Outgoing Governor reveals: The specific instruction Queen gave me
Outgoing Governor Paul de Jersey has revealed the important piece of advice the Queen gave him, and what Queenslanders really think of the Royal Family. VOTE IN OUR REPUBLIC POLL.
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His Excellency Paul de Jersey, Queensland’s 26th Governor, Queen Elizabeth II’s official representative in this state and the man residing at the apex of Queensland’s power hierarchy with the Premier and the Chief Justice is reading Gavel Finds His Place to a boisterous group of Grade 3 kids at Julia Creek State School.
Gavel, who failed as a police dog recruit because he was too friendly, sets off across this vast state to find a new career, his optimistic, doggy journey recorded in a delightful children’s book published by Government House Queensland.
Gavel studies dinosaur fossils in Richmond, works alongside Indigenous rangers on Cape York Peninsula and even becomes a water testing scientist on the Great Barrier Reef, his journey of self discovery beautifully illustrated by artist Amanda Letcher and written by Wendy van Rosmalen.
Yet when Gavel becomes a nurse with the Royal Flying Doctor at Charleville, these cheerful and good natured western Queensland-bred kids clearly don’t find the german shepherd’s adventures as exotically fanciful as their city counterparts might.
“I got bit by a snake and went on the Flying Doctor,” declares one kid loudly.
“I got a broken bone and went on the Flying Doctor,” chips in another.
De Jersey, a portrait of that magisterial authority which must have served him so well back in the ’80s when he was just another Supreme Court judge, staring down lippy barristers, sails on majestically.
The tale of Gavel’s adventures continues in an unruffled, steady voice in the face of more interjections until de Jersey reaches the story’s climax where Gavel accompanies the Queensland Governor on a trip to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen.
It’s only then, when a particularly self-assured child in the group loudly declares – “I went to London and saw the Queen too’’ – that a keen observer might have heard a slight pause in de Jersey’s narrative, accompanied by the barely perceptible rise of one vice-regal eyebrow.
He is 73 and starting to feel it.
That prodigious intellectual and physical energy which propelled him to the Supreme Court bench well before his 40th birthday, then into the office of the Chief Justice and onward to the governor’s mansion in 2014, has to have its limits somewhere, and de Jersey may be just starting to become acquainted with them.
“You do get tired as you get older, there is no way around that, it is just the truth,’’ he says in the gathering twilight the evening before his Julia Creek visit, taking his ease on a plastic chair in front of a Charters Towers motel room.
That plastic chair is 1300km from the heritage-listed mansion on Fernberg Rd, Paddington, which he has called home since July 2014.
Here at the Cattleman’s Rest Motor Inn there’s little evidence of the perks of office.
The in-house chef, the gardeners, the library and the 1972 Rolls-Royce Phantom which whisks him from Paddington to state parliament have all vanished, along with any prospect of Charles and Camilla popping by for an overnight visit.
Here in the bush it’s spaghetti on toast for breakfast and a white Hi-Ace Commuter minibus for transport, his status as the British Monarch’s rep only evident by the Crown number plates and the governor’s flag – a Union Jack with a blue Maltese Cross at the centre – which flutters over the front grille as driver Andrew Boyd skilfully negotiates the streets of the old gold mining city west of Townsville.
This trip, his seventh to conduct the business of Government House in regional Queensland, will be his last as he prepares to wind up his working life on November 1, making way for the 27th Queensland Governor, Dr Jeannette Young.
During the five days in early September he will travel 4100km, undertake 33 engagements, and fly up to Croydon more than 500km south- west of Cairns in far-flung gulf savannah country to preside over a meeting of the Executive Council of Queensland.
He’s in no position to complain about the work schedule, even if he was inclined to do so.
It was de Jersey who pioneered the idea of taking Government House to the regions soon after he was appointed in July 2014, and the regions appear to have appreciated it.
“What a ripper idea!,’’ is the verdict of one of his most loyal regional media advocates, legendary Townsville radio personality Steve Price.
Price never fails to allot some Townsville Triple M airtime to de Jersey when the Governor brings Fernberg anywhere near the north, typically dismissing protocol and calling de Jersey “mate” (and, on occasions, “cobber”) and always displaying a warm affection for the 26th Governor. “You could not meet a nicer person,” he tells his listeners.
It is fortunate he is a “nice” person. Being nice is a significant part of the job.
One of his first duties on this last western trip is to visit Lister St, Charters Towers, where around 50 locals wait eagerly for his arrival at the Charters Towers Women of the Outback Shed – a spin-off from the Men’s Shed initiative designed to improve the health and wellbeing of Australian men.
The excitement among the middle-aged women (and several men) present is far from confected – the visit is something they have anticipated for weeks and each person present is hoping for at least one tiny interaction, one word of acknowledgment, from the Governor himself.
And many of these people have not had an easy time of it. As local Brigham Young explains, the Men’s Shed (de Jersey is a patron of the Men’s Shed initiative) was there first, but many local women found they needed help from men.
“A lot of these women have lost their husbands so we teach them to do the things that their husbands did but they never learned to do – fix a flat tyre or change a washer on a tap, that sort of thing.”
De Jersey, displaying that dignified affability that seems to be a defining character trait, accepts the bottled water and the biscuits and, as the eager crowd clusters around him, appears determined to leave no one out.
He instinctively reduces the impact of his own presence and enlarges that of the person in front of him by his constant questioning, giving every appearance of being deeply interested in the lives of everyone he meets.
It’s the “tea and biscuits” aspect of his duties, and he appears to take it as deeply seriously as the more complex aspects of vice-regal life.
De Jersey, like governors before him, plays a less acknowledged role in this state as a sort of de facto trade envoy.
He works largely under the radar with his team, including Official Secretary Kate Hastings, to identify the global opportunities that are unearthed by bodies such as Trade and Investment Queensland, and examines ways he can put his office to good use in securing deals and in furthering the ambitions of our entrepreneurs.
His status at the top of the official power hierarchy in this state (along with the Premier and the Chief Justice) carries with it an internationally recognised currency, which perhaps has more power in Europe or parts of Asia that more readily recognise the status of the Commonwealth.
It’s the sort of pull that can get him inside the office of India’s Finance Minister in New Delhi, or have a word in an ear at the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs.
It was in the Netherlands in January last year, at a hydrogen roundtable hosted by the Australian Ambassador to the Netherlands, Matthew Neuhaus, that de Jersey helped promote Queensland company Tritium, a global leader in fast-charging solutions for electric vehicles.
Queensland’s Trade and Investment Commissioner for Europe and our Agent General in the United Kingdom, Linda Apelt, has publicly acknowledged the Governor’s value at the roundtable.
“I’m sure Queensland will be reaping the rewards from the Governor’s visits,” she said.
Yet the reality of life as Queensland Governor is mostly far removed from the glamorous world of international trade, or even domestic political intrigue.
The international trips, the three official audiences with the Queen, the weekly Governor in Council meetings where he receives advice from the Premier and Cabinet ministers and the ever-present authority of his office which, in constitutional theory at least, is the ultimate arbiter of political power in the state, are all eclipsed by the more humble reality of his regular routine.
For de Jersey and his wife Kaye, life over the past seven years has been not so much about London and Paris as Longreach and Prairie.
In his first audience with the Queen in October 2014 he was told, in what he interpreted as a quite deliberate directive from Her Majesty, to make strong regional connections in this decentralised state. As both a loyal subject and official representative of the monarch, he took her advice to heart, and has never stopped travelling in the bush.
Born in Brisbane in 1948, the man brought up by his teacher parents Ronald and Moya in regional centres including Longreach and Bundaberg made a whimsical comment on taking office in 2014 that he was not sure what was “west of Winton”.
He has since found out.
Dajarra, Camooweal, Jundah, Boulia, Birdsville and Bedourie all lie beyond Winton and all have received the vice-regal treatment, as have hundreds of towns and hamlets scattered across the state.
His reception, he says, is almost unanimously positive as regional Queenslanders recognise and respect not so much him, as the tradition, worth and longevity of his office.
He believes he is perceived as an apolitical conduit to political power, and that is never better evident than in Julia Creek where McKinlay Shire mayor Philip Curr and his council use his visit to complain, with some justified bitterness, about the lack of health resources in their town.
Curr, a grazier with long generational connections to the northwest, is in an exuberant mood during the Governor’s visit in early September.
The local economy is booming.
That monsoonal deluge of early 2019, which made international news and killed off about 600,000 head of cattle, ended up funnelling buckets of federal and state relief money into road, fencing and general infrastructure repair throughout the northwest region.
The skyrocketing beef price has only served to pour more kerosene on to this regional economic blaze and Curr, who owns plenty of country including properties around Barcaldine and in northern New South Wales and can sell an average steer for $2300, sees blue economic skies opening up in the decade ahead.
“But there’s no bloody hospital,” he tells the Queensland Governor, as fellow councillors join in the chorus inside the town’s council chambers.
Actually there is a hospital – a brand new one – but there’s no one in it, largely because doctors and nurses are hard to get out west.
Curr, his sense of humour very much intact, sees the Humphrey Appleby absurdity in the predicament that is straight out of the Yes Minister television series that lampooned government ineptitude, and which once did a series on a brand new, fully staffed hospital with no patients.
But he is also frustrated and angry, because the lack of a hospital access is not merely a health issue, but an economic one.
“You imagine a young couple wanting to come out here and get a job and start a business and they learn there is no hospital – that if a kid gets a broken arm they have to go to Mount Isa (three hours’ drive away).
“That young couple won’t come.”
De Jersey and Kate Hastings listen politely, acknowledge the issue, ask a few questions and make no pledges.
But it could be a matter that arrives on a desk in Brisbane in a few weeks, and if a solution follows, it may well have had its genesis in the office of the Queensland Governor.
Yet that very office, as almost every thinking person in the British Commonwealth must acknowledge, represents something of an anachronism. Many would argue, with some legitimacy, that the British monarchy began its slow retreat into irrelevance as far back at the late 17th century when the Glorious Revolution robbed it of the whip hand over the British parliament.
Yet, simultaneously, the monarchy represents a power with a direct link to William the Conqueror stretching back 1000 years. An institution with the power to dissolve an Australian parliament does not, itself, readily dissolve.
De Jersey, of course, can’t comment on the relevance of the British throne. But he does note that in seven and half years as Governor, not one person at one of his public engagements has approached him wishing to discuss a republic.
The common courtesy of the ordinary Queenslander may provide the explanation, he says. But de Jersey serves as the perfect lightning rod for ardent republicans who have been anything but silent since the referendum of November 1999 rejected the proposal.
“I cannot recall an occasion when the republic issue has been raised for me,” de Jersey says.
“It just has not happened, to my recollection, over the past seven and a bit years.”
De Jersey says it is entirely a matter for the Australian people as to whether the nation alters its constitution and severs its link with the Queen.
But he believes there is still a great affection for the British royal family in what is “the Queen’s Land” and he has witnessed it personally not only as Governor but as Chief Justice when called on to attend royal family visits.
He has also found, particularly in the state’s regions, a deep understanding and appreciation of the governor’s apolitical role.
As the Julia Creek experience highlights, Queenslanders will often use the governor’s office as a conduit to power, raising their concerns with him because they believe he can use his influence to address those concerns.
De Jersey has made changes while in office.
He has become the first Australian vice-regal not only to take the workings of his office into the regions, but to embrace social media as a means of connecting with Queenslanders and explaining the workings of government.
That social media network was laid down by his communications adviser Chris Piggott-McKellar and he was reluctant to embrace it at first, but swiftly came to see its benefits in direct communications with the public about the working of Government House.
He has also managed to discharge his constitutional duties across three state elections and two premiers, deepened business and cultural ties with major trading partners, opened up Government House to the public including the introduction of disability access lifts and overseen public and virtual tours.
He sees the governor’s office as not one trapped in some colonial time warp, but absorbing the character and dynamism of the state as it evolves.
The same principle applies to the state government and the legal system.
“(They are) institutions based in British tradition yes, but which have adapted to the contemporary needs of the Queensland people.”
The Governor also faced an internal crisis in his extended term when allegations of serious bullying among staff were raised.
A report made public earlier this year cleared him of any knowledge or involvement in the abuse and he believes the matter was handled properly, and to the satisfaction of the person who made the claims.
His memories of the office will be fond ones, but the role is not without its anxieties, and on Anzac Day they can become intense.
The man who joined the Citizens Military Force as a uni student in the 1960s (now the Army Reserve) begins planning for Anzac Day each January, and that includes the first drafts of his speech.
He gets out of bed around 3am each April 25 and, with Kaye, arrives at Anzac Square at 4.30am, to deliver a speech always recorded by the media.
That walk up the stairs to his allotted space, his path dimly lit in the predawn darkness by a few pin pricks of lights, has given him his greatest fears, not least of which is falling over.
He always wants the focus on those who served as well as those who have come to the dawn service, and he quickly became aware that as governor he has to meet a difficult challenge – to say what everyone is thinking.
Each Anzac Day he is expected to merge the historical, the emotional and the mythological in a manner that can resonate with millions of other minds. On the morning of April 25, 2015, marking 100 years since the Gallipoli landing he felt the responsibility most keenly.
This is what he wrote in his diary after the event: “When I moved to the podium in the cold dawn, those thousands of upturned faces, young and old, brought home to me, in the strongest terms, my responsibilities as Governor. I have subsequently regarded this as probably my most important public presentation so far.
“I strove through my address to meet community expectations to capture those elements of respect, pride and sadness. I was immensely struck by the privilege of presuming to speak, for us all, on such a historic occasion.”
The future is an art deco apartment in central Brisbane, no law-related work and few public duties unless he is called upon to devote his time to some issue or organisation with a public service element involved.
“I would consider doing something if asked, but I would say I am looking forward to total retirement.”
There will be travel, if Covid restrictions allow it, and grandkids.
Kaye and Paul de Jersey married in 1971 and have three children, Carolyn, 46, Alison, 44, and David, 42, and three grandchildren, Alexander, 15, Sophie, 13, and Lily, 10. who will play an important role in retirement life.
So may Gavel, that failed police dog who ended up being embraced by the de Jersey family as official vice-regal dog as well as becoming the star of a children’s book which the Governor has been obliged to read on several occasions.
Gavel, like his boss, is headed for retirement but will retain his kennel at Fernberg where he is expected to live out many more years, given he is only seven.
De Jersey retains visiting rights.
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