Australia Day Awards 2017: Catherine Ann Warner, AC

TASMANIA Governor Kate Warner has received one of Australia’s highest honours for her contribution to Tasmania’s legal community.

Tasmanian Governor Kate Warner will be appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia. Picture: NIKKI DAVIS-JONES

“ENORMOUSLY proud, humble and a little bit inadequate” — Tasmania’s 28th Governor Kate Warner says she is pleased to receive one of Australia’s highest honours for her contribution to Tasmania’s legal community.

Her Excellency Professor the Honourable Catherine Ann Warner AM has been made a Companion of the Order of Australia for her service as a legal academic, particularly to law reform and higher education and as a supporter of the arts, and environmental and social justice.

“I think in this role as governor, going around in the community you really realise how much individuals do for our community and so to think I was getting this special award was extremely humbling,” said Her Excellency.

“I’m particularly pleased to get this award as an academic and also as a law reformer. I feel it’s putting law reform on the map and acknowledging the kind of contributions that law reform makes to our community.”

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Tasmania’s first woman governor spoke candidly on a number of topics at Government House this week.

Prof Warner, 68, took the post in late 2014 following a distinguished 40-year career as a legal academic at the University of Tasmania.

However, she has hinted she will likely return to the academic world at the end of her five-year tenure.

“I love my university work and I’m continuing to do that a little — on Fridays I go to university when I can so I have something to return to after this role,” she said.

“I do like my research work so I’m not sure about that [returning for a second term] at this stage and of course I’d have to be invited.

“I think I’d prefer to give this job during those five years a lot of energy and a lot of time and I’m not sure I could sustain it for longer than that.”

In November 2015, Prof Warner launched a groundbreaking education initiative that is aimed at improving the state’s poor education retention rates.

Education Ambassadors Tasmania aims to change attitudes towards education by enlisting community leaders to spread the word about the importance of going to school.

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She has spoken out about social justice issues such as last year when she came under fire after telling a Hobart welcome rally for refugees it was important for Australians who opposed Senator Pauline Hanson’s views on Muslim immigration to “stand up and be counted”.

Prof Warner this week stood by that view.

“I don’t think we should have laws which don’t allow Islamic immigration in Australia,” she said.

She also warned against knee-jerk changes to bail laws across the country following last week’s Bourke St tragedy in Melbourne.

See today’s Mercury for more on Tasmania’s Australia Day Awards recipients.