Maroubra. It’s not the sort of suburb that people usually get emotional about, but something happens when the new NSW opposition leader, Michael Daley talks about the place where he was born and raised, and which he now represents in the NSW parliament.

“I was born and bred in South Maroubra,” says Daley proudly. “The whole clan live in the same postcode.”

His parents, both still alive, are in Maroubra. So are his brothers and sisters and their families.

Although the southern coastal suburb 15km from Sydney’s heart is gentrifying, it is the old Maroubra that defines Daley.

Home to Sydney’s largest sewage treatment plant, and just a short drive to Port Botany and nearby industrial plants, including the Orica chemical plant, the Maroubra of last century was a working-class enclave offering proximity to work and a glorious beach.

It still has a larger than average Catholic population, evidenced by churches and Catholic schools dotted around the suburb, including Marcellin College Randwick, where Daley went to high school.

There were daunting times [working at Customs], putting on overalls and crawling through the bottom of a ship looking for drugs Michael Daley

There are several large public housing estates and at its southern most tip, the Aboriginal community has clung on at La Perouse.

In the last two decades it has changed. On Maroubra hill, favoured by upwardly mobile footballers and developers, huge mansions have sprung up. Young families are moving to the liver-brick bungalows close to the beach. But it’s old Maroubra that has made Daley who he is.

“My first job was as a 12-year-old paper boy,” he told Guardian Australia in an interview. “I didn’t grow up in the social housing estates, but there was a huge one nearby: Coral Seas estate. It was a postwar model on how to do housing. It’s now a study on how not do it,” he says.

“I worked right through this estate. My paper run should have taken me two hours, it often took five or six. I would stop off and help the old ladies, walk their dogs, they would give me breakfast and I formed a really great affinity with what I would unashamedly call the beauty of the working class,” he says.

The local MPs – former premier Bob Carr, and former state and federal MP Laurie Brereton – shaped him politically.

Daley says his parents didn’t talk about politics at home, but he nevertheless became intrigued as a child during the “It’s time” campaign” of Gough Whitlam.

“They remember me sitting in front of the TV watching the tally room of a federal election, when I was eight,” he says.

By 27 he had decided he was a Labor man and joined the party, attracted by the environmental policies of the Hawke government and “the verve of Paul Keating”.

Carr and Brereton became his role models and mentors and remain his political sounding boards. Several of Carr’s former staff including chief of staff, Kris Neill and political operative Bruce Hawker have joined his staff.

In the meantime he had started studying law at Sydney University, but found full-time study unfulfilling.

“My father came home one night with a form for the public service and said: ‘Go away, get a job and study at night.’ It was really great parenting by dad,” Daley said.

He went to work for Customs and did his law degree at night.

At Customs he did everything from searching bags to patrols on the waterfront at night and raiding Chinatown to find imports of endangered species, or bits of them.

“There were daunting times, putting on overalls and crawling through the bottom of a ship looking for drugs,” he said. “But it was a very good job for getting to know people, because a lot of people lie to you and you get to pick the people who are telling the truth.”

It also provided him with a circle of friends, many of whom live in the area and are members of his branch.

In 1995 he was elected to Randwick Council, and later served as deputy mayor.

On graduating in law, he went to work at a law firm in the city.

“I fell in love with my wife at the photocopier, but I had to work hard as she didn’t feel the same way,” he jokes.

Michael Daley with his wife Christina and children Olivia and Austin, after being elected NSW Labor leader in November. Photograph: Ben Rushton/AAP

After a year he asked Nick Whitlam, then chairman of the NRMA for a job. He spent five years as an in-house lawyer, during the period when the NRMA was demutualising. It helped him hone his skills in company law and corporate governance, but politics beckoned.

“I was sitting in a board meeting one day – [former Labor MP] Gary Punch was on the board – and he said, ‘Michael, you might want to go and make some phone calls,’” he recalls.

It was 2005 and Carr had just resigned the state seat of Maroubra.

What followed was a bruising preselection fight, marred by allegations that Daley’s branch of South Maroubra had not had the requisite attendance for a valid meeting and that someone had subsequently “walked the books” to collect signatures and boost the numbers.

Daley won, beating Maroubra branch president, Penny Wright, and a former mayor of Randwick, Chris Bastic.

“The Terrigals [the Labor Right faction then headed by Eddie Obeid] and head office tried to stop me, as they had someone else in mind, but I beat them,” says Daley proudly.

Now the boy from Maroubra is a chance to become premier, following in the footsteps of Carr.

“I was really lucky to have had Bob Carr and Laurie Brereton as my local members: two of the greats.

“I used to sit there and watch them very carefully. I liked the way they treated people, the fact that you could walk down the street with Bob and Laurie, even at the height of their powers, and they would stop and talk to a kid, and an old person. They never lost that common touch.”

But they were also two of the toughest, most pragmatic operators the state has seen. Will Daley prove the same?