Kristina Keneally Biography
Kristina Kerscher Keneally (born December 19, 1968) is an Australian politician representing the Labor Party who has been a New South Wales senator since February 2018. From 2009 to 2011, she had previously served as New South Wales Premier, the first woman to hold the position. Keneally was born to an American father and an Australian mother in the United States.
She was raised in Toledo, Ohio, and is a Dayton University graduate. She settled permanently in Australia after marrying an Australian, Ben Keneally, and in 2000 she became a naturalized citizen. After a controversial pre-selection process, Keneally was elected to Heffron’s New South Wales Legislative Assembly seat at the 2003 state election, succeeding Deirdre Grusovin. Following her re-election at the 2007 state election, she became Minister of Ageing and Disability Services and was later appointed Minister of Planning by Premier Nathan Rees in 2008. She was also the spokeswoman for World Youth Day 2008 for the state government.
Kristina Keneally
By December 2009, Keneally emerged as the Labor Right faction’s preferred leadership candidate and defeated incumbent Prime Minister Nathan Rees (who had been in office for only 15 months) in a party room ballot, winning 47 to 21 votes. At the 2011 state election, the Keneally government suffered a 16.5 percent swing statewide–the biggest swing in Australian political history.
John Robertson, who was elected unopposed, replaced her as Labor Party leader on 31 March 2011. She resigned in June 2012 from Parliament. As a political commentator, Keneally joined Sky News Live in 2014 and later became To ThePoint’s co-host. In November 2017, she took leave to stand as the candidate for the Bennelong by-election that she lost to John Alexander, a former member. Instead, she was appointed to the Senate in February 2018 to fill a casual vacancy caused by resignation from Sam Dastyari.
Kristina Keneally Age
She was born on December 19, 1968
Kristina Keneally Early Life
Keneally was born to an American father and an Australian mother (born in Brisbane) in Las Vegas, Kristina Marie Kerscher. She lived briefly in Colorado but grew up in Toledo, Ohio, where she attended high school at Notre Dame Academy. While she was awarded twice the most valuable player in the Academy’s soccer team at Notre Dame (1985, 1986). After graduating from Notre Dame, she studied at Dayton University, also in Ohio. While she was involved in student politics, she was involved in founding the National Association of Students at Catholic Colleges and Universities and served as the group’s president in 1990 and 1991.
She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science in 1991, was a registered Democrat and worked as an intern for Ohio’s Lieutenant Governor, Paul Le Le. She later studied in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at Marquette University. After graduating from Dayton University, she worked in New Mexico as a volunteer teacher for a year.
She identified as a staunch feminist for most of her life. In 2009, she told The Daily Telegraph that she asked him why girls could not be altar servers when she heard the bishop of her diocese being on a local talk show. The “unsatisfactory answer,” of the bishop, she said, awakened her to “how women are disadvantaged in the church and society.”
At World Youth Day 1991 in Poland, Keneally met her future husband, Ben Keneally, an Australian Labor Party politician. She moved to Australia to be with him in 1994, but they returned to the United States so that Ben could take up a position with the Boston Consulting Group. They married there in 1996. Two years after the birth of their elder son, they returned to Australia. She became an Australian naturalized in 2000 and joined the Labor Party the same year. She resigned from U.S. citizenship in 2002 before being elected.
After arriving in Australia, she worked as State Youth Coordinator for the New South Wales branch of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul before leaving full-time to care for her children. She also attended the Australian Catholic University in Strathfield, New South Wales for a short time.
Kristina Keneally Personal Life
Keneally married Botany Bay’s former mayor, Ben Keneally; they have two sons together. A daughter died at birth. Australian writer Thomas Keneally’s nephew is her husband. Keneally is Australia’s patron of the Stillbirth Foundation. Previously, Keneally and her family lived in Pagewood, in the Heffron electorate she represented in the state parliament.
Keneally and her husband sold their home in 2016 and moved to a rented home in the wealthy Hunters Hill suburb across Sydney. Together they own a $1.8 million vacation home on the isolated Scotland Island on Sydney’s Northern Beaches and a Wollstonecraft townhouse purchased $1.3 million in 2016.
Kristina Keneally State Politics
After a bitter pre-election battle with Deirdre Grusovin, the sister of senior labor politician Laurie Brereton, Keneally was elected to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly in 2003. In fact, it was her husband Ben who was more interested in a political career, relying on Joe Tripodi’s friendship. The affirmative action rules of the party, however, required a female candidate, so instead Kristina ran. Labor insiders were concerned before the election that their strong American English accent with voters would not play well.
Although she allegedly took lessons in elocution to sound more Australian, she is talking with a marked American accent to this day. She spoke of her commitment to social justice, equal opportunities for women and her Roman Catholic faith in her maiden speech. She also shed light on an incident that occurred during the state election in 1999. She worked in the campaign office of John Watkins when she took a call from the communications director of Premier Bob Carr, Walt Secord.
Keneally later learned that Secord had demanded that Watkins ‘ campaign team “get that woman with an American accent off the telephones.” She replied, “Well, I got off the phones that day, but today I have the floor.” As NSW Disability Services Minister, Keneally took steps to rebuild outdated institutional residential facilities for people with disabilities, reverting to promises made. As NSW Planning Minister from August 2008, the department of Mrs Keneally oversaw local traffic diversions and strict environmental management during construction around the desalination pipeline works between Erskineville and Kurnell, approved by the department under the approval of Frank Sartor’s desalination pipeline project in November 2007.
Keneally was alleged to be one of the names in a challenge to wrestle NSW Premier Nathan Rees ‘ leadership in August 2009. Keneally responded to the accusations by saying: “He (Nathan Rees) has my support (as Premier)” and it was reported she insisted that she would never be New South Wales ‘ prime minister, something that the media continuously disputed. Keneally again denied in November 2009 that she wanted to be Premier, saying “I have always supported the Premier, Bob Carr, Morris Iemma and now Nathan Rees. Now is the time to put this ridiculous leadership speculation behind us.”
The dominant right faction, however, withdrew support from Rees less than a month later. On 3 December, in a leadership spill against Rees, Keneally narrowly defeated Sartor by two votes to become the candidate of the Right. She defeated Rees later that day with a majority of 45–21 in a party room ballot.
Before the vote, Rees declared “Should I not be Premier at the end of this day, let there be no doubt in the community’s mind that any challenger would be a puppet of Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi” a claim later rejected by Keneally, who declared “I am nobody’s puppet, I am nobody’s protege, I am nobody’s girl.” A state’s Premier and Deputy Premier were women for the first time in Australian history.
During her time as Prime Minister Keneally supported Barangaroo headlands development. Keneally transferred various local government planning powers to the state government to ensure the project was completed without delay, created a new portfolio related to the major Barangaroo development for which she took responsibility, and supervised the project while Premier.
Despite her dedication to the project, she was criticized for a perceived conflict of interest in Barangaroo’s development worth more than a million dollars and was linked to the installation of electric car infrastructure associated with the development, as well as giving Barangaroo exemption from environmental planning laws.
During investigations into corrupt dealings by former minister Ian Macdonald, on the eve of her time as prime minister, Keneally refused to release a report on him concerning the misuse of taxpayer funds, although she was forced to release the report to the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC).
Keneally pushed for the Labor Party to be renewed, with 23 members retiring from the 50 members of the caucus. Her push also included the resignation of NSW Labor President Bernie Riordan and Labor powerbrokers, Joe Tripodi and Eddie Obeid’s retirements. Her government sold for $5.3 billion on 14 December 2010 the first tranche of partial privatization of the state’s electricity assets. Eight of the directors quit the generator output in protest at the sale of trading rights.
Her government abandoned the second stage of its electricity privatization plan after criticizing the privatization, as no companies bid. NSW Governor Marie Bashir prorogued Parliament on the request of Keneally on 22 December 2010. This act normally takes place before elections later than December. There were accusations that Keneally tried to halt the later proceeding of the electricity inquiry.
In October 2011, the O’Farrell government’s inquiry reported that the partial sale was “reasonable and appropriate” to the NSW Liberal / National Government. She was highly popular when she became Premier, and at one stage she was the most popular political leader, as the March 2010 Galaxy poll showed, her personal satisfaction was 53 %. However, she did not transfer her own personal popularity to her party, which in opinion polling since 2008 had been well behind the Coalition.
Her popularity began to decline in August 2010, falling to 39 percent in her approval rating. Newspoll reported in October 2010 that the Keneally government had only 23 percent of the primary vote— the worst recorded display for a state-level Labor government in Australia. Newspoll’s only lower result recorded at the time was in 1989, when 22 percent of the Queensland Nationals polled.
This was a dramatic turning point from the 2007 election; if this figure had been repeated at an election, Labor would have been decimated. Junior minister Karyn Paluzzano was forced out of politics in May 2010 to use public money for and lying about her reelection campaign in 2007. Keneally moved to suspend Paluzzano from the Labor Party, and soon afterwards Paluzzano resigned. It was not enough to prevent the subsequent by-election from resoundingly losing Paluzzano’s once-safe Penrith seat to the Liberals.
Labor suffered a swing of more than 26 percent— the biggest swing in New South Wales history against a sitting government. A series of investigations at the Independent Commission Against Corruption, after the Labor government’s defeat, found that Keneally ministers Obeid, Tripodi, and McDonald had acted corruptly. In 2012, Geoffrey Watson SC, counsel assisting the inquiry, said of investigations into the actions taken by the men in 2010 that these inquiries were the ICAC’s most important investigation ever undertaken and that corruption on a scale was probably unchanged since the days of the Rum Corps.
Keneally appeared at the ICAC in March 2014 as a witness about her former colleagues ‘ investigations. She said she had concerns about the lobbying of Obeid, Tripodi and Tony Kelly and that she had not been influenced by their efforts. When asked if Obeid had “put her in her job” as prime minister, Keneally answered: “No, caucus did”.
Kristina Keneally Basketball Australia
Keneally resigned from Parliament on 29 June 2012 to start work as Basketball Australia’s chief executive[69]. Previously, she was chair of the Australia Basketball board. Keneally left Basketball Australia in April 2014 to spend more time with her family. Keneally is also Souths Cares ‘ director, the South Sydney Rabbitohs ‘ nominated charity.
Kristina Keneally Political Commentator and Television Host
Keneally joined Sky News Australia in July 2014 and started co-hosting The Contrarians panel program with Ross Cameron every Friday afternoon before the pair got their own self-titled Keneally and Cameron program. In April 2015 this program was axed. As co-host of the Sky News daytime program To The Point, Keneally joined Peter van Onselen on 1 June 2015, which will air during PVO Newsday.
Keneally has also been a regular presenter of The Cabinet and Credlin & Keneally primetime programs. She took leave of Sky News on the same day as her announcement on 14 November 2017 after announcing her intention to stand for the Federal Parliament. Since December 2014, Keneally has contributed to The Guardian Australia on a range of politico-social issues such as political religion, same-sex marriage and seeking asylum.
Kristina Keneally Federal Politics
Keneally was preselected as their candidate for the Bennelong by-election on 16 December by federal labor in November 2017. She lost to the previous incumbent and liberal candidate John Alexander despite picking up a five percent two-party swing.
The Labor Party announced on 30 January 2018 that Keneally would fill the vacant New South Wales seat in the Senate left by the former Senator, Sam Dastyari, who formally resigned earlier that month after an ongoing Chinese donation scandal. On 14 February 2018, Keneally was formally appointed to the vacancy and on the following day he was sworn in as a senator.
Keneally stated in June 2018 that she opposed mandatory reporting for Catholic priests who are informed in confession of child sexual abuse; she believes that it is not the most effective way to prevent abuse. Keneally, sponsored by the Australia / Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, also attended the Rambam Israel Fellowship Program in Israel. The lobby group funded “transport, accommodation, meals and other associated costs”