother, Anna, is Tongan) at a nightclub in Burpengary, north of Brisbane, when she was 19. There’s a nightclub in Burpengary? She laughs: “Well, there used to be.

“I think I met him a month after I started at the Industrial Registry,” she adds. “I remember the day I started there because it was the day they banned smoking in government buildings. I was never a serious smoker but I was a little bit of a smoker … there were a lot of tense people that day with empty ashtrays on their desks.”

The couple married in 1994 and their first child, Emma, was born in 2000 (son Cameron followed two years later).

Both children now attend a private school on the Redcliffe peninsula. D’Ath goes to some pains to assure me this is not because she prefers private over public education, but because she had heard many positive stories from constituents about how excellent the school was.

For that matter, D’Ath says she is not that different from her constituents: “I remember getting elected the first time and all the mums at this birthday party congratulating me, saying, ‘We were so thrilled you won because now we’ve got one of us’.

“That still sticks with me because that’s the way I see myself. I do get it, you know? I am very fortunate, my salary is much better than it was but we’ve still got a mortgage, my husband’s still a shiftworker and we still juggle family life like everyone else — trying to get kids to sport, trying to fit all those things in — it isn’t easy.”

It’s partly why she resents LNP attempts to paint her as a union stooge or as someone with little real-world experience. One of her attributes, she says — apart from real-life experience as a working mother — is a deep knowledge of the parliamentary process. She was chair of the public accounts and audit committee “which might sound a bit dry, but that committee is one of the most senior in federal parliament because it’s about scrutinising exactly what governments do and holding governments to account in the delivery of services”.

Make no mistake: D’Ath intends to be a very hands-on attorney-general. “I want to be known as the attorney-general who actually works with the profession, who works with the judiciary, who listens,” she says. “At the end of the day hard decisions still need to be made, and that responsibility falls on my shoulders. I’m sure there’ll be times when I’ll make decisions others might not like, but I’m confident [that] as long as I can make those decisions on the basis of proper consultation, then we’re doing the right thing.”

Whether it’s the Commission of Inquiry into Organised Crime, announced in February, or the high-level task force set up to review the association laws introduced by the former Newman government (known as the bikie laws), D’Ath’s eye will be across every detail. She wants to be known as a parliamentarian serving the people, not a politician in it for self-gratification. “There’s a difference,” she says. l