IN the weeks before the NSW ALP chose Jodi McKay as its new parliamentary leader, Penny Sharpe - deputy leader to Michael Daley and interim leader after his resignation - was favoured to retain the deputy's position in the new administration.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
But it was not to be. Instead, Swansea MP Yasmin Catley has emerged as the new deputy leader, elected unopposed both by her Left faction and the full Labor caucus. The only male member of Labor's leadership team, Adam Searle, is the new leader of the upper house, with Ms Sharpe as upper house deputy.
A parliamentarian since 2005, Ms Sharpe had publicly stated her intention to run again as deputy. Both she and Ms Catley are from the Left, and the Swansea MP's success can be seen as the first obvious sign of Ms McKay getting her way as leader.
Although Ms McKay is in the Right faction, she and Ms Catley have worked closely together since the loss of the March state election, with Ms Catley managing the Strathfield MP's campaign to beat Kogarah MP Chris Minns to the top job.
While Ms McKay has long been a public figure in the Hunter, Ms Catley has been a relative unknown, outside of her electorate, until now. Raised at Gwandalan and joining the Swansea branch of the ALP at 19, the 51-year-old Ms Catley has strong links to the Maritime Union of Australia. As she noted in her inaugural speech to parliament in 2015, her father, Jack, was a seaman. She moved to Sydney in her early 20s and returned to the region before the 2007 election with her husband, Robert Coombs - Labor's candidate to replace the disgraced Milton Orkopoulos in Swansea. He succeeded, but lost the seat at the 2011 election that saw Labor decimated to a parliamentary rump of just 20 seats.
As Ms Catley tells it, she nominated for Swansea, and won it, only after her husband decided against re-contesting. Four years later, she is the party's deputy leader, the first regional Labor MP to hold such a position in more than 50 years.
Together, the four members of Labor's new leadership team represent generational change. Perhaps even more importantly, the three women involved stand as testament to the society-wide rebalancing of power that is increasingly giving shape to the present era.
And for Hunter voters, Ms Catley and Ms McKay represent two of the closest links this region has had to parliamentary power - albeit from opposition - in quite a while.
ISSUE: 39,346.
