Linda Burney is the NSW deputy Labor leader set to make Australian history after announcing she will run for for the federal seat of Barton in Sydney at the next federal election.
If elected, the 58-year-old will become the first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander woman in the House of Representatives.
"People might say, 'Oh, It's 2016, how could it have taken so long?'"
A proud Wiradjuri woman, Ms Burney says she doesn't want to be "Shanghaied" by her Aboriginality. But that doesn't mean she isn't heading to Canberra with an important mission.
Burney was ten in 1967 – the year Australians finally voted to include Aboriginal people in the census. She says that if she makes it to Canberra, she wants to help young Indigenous people today have an easier life than the one she has lead.
"For the first ten years of my life, I wasn't counted in the Australian census because I was Aboriginal. I think we're one of the only first world nations that doesn't have some constitutional recognition of its first world peoples."
"My Aboriginality, the fact that I'm a Wiradjuri woman is the very essence of me, but I don't want to be pigeon-holed by anyone.
"I think it's really important, not just for me and for Aboriginal Australia, but for everyone that I move into this position," she told BuzzFeed News.
Burney certainly has the résumé. She was the director-general of the NSW department of Aboriginal affairs and became the first Aboriginal person ever elected in NSW parliament. She's been an education and community services minister.
At a press conference at Parliament House on Tuesday, Labor leader Bill Shorten announced Ms Burney would run for preselection in Barton, a marginal seat in Southern Sydney.
More than a dozen people have put up their hands to run, but in a controversial move, BuzzFeed News understands Labor's national executive has taken over the process and will make sure Ms Burney becomes the candidate.
If elected, Ms Burney will join Pat Dodson, one of the father's of Australia's reconciliation movement, who was this week nominated to the Senate to fill the seat vacated by Joe Bullock.
It's believed the seat of Barton was offered to Burney as part of an intricate domino factional deal stitched up by former General Secretary of NSW Labor Jamie Clements and with the help of Anthony Albanese. The left and right were shuffled around the state to make sure high-profile MPs like former Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon could stay in parliament.
The rumours circulating of an early double dissolution election have spooked NSW Labor, and an email (below) was sent out this week telling everyone to get their factional deals sorted before nominations close next week.
But that doesn't bother Ms Burney, who denied suggestions she is jumping from a sinking NSW Labor ship.
