Little places can wring big changes. And so it is with Carterton, a conservative, rural New Zealand town northeast of Wellington that took to heart a tall, glamorous woman, knowing she was once a man, and made her mayor.

The mayoral gig lasted five years and in February last year, Georgina Beyer wrested the blue-ribbon, conservative seat of Wairarapa for Helen Clark's Labour Party. New Zealand - indeed, the world - had its first transsexual member of parliament.

Beyer is a former theatre, film and television actor, appearing in the soap opera Close to Home - first cast as a man, and a few years later, as a woman. She spent her early adult years in Wellington doing drag, stripping in seedy clubs and selling her body for sex.

The people who elected Beyer knew of this prostitution. It wasn't an issue. "I get asked questions no other politician would ever have to answer," Beyer, 44, laments in an interview between sittings of parliament in Wellington. "Regarding the surgery, you know. 'Did it hurt?', or 'When you have sex now as a woman, is it different to how you had sex as a man?'

"Well, honey, obviously."

The throaty kookaburraish laugh lets you in on the secret. Beyer is loving the new role. "If comic timing and brave honesty were the measure of an MP," waxed one report in The New Zealand Herald, "Georgina Beyer would be Prime Minister".

Beyer's maiden speech in parliament was notable. With the gay-rights friendly PM looking on, she said: "I was quoted once as saying this was the stallion that became a gelding and now she's a mare. I suppose I do have to say that I have now found myself to be a member. So I have come full circle, so to speak."

On the eve of an appearance at a forum for Melbourne's Midsumma Gay and Lesbian Arts and Cultural Festival, Beyer is sharpening her celebrated wit. "I think humour has always been a powerful communicator if it's done well. And so, yeah, it helps me to break the ice."

Indeed, Beyer has brought a comic timing a little like Absolutely Fabulous meets Dame Edna Everage to parliamentary proceedings, but she also has a serious side. She is helping the NZ government draft a civil unions bill that would recognise same-sex relationships - not quite the legal definition of marriage, but with the same intent. Indigenous issues count, too - she is part Maori.

Aware that fellow parliamentarians could use her background against her, in 1999 she laid out her life in a disarmingly frank autobiography in the lead-up to the election. "You get your moral outrage and you get some of the redneck element," she says, "but I've never experienced discrimination from my colleagues in the parliament. They'll always judge me on ability and that's the way it should be."

Born George Bertrand in 1957, her father Jack disappeared quickly and her mother, Noeline, left her in the care of her grandparents. She started playing dress-ups with a girlfriend, Joy, at about age four. "I was happier dressed as a girl than a boy," Beyer wrote in her autobiography, A Change for the Better.

Beyer did not learn about transvestism until she reached Wellington and became part of the gay and drag scene at age 17. Over the next 10 years, George intermittently dabbled in acting, stripping, and prostitution, taking hormones to be Georgina.

Australia has not always been so kind to Beyer. In the late 1970s, she hit rock bottom in Kings Cross and was brutally raped by four men, who intensified the assault when they discovered she had a penis.

She describes her sex reassignment surgery of 1984 as "the most significant and greatest achievement of my life".

Beyer is still mulling over exactly what she will say in Australia, a country she says has made headway with indigenous reconciliation. But she stops short when John Howard's name is mentioned.