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JODI McKay got lost on her way to Williamtown.
That’s not a criticism, so did all of the reporters trying to find the home of Brian Crooks, a Labor member who lives on a vaguely-numbered hilltop property off Nelson Bay Road.
But it is, perhaps, a helpful metaphor for the former member for Newcastle’s relationship with the Hunter these days.
‘‘Newcastle and I have separated, permanently,’’ she told the Newcastle Herald on Wednesday.
Ms McKay’s visit to Port Stephens in her capacity as shadow minister for roads was the first since she re-entered parliament.
It is not, apparently, a trip that she relishes.
‘‘Newcastle is a hard place,’’ she said.
‘‘I have no desire to go back to Newcastle [and] if I’m there, I’m there to visit my sister or family.
‘‘I don’t go anywhere else.’’
It doesn’t read like bitterness, but something more like wariness.
Asked on Wednesday by a member of the press for her view on the changes that have occurred in the city since she left, she was unable to offer an opinion.
‘‘I haven’t been into the CBD for a couple of years so I can’t actually answer that question,’’ she said.
She did, however, express excitement that the new legal precinct is close to opening, a development she pushed for as the local member.
‘‘Newcastle has always had a mentality of saying ‘no’,’’ she said.
‘‘It’s easier to say no than to chart your own future, I didn’t believe that, and I like to think that the fact the city has changed is a testament to some of the work that I did.’’
That the former local member has such a strained relationship with the city she once represented is not a shock.
While waiting for her to arrive, one of the assembled reporters expressed surprise that she had re-entered parliament, considering ‘‘the way we treated her’’.
After being parachuted into the seat to replace former member Bryce Gaudry before the 2007 election Ms McKay was not warmly welcomed into the fold.
Despite often being described as a hard worker, the so-called ‘‘anti-Jodi’’ sentiment among the local rank and file – many of them still senior figures in Newcastle’s Labor Party – is legendary in Newcastle media circles, as are the allegations of white-anting by some of her former state colleagues, detailed in last year’s ICAC hearings.
As a newly-minted member of the ALP’s Merewether branch when she joined before the election, Ms McKay admits she ‘‘didn’t have the support of the local Labor Party’’.
‘‘I’ve never spoken publicly about the way they treated me, and I never will,’’ she said.
Now, as the member for Strathfield, she says she has a ‘‘kind’’ electorate. ‘‘They value me as a local member, even if they didn’t vote for me, they know I’m there to work for them,’’ she said.
