"Reset your eyes!" the cameraman orders. Luke Foley closes his eyes and tilts his head towards the fierce midday sun - a trick to combat the relentless glare.
Clustered around him on a narrow strip of grass next to Newcastle Harbour are the film crew, staff from Labor's advertising agency, and ALP state secretary Jamie Clements, watching carefully from the the sidelines. Looking fixedly down the barrel of the camera, sweating in a dark suit, he delivers the same lines, over and over: "Hello, I'm Luke Foley, Labor's new leader in New South Wales."
It's a mantra he'll have to repeat endlessly in coming days. Unlike his telegenic rival Mike Baird, Foley has been in the job less than three months, and is battling to win bare recognition from most of the state's voters.
He worries he lacks Baird's polish.
"Mike's a bit better at this than me," he mutters to a photographer, who is getting him to pose for a formal portrait.
Fate presented 44-year-old Foley with an unexpected opportunity just before Christmas, when John Robertson, the former union boss who'd doggedly led Labor since its electoral annihilation in March 2011, fell on his sword after revealing he'd once written a letter in support of Man Haron Monis, perpetrator of the deadly Lindt cafe siege.
At first blush, Foley was not the inevitable replacement for Robertson. For a start, he was in the upper house (leaders have to be in the lower chamber). And there were others, particularly shadow treasurer Michael Daley, who desperately wanted the job.
But talk quickly turned to Foley, who'd been impressing colleagues with his growing mastery of the Legislative Council ever since he'd moved there in 2010, after seven demanding years as the left-wing's assistant secretary in Labor's Sussex Street headquarters.
"I only had a few days to make the decision," Foley recalls. "I knew a clear majority of my caucus colleagues and party organisation and party members wanted me to do it."
Among those urging him to make the leap was close friend, former deputy prime minister and federal frontbencher Anthony Albanese. "It hadn't been on his radar," Albanese insists. "He was in the wrong house, from the wrong faction, at the wrong time. For many people running for leader is something they see themselves as destined for. It was not like that for Luke. He was comfortable running the upper house and doing a job for the party there."
For three days Foley took calls, then shut down. "I kept talking to Edel [McKenna, his Irish-born wife] . I waxed and waned ... I always had enough tickets on myself to think I could do the job. The doubt was about the impact on my personal life and family life."
On December 28, he announced he would run; a week later he was anointed leader by the party and cleared to enter the preselection contest for the lower house seat of Auburn.
Did he feel sorry for Robertson?
"Yep, of course," he says. "To be leader for three years and then not get to fight the election is tough. I feel for him." Ten days after taking the top job Foley embarked on some barnacle-clearing, confessing to two previous drink-driving convictions, one (in 2007) resulting in a nine-month licence suspension. It doesn't seem to have dented his standing.
His elevation has put new spring in the step of Labor candidates around the state, as they run hard against Baird's privatisation plans for the state's electricity distribution networks - an attack which proved devastatingly effective in Queensland's recent election.
As a jubilant Jodi McKay put it at Labor's campaign launch two weekends ago, "under Luke, we have burst from the blocks" .
Family matters
It's just before 7am, and an elfin face appears at a side window along the drive-way of Foley's modest house, in a modest street in West Concord.
It's six-year-old Niamh, who comes running out in a large red shirt emblazoned with her father's name.
"The kids all got new pyjamas this week – Luke Foley T-shirts, several sizes too big," he deadpans.
As we barrel up the F3 to the Hunter, his long frame folded in the front seat, Foley immerses himself in briefing notes, rejigging the day's speeches, and juggling radio interviews. He will make four campaign stops before returning to Sydney tonight, rising before 5am the next day to take his campaign up to the far north coast, where Labor is hoping to dislodge the Nationals from several key seats.
Foley is a disciplined worker with a prodigious capacity to get across a brief. He likes to plan his time. Former housemate and journalist Andrew West remembers once stumbling across a Foley to-do list that he'd left around the house. He'd written out a meticulously planned schedule for the day, which included precisely two hours and 15 minutes for reading. (Foley is a fan of hard-boiled crime though he says he's broadening his tastes in fiction because it "widens the imagination".)
Friends speak of him as an old-style Labor leader, a social conservative possessed of a dry wit, a passionate speaker, and a thinker more at home with policy than the theatre of politics. "He is quite a serious person at heart, but you want a serious person to be running the state," Albanese says.
Foley had to rush out and buy two new suits after getting the leadership. Edel, he says, nearly ran the family car off the road when she first sighted her husband's face looming from a huge poster on the M4.
A petite woman with dancing eyes, she met Foley in 1998 when he was an organiser with the Australian Services Union and she was a backpacker temping on the union's reception desk. They married in 2005, after negotiating red tape over visas and making trips back and forth to her farming family in County Tyrone. Foley's long-time friend, Ken Fowlie, says: "They would never say this but it's really a terrific love story - he is very determined, once he has set his mind to something."
When Edel went to Labor's rousing campaign launch in Campbelltown two weekends ago, it was the first time she'd seen her husband on the stump.
"I don't know what she expected," Foley says, "because she has never been to a political meeting, she does not go to events with me, she doesn't watch the news unless I am at home watching it. She is on Facebook with her sisters and her cousins in Ireland."
But he likes the fact that home life, with their three young children (Aoife, 8, Niamh and Patrick, 5,) gives him a break from politics.
"A number of my friends are in partnerships where both are politically active. For me, I'd worry that there would never be an off switch from political conversation."
Absence of a father
Foley grew up on the upper north shore, on the fringes of St Ives, where he attended a modest Catholic school, St Leo's.
There was not much money. His mother, Helen, was a staunch Catholic who had Luke and Bridget – his twin – when she was 40.
His father walked out on the family when Foley was eight, never to see his children again. Foley snr (since deceased) had become an alcoholic, and there was "unpleasantness" but no violence in the house, Foley says.
The absence of a father was something he had in common with his best friend at school, Loch Van den Berg. No one ever really talked about it, Loch says: "It was the way things were treated back then."
Foley's father once made a "sort of approach" about coming to see his children, then in their teens. They rebuffed him out of loyalty to their mother. "I've thought about it a couple of times since, whether I should have caught up with him," Foley says, "but the opportunity did not come again."
At St Leo's, run by the Christian Brothers, Foley became inculcated with the social justice values of the church but also its social conservatism. This annoys some in Labor's Left, Foley's home faction.
He agonised long and hard, for instance, before coming round to embrace the concept of same-sex marriage.
"For me it's always been complex because I grew up in a very traditional Catholic household," he says. "When I first heard the suggestion of gay marriage, as it was then, it was almost a surprise, the concept, because I had just always understood marriage to be between a man and a woman.
"But then my entire political involvement has been about promoting equality, so there has always been a tension there. I'm one of 5 million Australians that have changed their mind ... I would far prefer never to have to answer a question on the issue because I have always grappled with it.
"Now that I'm leader there is no place to hide on a great many issues," he says.
He attends Mass weekly but adds, "I don't pretend there has never been doubt, you grapple with it all the time." On other issues - party reform, the environment - he is more instinctively progressive. He has kept firm hold of the shadow environment portfolio since taking on the leadership, and says he shares Kevin Rudd's once-espoused view that climate change is the great moral challenge of the times. "I do think it's an existential threat," he says.
But he is blunt about how he sees the Greens, Labor's key rivals in Balmain and Newtown, in particular.
"They are not the principal enemy, the Tories are the principal enemy. But the Greens are an enemy because they are seeking to destroy the Labor Party."
Why does he feel that?
"Because their stated intention is to replace the Labor party."
At school he was - and remains - a huge sports nut, passionate about cricket in particular, though he enjoyed debating and legal studies. He toyed with becoming a lawyer, but ended up studying arts and industrial relations at the University of New South Wales.
It was there, in 1988, that he first became politically active, joining the campus Labor Club, and quickly gaining a formidable reputation as a young warrior of the Labor Left.
"If you wanted to move forward in Young Labor politics in the late 1980s or early 1990s he was someone you wanted to meet," says Fowlie, who met him at university.
In 1992, he went to work for left-wing senator Bruce Childs, gaining notoriety inside the party when he clashed fiercely with young right-wingers Joe Tripodi and Reba Meagher over the presidency of Young Labor. Foley lost by a handful of votes, but had the satisfaction of anonymously co-authoring a document called Abuse of Power, which accused the Right of stacking the vote.
"He was very, very good at machine politics," says his mentor and Labor elder, John Faulkner, "but he has a lot of other strings to his bow. He is principled, a person of substance and he stands up for decency of process."
Faulkner says Foley was always "on the side of the angels" in the battles against Tripodi, Eddie Obeid, and the Left turncoat, Ian Macdonald – all three later found to have been corrupt by the ICAC.
Foley crossed factional lines when he unsuccessfully tried to get Macdonald disendorsed just before the 2007 election. (Ironically, Foley got Macdonald's seat four years later, when the then minister got sacked over rorting his travel expenses.)
More controversially, Foley had a hand - together with the party's then secretary Karl Bitar - in the undoing of then premier Morris Iemma and the subsequent elevation of Nathan Rees in 2008, when electricity privatisation was tearing the party apart.
"I was always honest with Morris," he says, unapologetically. "Now that I'm leader I will always treat the party with respect."
Regardless of the result on March 28, Albanese is convinced Foley is a future premier. "He has grown in stature in a very short time," he says, "he has won real authority as leader. That's something that can't be given - it has to be earned."
Life and Times of Luke Aquinas Foley
Born: June 27, 1970 (with twin sister Bridget)
Schooled: St Leo's Catholic College, Wahroonga
1988 University of New South Wales - arts/industrial relations
1992 worked for Senator Bruce Childs
1996 Australian Services Union, organiser and secretary
2003 NSW Labor assistant secretary
2005 married Irish-born Edel McKenna
2010 entered NSW Legislative Council (filling casual vacancy)
2011 Opposition Leader in Legislative Council, shadow minister for Environment, Energy and Water
January 5, 2015 NSW Labor leader
Key campaign promises:
+ Poles and wires: "We will keep our electricity network in public hands", use profits to "fund improved services".
+ Education: $1.3 billion earmarked for schools and TAFE, childcare with every new school, new allowances for apprentices.
+ Health: An "additional" $1.7 billion earmarked for hospitals and "health infrastructure in the coming years".
+ Environment: Fund renewable energy research, moratorium on coal seam gas, new north coast koala sanctuaries.
+ Political reform: "We will have the highest integrity standards for MPs of any party anywhere in Australia."
+ Economy: "Maintain the budget surplus over the economic cycle."
+ Transport: Bundled with general $10 billion "infrastructure" spend in Foley's campaign launch of March 1; delayed construction of second harbour rail crossing until 2021; build new M4 and M5 motorways but no clarity on route; scrap proposed tunnel linking the M4 and M5 under the inner west.
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