Living next to the PM, putting up with party boats and hosting the Queen: Sam Mostyn on being G-G

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

I am about halfway through my lunch with Governor-General Sam Mostyn when I grow concerned about her nutritional intake. There is a structural inequality to Lunches With – the subject must do all the talking, leaving little time to eat.
And such is the pace of conversation, and the breadth of topics to cover, that the head of state can barely manage a mouthful. 'Oh no, no, don't worry!' she tells me. 'I can eat any time.'
We are sitting at a round antique table in the Governor-General's private study in Admiralty House, Sydney, having been served a light and delicious lunch of curried chickpea soup with a croque madame, prepared by the in-house chef, Graeme Stewart.
We drink water and there is no bill – lunch is on the gracious taxpayer.
The Governor-General and I had originally planned to meet at Deus Ex Machina, a cafe in Sydney's inner west which Mostyn frequented in her former life as a regular civilian.
But heads of state come with large security details, and it was deemed easier to eat together at the Governor-General's official Sydney residence, originally home to the Admiral of the Royal Navy's Australian Squadron.
The Herald / Age photographer and I arrive at a bucolic scene – a posse of young sniffer-dogs-in-training is frolicking on the rolling harbourside lawn.
Mostyn is weaving among them, chatting to their Australian Federal Police handlers, buffeted by the winds coming off the magnificent harbour. The view, a splendid eyeful, must surely be one of the best in the world.
The elegant sandstone residence, with its magnificent colonnaded verandah, is directly opposite the Opera House, under the gaze of the Harbour Bridge, and in full view of the sundry seacraft of the busy harbour.
Mostyn says that sometimes the passing party boat revellers yell out ripe comments intended for the Prime Minister, whose official Sydney residence, Kirribilli House, is next door.
There is no fence between the two houses (Kirribilli House once served as a staff residence for Admiralty House) but the Governor-General says the two neighbours do not socialise. 'He wouldn't come over and hang out,' she tells me. 'That would be a breach of convention.'
But the PM does use the Admiralty House pool, and on the morning after the federal election he contacted Mostyn to say he would be walking his dog Toto across her lawn. Mostyn, who has opted out of voting for the duration of her role, stepped out to meet the re-elected PM, and then invited him inside to discuss the timing of the swearing-in of his new cabinet.
This vignette strikes me as an exquisite glimpse behind the curtain of our constitutional democracy.
It's the kind of anecdote Ms Mostyn shares candidly, along with stories about the last Pope's funeral (where she lent a fan to the president of Iceland Halla Tomasdottir, who was schvitzing in the Italian heat), reminiscences from the King and Queen's visit last year (they bunked upstairs, while Mostyn and her husband, barrister Simeon Beckett, went briefly home to their inner west house, and Queen Camilla was thwarted from swimming in the pool by a paparazzi drone) and her trip to meet President Erdogan of Turkey.
The governor-general's candour is the natural corollary of her interpretation of the role. She wants the institution she represents to be visible, transparent and accessible. This is particularly necessary because many Australians do not know who the Governor-General is, or what she does.
'Wherever I go now, I'd say the majority of people start by saying, 'It's nice that you visited … but sorry, what do you do? What is the Governor-General?'' Mostyn tells me. 'They link it to some kind of royal role. Many still give me a semi-curtsy or a bow, which is absolutely not required.'
'It's clear to me we have done a very poor job talking about civics and our institutions, and the very basis under which our constitutional arrangements work.'
Recent exam results released by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) show she is correct – Australian students' knowledge of civics and citizenship have fallen to their lowest level in two decades.
Queen Elizabeth II (an informal photo-realist portrait of whom the GG keeps 'at my shoulder', on the wall next to her desk) used to say of royalty that 'we have to be seen to be believed'.
Ms Mostyn has adopted the same credo for the vice-regal role. To that end, she has built a strong presence on Instagram (66,000 followers), where she serves up content such as videos of electoral commissioner Geoff Pope returning the writs for the federal election.
Working with the National Gallery of Australia, Mostyn has brought more modern and contemporary artworks into the official residences. This grand sandstone pile, with its heavily patterned Victorian wallpaper, used to be hung exclusively with dark oils of important men – former Governors-General, and 'a lot of Cook paraphernalia', she says.
Now it is adorned with an eclectic mixture of Arthur Streeton, a 1929 Grace Cossington-Smith painting of the Harbour Bridge being built, a bark painting by Nyapanyapa Yunupingu and a Sidney Nolan or two.
The Captain Cook painting that used to adorn the entry hall has been moved to a position underneath the grand staircase. In its place is a bright canvas by Indigenous artist Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford. 'In modernising the office, it was important to consider how the art and artefacts in official residences could reflect the full story of Australia in all of its diversity,' she says.
When the Prime Minister approached Mostyn about the job in January 2024, she was greatly surprised. Mostyn was not a male in the military, which made her unusual enough for the head-of-state gig.
She had spent most of her career in corporations, not institutions. A law graduate who worked as an associate to Justice Michael Kirby (when he was at the NSW Court of Appeal), she went on to become a policy advisor to two successive Labor ministers for communications, and then as a senior communications policy advisor to prime minister Paul Keating.
She left that job to take up a senior executive position at Optus Vision, and from there, she went on to an executive role at Optus and Cable and Wireless in London, where her daughter, Lotte (now 25) was born. Her business career flourished, and her CV is too dense to summarise neatly, but it includes senior executive roles at companies including Insurance Australia Group, and multiple board and chair roles at Virgin Australia, Transurban, Mirvac, Citigroup and Aware Super, as well as charitable organisations like Beyond Blue, Foundation for Young Australians, the Climate Change Authority and Reconciliation Australia.
In 2005, she was the first woman AFL Commissioner (she was accused of being a 'quota pick') and in 2023 the Prime Minister appointed her to the Women's Economic Taskforce.
As the daughter of an army colonel, who served in Vietnam during her childhood, Mostyn understands service and she respects institutions. 'I'd been to Government House many times ... I'd studied constitutional law in Canberra and I had been to the High Court many times,' she says. 'As a country, we had debated many years ago the issue of whether we would be a republic, and we'd just been through the referendum on constitutional change for a Voice for First Nations people.
'So I think the job of Governor-General was one I understood.' Next week, she will have been in the job a year.
Her law background prepared her well for the constitutional part of her role, which involves giving the royal assent to laws, but also providing extra probity for government appointments in presiding over the federal executive council, which gives legal effect to decisions made by ministers.
More generally, she is a guardian of the constitution and must help ensure the stability of the government.
To this end, she sought extensive legal advice from the Solicitor-General on what to do if the result of the last election had not been clear-cut.
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'After the Dismissal in 1975, people were acutely aware the Governor-General could do one thing, and that was dismiss the Prime Minister,' she says. 'I talk to people about the reserve powers and why I don't believe that will ever happen again … as the Governor-General, you should always be conscious of maintaining the kind of relationship with the Prime Minister and the government where, if you see trouble ahead, you work with them to avoid the trouble.'
Because Ms Mostyn had been a strong advocate for progressive causes including The Voice, and gender inequality, she sustained harsh criticism when her role was announced. She was derided as an 'activist'.
News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt wrote that her appointment was 'the triumph of affirmative action over talent or accomplishment'. His stablemate Janet Albrechtson opined that Mostyn was 'no business heavyweight' and that she 'reflects the worst of modern woke Australia'.
Further, Albrechtson wrote, 'if her chromosomes were XY she wouldn't have been considered for the role'.
Is this the right time to note that the croque madame is delightfully buttery and exactly the right amount of crunchy? I have devoured mine. Beyond a few discreet mouthfuls, the GG has barely touched hers. I don't want to damage Australia's constitutional democracy, but my journalistic duty is to the reader, not to the Governor-General's blood sugar levels. I press on.
How did those personal attacks feel for her? 'How did I feel? I felt really disappointed that so many people were angry at the notion that a woman who had not served in the defence force could possibly be a governor-general,' she says, somewhat carefully.
Was disappointment all she felt? 'I had a lot of emotions running at the time, but I came into this with very clear eyes that this would happen,' she says. 'I can get angry about that, but I find anger is a pretty wasted emotion … so I think, 'What do they need to see?' What they need to see is a person showing up in the job and doing it.'
In preparation for the role, Mostyn spoke to former governors-general, and consulted former prime ministers about how they managed the relationship with the head of state. Sir William Deane, who is now 94, told Mostyn to always show compassion and to stay at each event for at least an hour.
He also advised her to find a seat. 'People don't share how they're feeling standing up, he said. But you sit down, and people tell you their stories.'
The Governor-General coughs. She is now getting a dry throat. I ask if she needs to pause and eat and drink something. 'No, no, I'm all right!' she says. 'I'll just drink this.'
She sips her water. I ask her what she does to unwind. 'I'm a knitter, I'm a weaver. I always have something in my bag that I'm doing,' she says.
An attendant clears our plates away – mine is clean, Mostyn's still quite full.
She asks for a tea with some lemon and honey in it. I take a regular tea.
I ask Mostyn if she is a royalist. 'What do you mean by royalist?' she asks.
'Someone who reveres the royal family,' I reply.
'I don't think I've heard any former Governor-General use that language,' she says. 'I'm deeply respectful of the role that the monarchy plays. I'm deeply respectful of our constitutional monarchy and our strong set of institutions. I think King Charles shows us what a modern king looks like.'
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'But the King doesn't direct me and I don't seek his advice. It's the Prime Minister and the ministry I take my counsel from, and that I work with.'
Her larynx fortified by herbal tea, the Governor-General is happy to continue our chat. 'I talk all the time about a mighty Australian democracy,' she says.
But it is me who has to end our nearly three-hour-long conversation, to attend to the un-vice-regal responsibility of the school pickup. 'That is a real deadline,' Mostyn says, and she sees me out, while issuing an invitation to bring my daughter another day for afternoon tea.
I walk out through the entrance hall, now devoid of Captain Cook pics. Behind me, the door stays open.