Banging on doors around the ACT electorate of Murrumbidgee before the October election, Labor's Chris Steel was buffeted by the amount of vitriol directed at his leader Andrew Barr.
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But it wasn't Barr's policies that attracted the scorn of voters. Rather it was who he chose to love.
What the new Member for Murrumbidgee now wonders is would people have said what they did had they known he was also gay.
That fact is not a secret.
He has lived in Kambah with his partner Kurt and their lagotto, Pickles for the past two years.
But it isn't exactly something he advertises either.
"I didn't want to be 'the gay candidate' because that doesn't really say a lot about me and what I'm about," he explained.
"To be honest no one was really interested in it either which I think is a sign of maturity from the community. And I was quite happy with that. It just it meant that there was less scrutiny on my family which I think was a good thing."
That scrutiny is something he has watched his mentor Andrew Barr cop relentlessly since becoming the first openly gay head of a state in Australia.
It was also something he listened to while on the campaign trail and addressed in his inaugural speech.
"It wasn't about his policy positions, it was actually about his own sexuality and questioning that and I think that's really problematic," Steel said.
"Following Andrew Barr, he's done all the hard work being the first. That's made it a bit easier for me here.
"But it gave me an interesting perspective simply because people didn't know I was gay. They were willing to actually say some things that perhaps they wouldn't have said if they known. And that and that that was quite interesting during the campaign. But on the whole most people have been very supportive."
Thirty-year-old Steel might be a first-time member of parliament but the halls of the assembly hold a lot of memories for him.
Last time he walked them he worked alongside his younger brother Kurt, a media adviser to the chief minister, who was killed in a Bolivian bus crash in 2014.
"You know when we were growing up he always followed me, including into the Labor Party," he said.
"I'm happy to say he was my best recruit into the Labor Party but over time he really came into his own."
It was Kurt who convinced Steel to stick his hand up for preselection on one of their runs around Lake Burley Griffin, the week before Kurt embarked for South America. He would never come home.
"In a sense he was my first campaign manager," Steel said.
The son of a high school principal and a school finance officer, Steel wanted become a lawyer before realising the policy-making side spoke more to him while studying at the Australian National University.
The importance of education was something his mum and dad taught him young and he worked for the territory and federal governments as a policy adviser on education, early childhood, community services and youth policy.
"I always thought while growing up through the public school system that there was a certain inequity in the way that those systems were treated," Steel said.
"Down in Marr Street in Pierce where I went to school you have Melrose High School and Marist College.
"Both are great schools but clearly very different in terms of the amount of investment that has been put in. You can see it in the dead grass on the oval at Melrose High and the pristine grass and grandstand at Marist.
"It was very clear to me while growing up that there was something wrong with that."
It was through his work as an advocate for early childhood education that he learnt he could achieve more with a seat at the table.
"It's one thing to be able to lobby government to for policy change or work in the bureaucracy on a very specific area of policy. But I think it's another thing to sit around the table and help make the decisions," he said.
