Australia is going to be hearing a lot from Kerryn Phelps over the coming months. Perhaps over the coming years. On Monday she will be sworn into Parliament as an independent member for the seat of Wentworth, which she seized from the Liberal Party after it dumped Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister. She joins a team of independent crossbench members who will hold the balance of power in the House of Representatives. They come from across the political spectrum, but most agree on a shortlist of key issues: the need for action on climate change and the need to establish a National Integrity Commission. Like Phelps, most want to see children removed from detention in Nauru and an end to the live sheep trade. Dr Kerryn Phelps joins crossbench MPs Cathy McGowan and Andrew Wilkie at Parliament House in October. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Despite their political differences they are determined to use this moment to force change. Phelps will be sworn in at 10am and give her maiden speech at 3.15pm. By then she may well have cast her first vote in support of the integrity watchdog. Despite the scope of this agenda and despite the punishing nature of crossbench work - members lack the support of party machinery - Phelps is determined to maintain her other role as a City of Sydney councillor. And she will even keep seeing some of her long-term patients. “There is nothing that grounds you like being in general practice,” says Phelps. “It is very meaningful work and it is something that keeps you in touch with people.”

Phelps, born in Sydney in 1957, graduated from the University of Sydney in 1981. She had barely begun medical work when her media career began. “When I was an intern, I was doing lectures for nurses and I realised that the level of general health literacy of young people coming out of school was not high. The first ever article I wrote was for Women’s Weekly in about 1982 about the importance of vaccination.” In 1985 Good Morning Australia on Channel 10 gave her a regular spot and she has rarely been out of the media since. “To me it is a means to an end. Doctors are always concerned about public health and social justice, it was part of that.” Phelps’ profile drew attention to her private practice, where she has always pursued integrative medicine, including the principles not only of traditional Western medicine, but of complementary therapies such as naturopathy, nutrition and acupuncture.

Loading Throughout her career she has faced criticism from elements of the medical establishment who question the efficacy of integrative medicine. Phelps’ profile also served her well in her first major political battles; her bids to become president of the NSW and then the national Australian Medical Association. Phelps says she decided to run on the advice of her friend and mentor Bruce Shepherd, who was famed for his trailblazing work for deaf children. “He told me that you won’t ever know what you are made of until you have the blowtorch put to your belly.” It turned out Phelps was made of stern stuff. When she took the helm of the national association in 2000, a crisis had spread throughout the health system, with doctors practising in several specialities withdrawing their labour because they could not purchase affordable indemnity insurance.

The solution demanded input from doctors and insurers, from all state and territory governments and from more than one federal department. Phelps fell into infamous conflict with then federal health minister Michael Wooldridge. It took six months and prime ministerial intervention for their dispute to be resolved, but the indemnity crisis was eventually fixed. Further battles broke out within the AMA. In 2002, AMA councillor Robert Hodge said publicly that the organisation had failed as a lobby group, membership had stalled and finances had deteriorated under Phelps. “Kerryn has done well in the media but we don’t have any runs on the board,” he said, according to a report in The Age newspaper at the time. The AMA executive responded with a legal threat, while another doctor, Gerald Segal, challenged Phelps for the presidency. She saw him off. The people involved in those disputes who were approached by Fairfax Media were reluctant to speak publicly. “Perhaps if I had the protection of parliamentary privilege I could tell you something interesting,” said one, on the condition of anonymity. Dr Kerryn Phelps celebrates her win with her wife, Jackie Stricker, on the night of the Wentworth byelection. Credit:James Brickwood

“I don’t like conflict at all,” Phelps said this week. “But I will stand up for what I believe in. That obviously puts you into conflict with people who hold strong views in the other direction. So you either fold or you end up being in what is perceived to be a conflict situation but what is really a very strong difference of opinion.” Even while at the AMA, Phelps had already begun the second great campaign of her life. On January 4, 1998, Phelps married her partner, Jackie Stricker, in a commitment ceremony in New York. Three weeks later The Sunday Telegraph outed the couple. The incident was shocking, not least because she was then working for The Daily Telegraph as a columnist. “You don’t plan to get outed; it was a weapon to be used against people in those days.” The outing, she says today, was also life-changing. It made her a marriage equality activist at the very vanguard of the movement. “It was tough. Jackie and I were in uncharted territory and we did not have any organised groups around to support us. The LGBTQI community itself was divided on the issue. We did the first six to 10 years pretty much on our own.”

After the results of the postal vote a year ago, Phelps and Stricker renewed their vows on their 20th wedding anniversary in January at Emanuel Synagogue in Woollahra. But before that, in 2016, Phelps was ready for a new challenge. She had considered federal politics over the years but believed she could not commit to either major party. “I just thought there were certain matters of policy that I could not agree with or keep quiet about,” she says. Instead she approached Clover Moore to canvas the idea of joining the Sydney lord mayor’s team of independents, with a view to taking over as lord mayor when Moore chose to retire, possibly in 2020. Moore was receptive to the idea and observers noted similarities between the two figures. Both were known as indomitable and indefatigable women who had proved to be hugely effective solo advocates in a city in which politics has historically been dominated by machine men of both political parties. Phelps was elected on Moore’s ticket in 2016, and was soon elected by fellow councillors to the deputy mayoralty.

Town crier Graham Keating, Jess Miller, Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore and Professor Kerryn Phelps on the steps of Town Hall at the proclamation of the 2016 council. Credit:Louise Kennerley But Phelps and Moore soon fell out, and did so in dramatic and somewhat stage-managed circumstances. Press photographers are rarely present at council meetings. But prior to the City of Sydney Council meeting on Monday, June 26, 2017, News Corp made a request to be allowed to photograph that meeting. During a break, Phelps handed Moore's staff a letter announcing her resignation from Moore’s team of independent councillors. Soon after, and as the meeting was still underway, The Daily Telegraph went live with an interview with Phelps outlining her reasons for quitting. Today, Phelps says she came to view Moore’s team of independents as a de facto party, directed by Moore. “I had rejected party politics many times before and I suddenly found myself in a party, but one without any democratic processes,” says Phelps. “I was miserable.” At the time, she also attributed her break to the frustrations in attempting to get answers from Moore about how she managed her budget.

In response, Moore has accused Phelps of, in effect, misrepresenting her own politics in order to get on Moore's ticket. “She convinced me and others that she really supported our progressive values,” Moore said. Loading Moore cited the fact that Phelps had voted against provisions about car-share services. She also said Phelps raised arguments in internal meetings against the council funding legal support for public housing tenants in Millers Point and Waterloo who were facing relocation. (Phelps has always voted in favour of maintaining this funding.) Moore criticised Phelps for not turning up to enough events, and said the real reason Phelps left her team was the prospect of losing the deputy lord mayoralty, which Moore wanted to share around. "She concocted a reason to leave the team which we saw as a betrayal of us and a betrayal of the people that had elected her," says Moore. "The reason why she left the team was that she couldn't be deputy lord mayor. And the reason why she wanted to be deputy lord mayor was that she thought it was a conduit to the top job, which is why she had run in the first place," says the lord mayor, who has added that Phelps would be "more comfortable with the conservatives on council."

It is true that Phelps has tended, since her break with Moore, to side with the two Liberals, Christine Forster and Craig Chung, when splits emerge on council votes. (For the most part City of Sydney councillors vote unanimously on meat-and-potatoes issues about services and rates.) Loading Phelps has criticised the expense of the Moore-championed “cloud arch” artwork to be installed on George Street. And she voted with Liberal councillors against pushing the government to prohibit landlords preventing their tenants having pets. Today she describes herself as coming from “the sensible centre”; to the left of the Liberal Party, to the right of Moore. On Monday Phelps, who has raised public health concerns about the mixing of cyclists with pedestrians in inner Sydney, was the only councillor to vote against the council’s cycling strategy.

During Monday’s meeting Phelps also proposed an amendment that would call on the government to not change existing laws prohibiting electric scooters. In a sign, perhaps, that Phelps will have to work harder at forging coalitions if she is to be an effective legislator, the amendment soon lapsed because no other councillor would second it. Loading Other councillors bristle privately at what they see as Phelps' regard for her own achievements. Yet Jess Miller, an environmentalist and Moore councillor, is hopeful Phelps will be effective in pushing for changes of mutual interest. “She takes an evidence-based approach to things,” says Miller. "Given the lack of understanding, or lack of willingness among the other parties to do anything about these issues, that will be a huge advantage,” she says. Nevertheless, being an effective politician is different to being an effective advocate. "There is a big difference between Foodora riders and detention centres on Nauru, it will mean increasingly adopting perspectives beyond her own immediate experience,” says Miller.

In Canberra, the crossbenchers who spoke to Fairfax Media were thrilled about her imminent arrival. Andrew Wilkie and Rebekha Sharkie said their early meetings had gone very well. Already observers are trying to second-guess how she might fare at the coming federal election. There is a school of thought that she defeated the popular Liberal candidate Dave Sharma only because the loyal Liberals of Wentworth wanted to punish the party for dumping Turnbull. Having registered their anger at the byelection, goes this theory, those voters will return to the Liberal fold, particularly if Sharma runs again, as is expected. Others note that Phelps has a profile of her own and will not be easily removed. Phelps believes her independence is key. She is, she notes, an employer of 30 years and understands the concerns of her seat's business-oriented voters. She is also socially progressive and, on climate, gay marriage and mandatory detention, more in line with her constituents than the right-wing diehards dominating much of the Liberal Party’s policy debate. And what if she can’t win? Phelps has not resigned from the council. Instead she is donating her council salary and biding her time.