A premier from Ohio

"I AM nobody's puppet," Kristina Keneally proudly declared in the NSW parliament yesterday.

"I AM nobody's puppet," Kristina Keneally proudly declared in the NSW parliament yesterday.

"I'm nobody's protege. I'm nobody's girl."

But in the annals of NSW political history, Keneally is no one's idea of a modern Labor premier either.

She's American, for a start. A young working mother of two, Keneally is also a feminist theologian and former teacher with a passion for social justice.

She's elegant, attractive and always charming. As a child she was a friend of Katie Holmes, the actress wife of Tom Cruise.

And she's now the first woman to assume the mantle of premier in NSW history.

But perhaps more to the point, Keneally is known as a creature of the Right, the latest candidate thrown up by Labor's dominant Centre Unity faction and its key powerbrokers, Joe Tripodi and Eddie Obeid.

And in the soap opera that is the beleaguered NSW Labor government, she just happens to be their best and last hope of clinging to power.

"I'm here to work for the people of NSW," Keneally said on emerging from the partyroom. "I'd just like to thank my colleagues for the opportunity to lead and to serve."

It was just six years ago that Keneally, aged 33, entered state parliament after a bitter preselection battle for the electorate of Heffron with sitting member Deirdre Grusovin.

In doing so she killed off a political dynasty: Grusovin's brother, state and federal minister Laurie Brereton, had previously held the seat of Heffron for 17 years.

But if Keneally remains a relative newcomer, and not well known beyond the Macquarie Street milieu, Keneally is not quite a cleanskin either, at least in the public's mind.

Courtesy of her position as minister for planning and infrastructure, she is perhaps best known for her tenuous connection to the murder of Michael McGurk, the Sydney property developer and standover man.

Gunned down in September outside his luxury Mosman home, McGurk had claimed to possess a tape that revealed corruption in the Labor government and its Planning Department.

The allegations were always far-fetched -- that prominent developer Ron Medich had bribed officials to rezone his land -- but Keneally and her department head Sam Haddad had been implicated.

The subsequent furore surrounding the mystery tape and the dead standover man prompted a NSW parliamentary inquiry. The inquiry uncovered no wrongdoing, just plenty of heartache and even anger from the woman who will now be the state's premier.

"There has been such an attempt to smear the Department of Planning, the government and developers on the basis of allegations from people whose credibility is questionable, to say the least," Keneally told The Australian at the time.

"It doesn't mean those allegations shouldn't be investigated, but what it boils down to is that we have an allegation about a man I'd never heard of, apparently attempting to extort people I've never met with, about land the government did not rezone and declined to declare a state-significant site. I don't believe there is any credible basis on which to say there is some kind of underworld culture in Sydney property development."

It is a matter of record that the land in question was not rezoned. But while there was never the stench of ministerial corruption, Keneally has still had critics in her handling of the planning portfolio.

She took over the role in September last year from the famously bullish Frank Sartor, who has been another of the so-called roosters who were keen to unseat Nathan Rees and take the top job.

Aaron Gadiel, chief executive of Urban Taskforce Australia, has sat opposite Keneally as a representative of developers in the state. And while he is quick to acknowledge her intelligence and professionalism, Gadiel says she has failed in her mandate to reinvigorate and reform the building industry.

"The state of development in NSW has reached rock bottom," Gadiel tells The Australian.

"We're building houses here at half the per capita rate of Queensland and Victoria, so we've been looking for some positive policies to revive development. But she hasn't delivered."

Gadiel notes that while Keneally has continued some of the reforms put in place by Sartor, those were mostly aimed at mum and dad developments, not significant projects and not on greenfields sites -- on new, undeveloped land particularly on Sydney's urban fringe.

She has also rejected three big projects that met the technical criteria required to be considered for the controversial part 3A provisions, which were put in place to speed up the building of critical infrastructure in NSW.

"She's overseen an unprecedented number of knock-backs. She's tough. But her decisions have been detrimental to the industry," Gadiel says.

Nevertheless, he can't suppress his admiration for Keneally. He describes her as confident, well-briefed and across the issues.

"She is very talented. I've always found her calm and assertive and measured. And she takes time to inform herself," he says.

"You get a fair hearing with Kristina.

"Even if she makes a decision you disagree with, you always get an opportunity to state your case, and she understands your position. She meets people, she hears them out, she looks at the evidence, which is what you want. You can't take that away from her."

Keneally also has been able to woo her colleagues in record time, and even those outside NSW Labor's dominant right faction.

John Watkins, a former deputy premier and member of the Left who these days heads Alzheimers Australia, believes that Keneally has been given short shrift by many in the media amid the turmoil that has beset the NSW government since Bob Carr's successor Morris Iemma was forced out last year.

"I think she's been unfairly tagged a fair bit in the media over recent times," Watkins told Sky News. "I think Kristina [is] a woman of great capacity, great intelligence, great compassion, unfairly tagged as being a creature of the Right."

But if her name has been circulated widely as a potential leader, her American heritage -- and accent -- is known to have caused some nervousness among Labor's Sussex Street elders.

Her twang is unmistakable and potentially grating to working-class voters. This despite persistent rumours of voice coaching, which she regularly denies.

Born Kristina Kerscher in 1969 in Las Vegas to an Australian mother and an American father, Keneally was reared in Toledo, Ohio. It was there, during high school, that she befriended Holmes, whose father was Keneally's basketball coach.

A devout Catholic, she studied religion and political science at the Catholic University at Dayton before completing a masters degree in feminist theology.

But while her parents were staunch Republicans, Keneally's political leanings would gradually become more left-wing.

She worked as a schoolteacher during a teacher shortage in New Mexico and would later win a job as a NSW youth co-ordinator for the Society of St Vincent de Paul.

It was in 1991 at the World Youth Day in Poland that she met Ben Keneally, an Australian management consultant and the nephew of author Tom Keneally.

Relocating to Sydney in 1994, she married him two years later and the couple now have two school-age children, Daniel and Brendan. A third child, Caroline, died at birth.

But if Keneally didn't become a naturalised Australian until 2000, the delay was not due to any ambivalence about her new-found home.

She is actually the third generation of Americans in her family to have married Australians.

Her grandfather, an American GI, married a Brisbane barmaid and reared her mother, Catherine, in Australia.

But when Catherine later married a US serviceman too, she returned with him to America.

In retrospect, Keneally's political career started within a few months of getting off the plane back in 1994, when she stuffed envelopes and letterboxed for Watkins in Ryde.

But it was not officially born until 2003, when she won the seat of Heffron.

Her electoral success came despite potentially damaging newspaper claims -- which she denied -- that she had been a member of the conservative Opus Dei religious group.

In her maiden speech, Keneally described three ideals as animating her public life: "These ideals are a passion for social justice, the importance of community, and an energy and enthusiasm for life itself."

Within four years, having secured the patronage of the right faction, and in particular her close ally and key powerbroker Tripodi, she would be elevated to the ministry, winning the ageing and disability services portfolio.

And by the time Sydney hosted World Youth Day last year she was put in charge of that, too.

But no matter her unusual path to the premiership, she can now lay claim to a mantle that no one can contest, nor take off her: that of the first female premier of NSW.

Among the many to offer their congratulations last night was Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, who says it is a welcome development to see a woman with young children in charge of the state.

"The assumption that we tend to make is `She's a mum, how is she going to do it?' " Broderick says.

"We never ask that question of men. I think if we see anyone who has got visible caring responsibilities as our senior leaders, whether that be in government or more generally, I think that is a positive development."