Governor-General

Baby boomer Patsy Reddy used to irritate her fellow company directors by using their first names. And she didn’t like saying ‘‘Mr Chairman’’.

‘‘I grew up in an era of ‘everyone’s equal’ – and particularly girls,’’ she explains. ‘‘It was my small act of rebellion, I guess.’’

But now the rebellion is over. She can’t say ‘‘just call me Patsy’’ when she’s in her vice-regal get-up, although sometimes she wants to.

‘‘Here I am Her Excellency Dame Patsy Reddy because I am the governorgeneral and respect for the role is something that is important.’’

So she lives a ‘‘strange’’ upstairsdownstairs life. Upstairs, in the onebedroom apartment at Wellington’s Government House which she shares with lawyer and businessman husband Sir David Gascoigne, she can wear jeans and be Patsy.

Downstairs amid the public tours and the grandeur she is the GG and the Queen’s representative, GNZM QSO DStJ, etc etc.

Reddy, 62, is friendly and bright in an orange suit, a self-described introvert whose fluency rarely falters, even when talking about ‘‘delicate’’ issues like a republic.

‘‘I was nervous about so much engagement with people I didn’t know,’’ she says.

But her husband – they were longterm partners before marrying shortly before she took office – is a natural. ‘‘Often he’s the last person to leave the party, and I’m usually the first.’’

The couple own a miniature poodle, Coco, which they ‘‘dog-share’’ with friends in Wairarapa, where they have a second home.

Reddy is clearly getting the hang of talking to strangers. Sometimes she happily talks a subject to death.

She is the first businesswoman in the office and has mapped out a five-year plan, with David’s help, to ‘‘add value’’ to the role. This aims at spreading the GG’s net further than the usual round of Rotary clubs and the like.

Recently, for instance, they held a ceremony for foster parents. ‘‘We had people here who had been foster parents for over 40 years and had fostered 400 children,’’ she says. ‘‘At one point the guest speaker said, ‘Hands up if this is the first time you’ve been to Government House.’ And almost the whole room did – and she did as well.’’

Reddy’s days of wheeling and dealing have also left an awkward blip on her CV: a scolding from a senior judge.

Like many other baby boomers, nowadays she is a champion of the Treaty, but she grew up an ignorant Pakeha.

‘‘In 1964 there was the big centennial for Hamilton, and I remember thinking ‘Oh, there must not have been anything here before that. That was the beginning of Hamilton.’

‘‘I’ve thought about that a lot since, and how appalling it was.’’

Nowadays most Hamiltonians know about colonial invasion and land confiscation, but few did back then.

On the other hand, Reddy got an early glimpse of the other side of New Zealand. When she was very young her schoolteacher parents taught at Minginui, a tiny dirt-poor Maori settlement in the Bay of Plenty.

‘‘Even when we got to Hamilton I remember my mother saying she wanted to learn Maori, and I was aghast. Where would you speak it? I was learning French at school and I thought that was much more useful…

‘‘So I kind of had this parental guidance that there was something different. I remember my father, who was really interested in history, telling me about the Battle of Gate Pa, which I never learned about at school.’’

The nation’s founding document, the

Words: Anthony Hubbard Photo: Kevin Stent

Treaty of Waitangi, was signed ‘‘between the Crown, at that stage Queen Victoria, and Maori. And I’m the representative now of that relationship,’’ she says proudly. ‘‘So that’s sort of unique – we’re probably the only country in the world that has that basis.’’

Another great strength of the constitutional monarchy, she says, ‘‘is that you have someone who is head of state who is not the government. And I look around the world at the moment and I think maybe that’s no bad thing. You have that continuity of government that is avowedly apolitical.’’

But isn’t the idea that the Queen is the Treaty partner just a fiction? The government is the real partner, and couldn’t a president do everything the governor-general now does?

Yes, she says, the government has always been the one that could give effect