While she would be the first to tell you how much she loves the retail business, she is equally as committed to the other projects close to her heart.

These include being a proud sponsor and supporter of Australian women’s sport, an outspoken advocate for gender equality and a co-owner of Queensland thoroughbred racehorse auction house Magic Millions with husband and Harvey Norman executive chairman Gerry Harvey.

Her reason for filling her dance card to the brim, despite the fact her day job alone can be all-consuming, is simple — she likes to keep busy and hates to squander an opportunity.

“What else are you going to do with your life?” Page says. “What’s the alternative? Do you sit in a room and meditate? I don’t meditate. But you’ve got to decide what you do with your time and I never wanted to be an 80-year-old saying ‘I wish I’d done this’.

“You’ve got this opportunity, and I think if you’ve got the ability to do it, you do it.”

Even on a video call taking place on opposite sides of the country, Page presents as a formidable force of nature.

Although Page has a great love for retail, it wasn’t her first career choice.

After graduating from the academically selective Brisbane State High School she applied to become a surveyor but was rejected on account of being female.

Looking back, she thinks she chose surveying specifically because it was such a “blokey industry”.

“After finishing school at a feminist school it was a shock to me that women couldn’t do everything and that they were getting paid so much less,” she says.

“I think that was the nail in the coffin for me at that point. I was already a feminist but that was probably the moment I thought: ‘right, this ain’t going to be easy’.”

She moved to Sydney and by the age of 26 was working alongside now-husband Gerry at his only store. Within five years she was appointed to the board and was overseeing the fit-out of new stores. In 1999, Page was promoted to chief executive.

In the 42 years that she has been with Harvey Norman, the company has grown from a single store with a turnover of $3 million into an integrated retail, franchise, property and digital business with more than 270 stores in eight countries. Page has been widely praised for her vision and tenacity as a business leader and her ability to spot a trend and run with it, especially for the company’s early embrace of technology.

“When we started in the 80s we didn’t have technology, we launched technology in 1990 and now we are strongly a technology company,” she says.

“You might think of us as furniture, as bedding, as selling fridges and TVs and computers but that technology piece is the most important part, I would say.”

“We were some of the first in the world to do computer superstores for retail. But we are a diverse lifestyle retailer and essentially have everything to do with the home. If everyone decides this year it’s all about outdoor kitchens, I’ll sell you a TV for outside, an outdoor kitchen or the barbecue. Whatever you are doing in the home or whatever changes society has around the home, we are there.”

Harvey Norman’s net profit in the 2024 financial year was a healthy $352.5 million with an annual turnover of $8.86 billion, which is down from $9.19 billion the previous year.  

Page is pragmatic about the impact of COVID price blow-outs, inflation and a downturn in consumer spending on the business over the past four or five years. She also points out that the droughts and bushfires of 2019 and strife in the Middle East were already creating disturbance in the retail sector before the pandemic sent the world into a tailspin.

“In March 2020 I was dealing with and having to navigate eight countries with very different government responses to COVID,” she says. “Often, I wished that I was just sitting in Australia and listening to just the premiers and the prime minister. But we had that times eight.

“It has been one thing after another and really we are not out of it. But that’s life. It is just a bit exacerbated at the moment but I don’t think there’s ever been such a consistent time where, year after year, you cannot predict what is next.

“Prior to all of this, you could pretty much say this is what the next 12 months will look like, this is what two years will look like, you had a pattern. But now there is no pattern. We will return to that at some stage. It is a cycle, but it is a pretty interesting cycle.”

Perhaps somewhat predictably her approach to market uncertainty is to: “Look forward, always. And keep working and focus on the next thing.”

Despite the challenges presented by the pandemic, Page is proud of how she was able to navigate the situation and grow Harvey Norman’s balance sheet.

“We talk about COVID and how difficult it was but we have grown our balance sheet with hard assets by something like 30 per cent, or $1.3 billion, in that time,” she says.

“We stuck to our knitting on how we run this business. The most important thing about that is when the world really hits tough times, you’ve got a strong balance sheet of hard assets. So that at the moment is my leading achievement, my feeling that this was the right way to keep growing the business.”     

Page is also proud of the women’s initiatives she started through Magic Millions, which provides financial incentives for all-female owned race winners.

The idea came to her after years of observing women being somewhat “invisible” in the horseracing business, where ownership was predominantly in men’s names.

“I’d be sitting there thinking, ‘this is crazy, it’s their horse as well, it’s their involvement as well but you only hear about the men’,” she says. “Putting extra money on the table for female-owned horses meant that women started buying horses with their mates in their own name. I remember the first year we had a group of all-female winners and the husbands tried to get on the stage to be a part of it. And I was saying, ‘OK, next year we are having security banning the husbands’. It was hilarious.

“Now the numbers are incredible and others have done it around the world. It’s grown female participation in what I call the business side of racing, not just turning up to a race day. They are a part of everything. How fantastic is that?”

Page is an equally enthusiastic supporter and long-time sponsor of swimmer Ariarne Titmus and was there to cheer her on in Paris when she won two Olympic gold medals to add to the two she won in Tokyo in 2021. “I didn’t want to come home,” Page says of her Paris Olympics experience.

“I was there for nearly a week, from the opening ceremony. I told Gerry before I left, ‘this will be extraordinary, this will be once in a lifetime’, but it was better than I ever thought.

“There wasn’t one part of it that I didn’t love. Or a moment that I wasn’t pinching myself that I was there.”

Her only regret was that she couldn’t stay for the Paralympics, which Harvey Norman has been sponsoring since 2019.

While women’s sport has made huge inroads in the last few years with the success of the FIFA Women’s World Cup, the soaring popularity of the Matildas and the fact our female athletes brought home 13 of the nation’s 18 Olympic gold medals, Page says the fight for equality continues.

“There is no end,” she says. “There is no high-fiving that we’ve got to a certain point. The real test is going to be from now until the (2028) LA Olympics, what happens in between, will all this love and respect for our elite athletes continue? I hope that it continues on an upward trajectory and that it is a lot easier for women, whether it is in sport, business, pay, whatever it may be, but I have this feeling, in fact I know, it’s just part of the journey and it will plateau for a while. We’ve just got to keep at it and doing our bit.” 

Page admits sometimes there aren’t enough hours in the day and that heading up a business that runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, can be relentless.

“There is no time when we haven’t got retail operating,” she says.

“We are in the northern hemisphere as well as the southern hemisphere and we are online. There is no downtime. At no point do you think you’ve come to the end of the year and tomorrow is a new day. That doesn’t exist in retail. You’ve got to have enormous strength of character, you’ve got to be fit.

“I do stress easily, it’s not that I don’t. Your mind is working the whole time, you are working on adrenaline the whole time. You actually have to make yourself stop sometimes.”

Outside of her work and sport commitments, Page doesn’t socialise often, preferring to spend time with Gerry and their family. But even in her downtime, there is always something to keep her busy. At the moment that’s encouraging a love of sport in her young grandchildren.

“I am more into sport than Gerry,” she says. “We’ve got a seven-year-old grandson and I’ve decided to teach him how to play cricket. In our family, you’ve got to play cricket on Boxing Day. So, Gerry and our son sit there having coffee while I teach my grandson how to play cricket. And then I take him fishing. And then, after that we watch the Swans play GWS. I mean, how much fun is that?”