Rachel Stephen-Smith was supposed to return to her first school on Friday morning, the small and unique O'Connor Cooperative School in the inner north.
The new Education Minister was educated in Canberra public schools and is proud of it. Her parents were involved in the establishment of the school at O'Connor and championed its eventual inclusion into the territory's public school system.
But the union that represents public school staff in May voted for an "unlimited number of indefinite or periodic stoppages of work to coincide with a visit to the workplace by an Australian Labor Party Member of the ACT Legislative Assembly".
It effectively means the Education Minister can't visit a public school.
And it shows the fragile situation Ms Stephen-Smith will need to manage since the cabinet reshuffle announced at the start of the week, that made her deputy chief minister and allowed her to take the reins of the school system while she still manages the territory's public service.
"I do want to sit down and listen to the unions. I'd love to get out and meet teachers and learning support assistants and principals in their workplace and hear from them directly about what they're experiencing on the ground but I recognise that's a conversation with the union first and foremost about how we manage through that," Ms Stephen-Smith says in an interview.
"So I'm going to respect their industrial action obviously and have that conversation with them but when I can, getting out and seeing our 93 schools, soon to be 94, will be a priority. But that's going to take a while."
Ms Stephen-Smith's parents could have sent her to a private school. Ms Stephen-Smith wants public schools to be the first choice for everyone, including more families like her own.
"You talk to a lot of Labor people and they'll reflect on the opportunity they had to go to university because of the reforms under the Whitlam government. For me it was always an expectation. I'm the fourth-generation woman in my family to go to university but I've always understood the privilege that came with that, that level of educational engagement and that not everybody has always had that," she says.
"And for me it's really important that families like ours engage with public education, that they see it as the right choice for their children, but also that they are actively engaged because if that's not the case, if public education is only for those who can't afford to go private, it's not going to be the excellent education system we have, it's not going to be the social leveller that we know it to be and it's not going to be the place that builds that resilient, tolerant, understanding community that we need more than ever now."
Ms Stephen-Smith, who says she originally wanted to be a teacher, says the public school system in the territory is excellent and her predecessor, Yvette Berry, has laid the foundations for the next phase of improvements, including lessening the administrative load on principals and teachers.
"I recognise people will choose to send their children to non-government schools for a range of reasons including faith and history and the individual circumstances of their children but public education should be excellent enough to be a first choice," she says.
The ACT government has made some additional offers on the teaching agreement and for learning support assistants and Ms Stephen-Smith says she thought both had gone some way to rebuilding the trust with the union.
"It's a long time since we've had a really disputed enterprise agreement right across for the core in the ACT so it's not necessarily a situation we're used to but it's the reality of the world that we're living in at the moment and we're not alone," she says.
"A lot of other jurisdictions have had significant industrial action across a range of different parts of their workforce."
The Australian Education Union last week said the government's pay deal was an "absolute shocker" and the Community and Public Sector Union, of which Ms Stephen-Smith is a member, will campaign against the government's pay offer, which Ms Stephen-Smith oversees as Public Service and Finance Minister.
Ms Stephen-Smith says she has had a few tough conversations with unions over the past decade in the Legislative Assembly, including when one launched a campaign against her in her inner-Canberra electorate of Kurrajong.
"In some ways it's hard for us because we really do sympathise with the unions and their members and ... we absolutely respect their right to take industrial action or to stand up for their members whether it's work health and safety or pay or conditions, whatever it might be," she says of a Labor government's task in enterprise bargaining.
"In other ways it's easier for us because we do understand and we have that relationship and we can speak frankly knowing that we come from the same values base in terms of wanting to see workers paid and treated fairly."
Ms Stephen-Smith also takes on responsibility for childhood development and wellbeing and wants to reshape the system to make it easier to navigate and ensure families do not fall off the radar between the end of their maternal and child health visits at 12 months and the start of three-year-old preschool.
"And unfortunately, it's often our most disadvantaged, marginalised families, whether that's because of cultural diversity and lack of engagement in the mainstream, or because of disadvantage, or for other reasons. We need to ensure that we are meeting those families where they're at," she says.
The ACT Labor caucus voted unanimously on Monday to make Ms Stephen-Smith the next deputy chief minister. Caitlin Tough's elevation to cabinet was a unanimous decision, too.
It's a far cry from the fractious era federal Labor went through after it won government after the long Howard era. Ms Stephen-Smith arrived as a staffer in Parliament House just after Kim Beazley took over from Mark Latham. She was there, working in Kim Carr's office, for Kevin Rudd's election.
Ms Stephen-Smith says everyone who worked as a staffer in the building at the time came to understand disunity really is death in politics.
"When I came into the Assembly, it's really gratifying that our caucus is - we have our internal disagreements and sometimes they can be quite challenging. But at the end of the day, we understand there's not that many of us, we need to work together," she says.
"And it's one of the Labor things that once a decision is made, solidarity, you stand behind that decision, even if you didn't agree with it. And it's stood us in good stead. And I think Andrew has done a great job leading that and being really clear that he wants the caucus to be driven by consensus wherever possible."
With a little over half the parliamentary term to run, and the damaging findings of a long-awaited corruption report that took out her predecessor, is Labor's job now to rebuild community trust?
"I wouldn't say it's about rebuilding trust because I think what we saw, and we don't get polling for the ACT very often, but what we saw in the recent poll was that Andrew Barr as Chief Minister has a high level of confidence in the community," Ms Stephen-Smith says.
"There will always be a lot of the ACT community that doesn't engage in local politics at all, but for those who do, I think actually the broad perception is the city is going in the right direction, the government is stable, responsible, delivering on the core things that need ACT government, that the ACT government is responsible for. There will always be more we could do.
"There isn't, unfortunately, an endless amount of resource to do that, either in financial terms or in the people with the skills and knowledge and capacity to deliver."
Ms Stephen-Smith says there is a responsibility for the government to think about how it does government differently and engages in different ways with a broader range of the community.
"I think what I would more reflect on is the way politics broadly has changed, and the whole rhetoric around doing politics differently, which too often seems to be about latching on to any community movement and amplifying grievance and promising things that you will never have to try to deliver," she says.
After handing over the job of being the ACT's health minister after the second-longest stint, Ms Stephen-Smith says she learned people appreciated the government willing to be open through the COVID-19 years.
"That's something I've certainly kept with, you know, that has stayed with me. I've tried really hard to continue that, obviously without doing the 45-minute live press conferences every day, which I think people would get sick of pretty quickly," she says.
"I think I've always been willing to say I didn't know when I don't know. It's much better to do that than to make something up or pretend. Yeah, I think people respect that there is no way you can know everything."
