Tanya Gadiel

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Tanya Rachelle Gadiel (born November 21, 1972) is an Australian politician. She has been an Australian Labor Party member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly since 2003, representing the electorate of Parramatta.^[1] She entered parliament after a highly controversial party preselection process in which she was installed as the Labor candidate by the party executive. Though for some time a low-profile backbencher, Gadiel has become more vocal and has been tipped as a potential minister.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Parliamentary career 3 In parliament 4 Notes

[edit] Biography

Gadiel was born in Cessnock, New South Wales and attended public schools, including Cessnock High School. She studied arts and law at university before becoming involved in the trade union movement, serving as an organiser with the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union of Australia and as an industrial officer with the Australian Workers Union. She was subsequently employed as a senior policy adviser to then-Police Minister Michael Costa. She married Michael Gadiel, who later became the Assistant Secretary of the Labor Council of New South Wales.^[2]

[edit] Parliamentary career

In 2002, Gabrielle Harrison, the Member for Parramatta, announced she would retire from parliament at the upcoming State election. Gadiel was preselected to take her place after a bitter internal contest against Parramatta Lord Mayor David Borger.

With Borger not contesting the election, Gadiel had a relatively clear run, as the protest vote split between an independent and the Green candidate. While many commentators predicted a larger swing considering the amount of adverse press coverage, it nevertheless caused a small swing to the Liberal Party in what was otherwise a landslide victory for Labor. Gadiel, who became pregnant not long before first becoming a preselection candidate, later stated that the stress had made her fear that she would lose the baby. Nevertheless, she was again the source of some criticism when, not long after being elected, her campaign team unsuccessfully attempted to have Borger expelled from the party for disloyalty.

[edit] In parliament

Once settled into her new career as a parliamentarian, Gadiel found that she had to face local backlash against a number of state government policies that she was not responsible for. Only days after her election, the party had backed down on their long-promised plan to complete the Parramatta Rail Link, indefinitely postponing any further construction past Epping; a move which Gadiel later described as "the bane of [her] existence". She also had to deal with a local community angry at the decision of Costa (who by this time had been shifted to Transport Minister) to slash the number of services on the Carlingford railway line, further inhibiting public transport options in her electorate, and groups of teachers angry over the government's reaction to their request for a wage increase. Though she joined with a significant section of caucus in opposing a planned poker machine tax, she otherwise stuck firmly to the party line for her first two years in parliament, refusing to criticise any of the transport decisions and snubbing the teachers, the latter which saw her branded "insensitive" by the Parramatta Advertiser.

Towards the end of her second year in parliament, however, Gadiel began to lift her profile. She rode a flying fox across Telstra Stadium as part of a fundraiser for the Parramatta Mission in late 2004. She personally raised the highly unpopular property tax with then-Treasurer Refshauge in April 2005, and several weeks later, publicly spoke of her frustration with the deferment of the rail link, adding "I'm not prepared to have people say it's scrapped. I'll dig it myself." However, this was met with a largely cynical reaction in the press, which was not helped when the council's pleas for her to take up the state of the Carlingford line went unanswered. In December, she raised the poor state of the Parramatta River and urged that it be cleaned up, and after some months of complaints by the local council, publicly criticised ongoing cancellations and other service issues with the Parramatta RiverCat.

[edit] Notes

Persondata
NAME	Gadiel, Tanya Rachelle
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	New South Wales politician
DATE OF BIRTH	November 21, 1972
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH