Bec Cody likes a chat, which isn't surprising for a woman who has spent much of her adult life snipping hair in salons.
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So when she found people were reluctant to talk to her while she was out campaigning for election to the ACT Legislative Assembly, it seemed logical to whip out the scissors and the cape.
"I joked with a girlfriend of mine who has a salon 'oh maybe I could work here one day a week so people can talk to me' and she said 'well why don't you just go and do a few free haircuts and just get people to talk to you'," she said.
The Labor backbencher is one of 12 new parliamentarians to gain a seat in the expanded ACT assembly.
A lifelong southsider, her family moved to Kambah when she was a baby. Her dad was a firefighter, who later ran his own freight company, and her mother was a teacher.
Both were members of the Labor party and taught Cody how to stick up for what she believed in early on.
In 1996, she was photographed casting her vote in her wedding dress on her way to the church with dad Tim in tow (she said she later had a go at Paul Keating for calling an election on her wedding day).
"The dinner table was always the place where we had a discussion about everything and anything and it didn't matter whether we disagreed or not as long as we could bring an argument to the table," she said.
Cody put those dinner table skills into practice when she took on Kambah High School over a policy that barred girls from taking woodwork and metalwork classes.
"I said 'this isn't on, where is it in law that you can tell me I can't do metalwork or woodwork, you tell me, why can't I?' and they didn't have an answer so I was the first girl at Kambah High to metalwork, woodwork and tech drawing. I aced it, I beat all of the boys," she said.
She left school at 15 and did a hairdressing apprenticeship at a unisex salon at Weston Creek.
She went on to manage and then own her own hair salons before having a "midlife crisis" at 30.
"I decided that I needed to do more for my children," Cody said.
"I left a not-so-good marriage, took my two boys and sold my hairdressing business and decided that I wanted to try something new and I wanted to educate myself.
"I thought that was that was the way the future for me."
Bizarrely, Cody said she was devastated when she received a UAI of 97.3.
"I rang my aunt [an academic at the University of New South Wales] almost in tears going 'Oh I failed, I failed. I didn't get a good enough score. I'm never gonna to go to uni'."
When she told her aunt her mark, her aunt hung up.
Thinking the line had cut out, Cody rang her back, only to cop an earful.
"She goes 'No you didn't fail. That's an amazing score and stop being so stupid'. I did [think I'd failed] because I'm used to getting 100 per cent in everything I do," she said.
Cody went on to study law but would never put the degree into practice.
Instead she worked in the public service before standing for election in 2012.
"I probably wasn't experienced enough and I probably wasn't ready emotionally either,' she said of her loss.
"Here in 2016 I was ready. I was hungry."
It also helped there was a spot wide open after long-serving ACT Labor stalwart Simon Corbell's unceremonious departure from politics.
Left faction powerbroker Dean Hall was a part of Cody's election team and she thanked him effusively during her inaugural speech.
Cody said she always saw herself as a hairdresser though, which is why she pulled out the scissors during the ACT election campaign and planted herself outside the Kambah Inn.
Many people opened up to her who would not have given her the time of day otherwise, she said.
"I had a beautiful Indigenous woman who hadn't been able to afford to have a haircut for quite a long time and she just loved sitting there and being pampered and being able to talk about nothing or about anything she wanted to. You know that was more important to me than anything else," Cody said.