Grace Portolesi

Grace Portolesi (born 26 June 1968) is an Australian politician who represented the South Australian House of Assembly seat of Hartley from 2006 to 2014 for the Australian Labor Party.

Previously the parliamentary secretary assisting the Attorney-General, in 2010 Portolesi was appointed Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation, Multicultural Affairs, Youth and Volunteers. Portolesi was appointed Minister for Education and Child Development in 2011, a position she held until 2013. From 2013 to 2014 she was the Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills, Minister for Science and Information Economy, and a Member of the Executive Council. She is aligned with Labor's left faction.

Portolesi was born in Adelaide to a migrant Italian family. She studied public policy and government at Flinders University where she became involved in student politics, serving as president of the Flinders University Student Association. She worked as an equal opportunities officer at the University of South Australia after graduating from university.

In the early 1990s, she moved to Queensland to take up a position as an advisor to then Premier of Queensland, Wayne Goss. She returned to Adelaide some years later to work as a policy advisor to then Opposition Leader, Mike Rann. When Labor won government in 2002, she took up the position of chief of staff for the Minister for Families and Community Services, Jay Weatherill, a position she held until her election to parliament in 2006.

Portolesi decided to enter politics prior to the 2006 state election, and was nominated, unopposed, for preselection to the then highly marginal Liberal seat of Hartley. The traditionally Labor seat had been won by Joe Scalzi at the Liberal landslide of 1993, and as a popular local member, Scalzi went against the predictions to retain the seat in 1997 and 2002. Portolesi's status as an Italian-Australian broadened her support in the ethnically diverse community, and helped neutralise a factor that Scalzi had used to his advantage in the past.

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