New Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner brings his brood to city hall

Something’s afoot at Brisbane’s City Hall where Brisbane’s new Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinnner, his wife Nina and their four children under six years old are livening up its hallowed halls. QWeekend meets Brisbane’s new first family.

From the outside, it looks like business as usual. The sleek, bronze lions guard the entrance, tourists take selfies beneath rows of Corinthian columns and the familiar, four-note Westminster chimes ring out from the clock tower every 15 minutes like, well, clockwork.

But step inside Brisbane’s City Hall to cross its mosaic floor and climb its Italianate marble staircase to a first-floor office, and it’s apparent that things are not as they were.

At the end of a hallway framed with some familiar faces – Sallyanne Atkinson, Jim Soorley, Tim Quinn, Campbell Newman, Graham Quirk et al – there are some unfamiliar sounds coming from behind the door of the Brisbane Lord Mayor’s office.

Laughter. Squeals. The occasional bang. Giggles. Lots of giggles. A “Put that down, please”. The door opens and Brisbane’s new Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner, 42, puts out his hand.

“Hello,” he smiles, “meet the family.”

Behind him, Petra Aurelia Themis Omega Schrinner, 1, is tottering about the room in the drunken sailor gait of toddlers, while Octavia Alexis Schrinner, 6, is sitting quietly on the lord mayoral couch.

Wolfgang Menzies McLaren Schrinner, 4, is standing with his head peeking out from between his legs, and beneath the lord mayoral desk is Monash Adrian Montgomery Schrinner, 2, pushing a toy truck. It’s not quite John John at the White House, but it’s disarmingly sweet nevertheless. Overseeing all this hurly-burly is their father, Schrinner, and Brisbane’s latest Lady Mayoress Nina Schrinner, 38.

It’s been decades since the Office of the Lord Mayor has had such a young family in attendance. Indeed, the Brisbane City Council says the last time was when Brisbane’s first lord mayor William Jolly (1925-1931) and his wife Lillie brought their brood of seven young sons (Frank, Harold, Arthur, William, Stanley, Douglas and Norman) to the role. More than 80 years later, the arrival of the Schrinners in April has already lent its hallowed halls a less formal air.

How the Schrinners, who live in Carindale, came to be here (and how they arrived at their children’s somewhat flamboyant names) starts far from the Italian Renaissance splendour of 64 Adelaide St, Brisbane. It begins in a German city called Dortmund, with a young boy named Jürgen Schrinner watching World War II Allied aircraft spiral and crash from the sky.

Less dramatically, it also begins when then lord mayor Graham Quirk stepped down from the role on April 7, before serving his full term. After winning the 2016 poll, Quirk pledged to seek re-election in 2020 but reneged – and by quitting within 12 months of an election he neatly side-stepped a mayoral by-election.

Schrinner saw off Peter Matic in a two-way party-room tussle to take the top job. That is, at least until next March’s council election, when Schrinner will face off against Labor’s Rod Harding. Then, who will don the 65 per cent polyester and 35 per cent viscose “unbearably hot” – according to former wearer Quirk – lord mayoral robes is anyone’s guess.

But let us go back to Jürgen, then a young man, but now 82, and living in the city of which his son Adrian would become Lord Mayor.

The future Lord Mayor as a Defence Force Air Cadet.

FAR FLUNG PLACES

“My dad Jürgen’s memories of Germany during the war are mostly of not having much to eat and strange things happening in the landscape around him,” Schrinner says. “Things like planes crashing in fields near his house, and finding unexploded bombs with his mates.

“When the war finished, Germany, like much of Europe, struggled economically, and it was
a time when Australia was really growing.

“My dad loved adventure and reading about far-flung places, and he decided that Australia, the most far-flung place he could imagine, was where he wanted to go.”

Jürgen Schrinner arrived in Victoria in 1960, the then 23-year-old part of the post-war migrant scheme, and, like many others, was sent to Victoria’s Bonegilla Migrant Centre.

Here, his son says, Jürgen Schrinner lived by the code he would practise his whole life, and ­expect his children to adhere to: Work hard, take any honest job offered to you, and exercise your mind.

“In Germany my father had been an interior decorator and window dresser. Here, his first job was as a worker at the steelworks in Port Kembla, and then at Jindabyne for the Snowy Mountains Scheme. These were very different jobs to what he was used to, but he just got stuck in.”

He also fell in love with an Australian girl, Beryl, now 79, at Sydney’s Concordia Club, where homesick Germans could enjoy their beloved weisswurst, washed down with a frosty stein of Erdinger. Schrinner smiles. “Beryl and Jürgen, their names tell their story all by themselves.”

The couple later moved to Brisbane, had two children, Marika, now 50 and a teacher, and Adrian, and ran a cleaning business.

“Nursery Rd, Holland Park,” Schrinner recalls, “right across the road from the crematorium. We were not a wealthy family at all, but they were pretty happy days as I recall them.”

He recalls too, sitting beside his father in his van, on their way to clean houses together, buckets and cleaning cloths in the back.

“We went all over the neighbourhood cleaning windows and washing the outside of houses. I guess I should have hated it but I loved it. Not the cleaning itself, but because I got to spend time with my father.”

Later, Schrinner would become the local representative for the people whose houses he once cleaned in the Chandler ward, but that would come after he took to the skies, and also came crashing back to Earth.

Adrian Schrinner with his parents Jurgen and Beryl in 1996

FLY BOY

Lisa Newman moved her desk in next to her husband Campbell Newman’s during his tenure in the Lord Mayor’s Office. When Newman vacated it for Graham Quirk, it was out with the twin desks and in with Quirk’s beloved racehorse memorabilia. Now with a new incumbent, the polished walnut table in the centre of the office has been ditched in favour of softer furnishings. Two user-friendly couches sit facing each other, and model aeroplanes dot the office, suspended in flight.

Brisbane’s new Lord Mayor loves aeroplanes and he once loved to fly them. Now the model Airbus A380s and Boeing 737s are a daily reminder of how he dealt with the disappointment of being grounded.

“As a kid I devoured Biggles books. I went all over Brisbane’s second-hand book stores trying to collect every single one of them,” Schrinner smiles. “There’s about 100 of them at home.”

The airborne adventures of author W. E. Johns’ fictional pilot James Bigglesworth fired up
a young Schrinner’s determination to fly.

Attending the Citipointe Christian College in Carindale, he joined the local chapter of the Air Force Cadets, meeting up once a week with his fellow trainees to march around parade grounds, learn how to salute and attend survival training camps, spending his school holidays sleeping under the stars beneath rigged-up tarpaulins.

“I absolutely loved it”, Schrinner says.

At 15 years of age, Schrinner, using the money he earned from his family’s cleaning business to pay for lessons, learnt to fly, taking to the skies like his hero Biggles.

“I went solo at 16, and I applied for the air force at 17 when I graduated from high school in 1994.’’

Along with his best mate from high school, John Haly, Schrinner was accepted into the ­Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA); Schrinner to live his out his dream of flying, and Haly to live out his dream of becoming an ­intelligence officer.

But the Defence Force had other ideas. Their entrance testing indicated it was Haly who was better suited for a pilot’s life, while Schrinner was the perfect candidate for the intelligence desk job.

Wings clipped, Schrinner admits he was devastated. “It was crushing, actually, because it really was my dream all through my teenage years. I knew I couldn’t afford to keep up the flying privately, so I had to let it go.

“I let it go,” he shrugs.

“And to be honest, it turns out they were right. John went on to became a Commander of Fighter Squadrons, he’s been to war in Iraq, they chose him to test the Super Hornets. He’s a very senior pilot in the air force, and I am very proud of him.

“I’m not saying I don’t miss it, because I do. It is an entirely new perspective on life when you are up there. You just feel very free, and all the troubles that you have in your daily life on Earth don’t seem so huge. But I found something down here that I have found probably far more satisfactory in many ways.”

And in another, highly unlikely plot twist for the dyed-in-the wool Liberal, that something – or someone – was Paul Keating.

News.bcm.15.2.11 Mayor Campbell Newman press conf on upcoming Budget cuts.with Finance Chair Adrian schrinner Pic Glenn Barnes

FROM THE HEAVENS TO THE HUSTINGS

Schrinner studied at the Defence Force Academy in Canberra for two years to become an Intelligence Officer. The academy sits beside Australia’s Royal Military College, Duntroon. Both schools deepened his love for military life (and later influenced his children’s names).

But in 1996, Schrinner, having served his compulsory two years in the DFA, had to make a decision, as per Defence requirements; whether or not he would stay on for a further six years.

After considering a lifetime career in the military – but not commanding its skies – Schrinner instead looked to another Canberra institution.

“Living in Canberra, you are just so close to the political action, you really can’t help but become involved in some way. I found it fascinating, and my interest in politics just grew and grew. I went to Question Time in Federal Parliament, and watched Paul Keating in full flight. It was in the lead-up to Howard being elected in 1996, and Keating’s performance was amazing. Just watching the theatre of it, the robust debate, Keating’s sense of humour …”

Schrinner was hooked, and soon after dispatched his military uniform for a life in the different, and some would say equally treacherous, battlefield of politics.

In 1997, Schrinner moved back to Brisbane to complete a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Government and International Relations at the University of Queensland, and began working as a policy adviser to a then Liberal councillor Graham Quirk. Elected as councillor for Chandler in 2005, Schrinner began his ascent to the city’s top job by way of senior roles in budget and infrastructure in both Newman’s and Quirk’s administrations. In 2011, aged 33, he became Quirk’s deputy mayor, the deceptively baby-faced Schrinner acting as Quirk’s loyal right-hand man, and at times, political insiders say, “bad cop” to Quirk’s good one. This loyalty was rewarded when, in April this year, the apprentice became the master, and came out swinging, if not zipping.

Adrian Schrinner at his Lord Mayoral desk.

DEAL OR NO DEAL

Barely a week into his new role as Lord Mayor, Schrinner announced that the ­Liberal National Party’s (LNP) much-vaunted plan to allow a zipline on Mt Coot-tha was now scrapped.

It was a defining moment for the freshly minted Lord Mayor Schrinner as he stepped out of Quirk’s shadow, and stamped his authority on the council administration.

“It wasn’t a hard decision,” he now says. “When there is a new leader, it’s an opportunity to reassess what you’ve been doing and to do some things differently. The justification for the zipline was, ‘Well, we’re not going to affect too many trees’. But it was more than that. Because anywhere in the city where you can see Mt Coot-tha, you would also potentially see the zip line going down the side. It changed the city’s visual.”

Being green can be hard for LNP politicians. But Schrinner wears his green credentials as brightly as the green tie he wore on his first day in office – although, he says he just likes that tie.

What he doesn’t like is the view from his office’s Evita-like balcony. Looking over King George Square, once a far greener hub for citizens, but now a baking, paved expanse they scurry across, Schrinner envisions a major overhaul.

Pointing to the Adelaide St side of the square he says, “As part of Brisbane Metro (the LNP’s pet high-frequency, rapid transit system) we’ll be doing some greening work at that entrance point there, and we’ll be putting back a water feature, and also (change) the bus portals to create a more green and calm environment.”

Schrinner walks back inside his office and past the lord mayoral wardrobe where his predecessor Quirk has left him, along with the hi-vis vests and hard hats all lord mayors seem to don on an alarmingly regular basis, a pair of lederhosen (gifted to Quirk’s office one Oktoberfest).

“I don’t know if I’ll be wearing these”, he laughs. “Not sure about that at all”.

One item of clothing he definitely won’t be donning are the lord mayoral robes. In fact, the idea of wearing them is so anathematic to him, he hasn’t even tried them on, allowing them to remain hidden deep in the bowels of City Hall. “They’re a little bit over the top,” he says. “That’s probably a tradition of the past that has been largely superseded. It’s obviously a British tradition worn in an entirely different climate. (With) the chains, however, I have a slightly different view. The places where the lord mayor wears those chains, I see it as a mark of respect to other people.”

Schrinner has respect too, for all the lord mayors who have sat in this office, with its arched windows and deep, patterned carpet, before him. He even admits, leaning forward on the couch to share his guilty secret, that he voted for a somewhat surprising one.

“I’m going to tell you some information that I’ve never really told anyone before,” he says.

“In council elections, I’ve only ever voted for someone other than the LNP once.

“I voted for Jim Soorley in one election,” he says, his voice a hoarse whisper.

The LNP pollie ranks this Labor luminary as among our city’s best lord mayors, saying his decision to utilise our previously underused Brisbane River with CityCats won him over – describing them as transformative.

“There’s been a really good run of lord mayors from Sallyanne all the way through,” he says. “Sallyanne (Atkinson), Campbell (Newman), Jim Soorley, Graham Quirk have been four fantastic lord mayors and did so much for the city. I would effectively put them all on an equal footing.“

But none of those lord mayors, however, had a Nina. And Nina Schrinner, as has been noted by broadly everyone who has met her, is quite the asset.

ENTER SMILING

Adrian Schrinner with his wife Nina and children.

It’s a little bit like herding cats, getting the Schrinner kids to sit still for a photo, but Nina Schrinner, 38, is an expert wrangler. Picking up the toy cars and trucks from the carpet, rounding up the children and scooping Petra under her arm, the Lady Mayoress laughs at the chaos.

A lawyer, she completed her degree at the University of Queensland in 2007, but has never practised. That same year she acted as interim (and the first female) president of the Young LNP for four months, and in 2013 served as an adviser for then attorney-general, George Brandis. While both politics and law are in her past, Nina Schrinner says she is now focusing on her role as a full-time mother. There’s also now a demanding, second job as Lady Mayoress and the task of overseeing the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Trust.

While still finessing her role, she says she is passionate about helping families coping with disabilities, particularly autism.

“It’s almost like a silent crisis which shouldn’t be silent, and families, for whatever reason are falling between the gaps. They’re not getting any help and I’d like to help them.”

To do so, she is looking to her predecessors for inspiration, citing Quirk’s wife Anne as a mentor.

“We speak all the time,” she says. “She’s wonderful. Both she and Lisa (Newman) in their own ways were uniquely excellent lady mayoresses. I do probably tend to be more Anne-like.”

But Nina Schrinner has already been far more visible in the media than the low-profile Anne Quirk. The new Lady Mayoress was recently on hand with baskets of Easter eggs at City Hall to give to sick children, and was a smiling supporter in the first row on the chamber floor on her husband’s first day in the top job.

She was born in Rockhampton and her father Graeme worked as a tugboat captain in various ports around regional Queensland, while her mother Lisgar looked after Nina and her two older siblings. They moved to Brisbane in 1989, settling in Ransome, an outer-eastern Brisbane ­suburb.

She met her future husband Adrian at (and where else would a couple of civic-minded Young Liberals meet?) a local Neighbourhood Watch meeting, and they married in 2009 (Adrian Schrinner was previously briefly married before he became a councillor).

The new Lady Mayoress is, people who know them say, the yin to his yang. Whereas he can be seen as somewhat formal, she is warm and approachable and has a smile as wide as the Brisbane River.

Nina Schrinner, her husband says, “will talk to anybody, anytime, anywhere and about anything.

“She is just a really lovely person,” he says, “who puts everyone at ease. I think I’m very lucky to have her by my side.”

But out of City Hall, Nina Schrinner says her husband is “also very relaxed, and very chilled”.

“He’s fun and I think maybe that doesn’t come across,” she says.

“He’s a good help to me. He empties the dishwasher every single morning, he takes the bins out, he changes the nappies. Obviously when he goes to work, that’s when I take over.”

Both husband and wife are members of the Pentecostal church based at the same Citipointe Christian College Schrinner attended. His faith, Schrinner says, gives him “great comfort”.

“Faith is a very personal thing and I believe in absolute separation from church and state.”

Schrinner rejects any notion that he is a hard- right fundamentalist, saying his faith “simply gives me an inner personal strength and a sense of peace in a world that feels the opposite”.

Particularly, one imagines, when you have four children under six.

Now, about those names.

Octavia, Wolfgang, Monash, and Petra Schrinner owe their unusual monikers to a combination of the Schrinners’ German (Adrian) and Jewish (Nina) heritage, as well as Adrian’s love of military history (which explains the Monash and Montgomery) and the Liberal party (which explains the Menzies). Nina’s legal background explains the Themis – Goddess of Justice, while her gratitude to her obstetrician explains the ­“McLaren”.

And the “Omega”? It’s the last letter of the Greek alphabet and Petra Aurelia Themis Omega Schrinner is, they say, their last child.

“Definitely,” Nina Schrinner says looking around her husband’s new office.

“I think we are probably busy enough now.” ■