Zoe McKenzie MP
Shadow Assistant Minister for Education and Early Learning
Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health
Member for Flinders
TRANSCRIPT – SKY NEWS NEWSDAY WITH CHRIS KENNY
Tuesday, 23 September 2025
Topics: Palestine recognition; Albanese unable to meet with President Trump
CHRIS KENNY: Let’s go now to Zoe McKenzie, the Shadow Assistant Minister for Education. She joins me live from the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. Good to talk to you again, Zoe. This idea from Penny Wong that the Coalition is working against the national interest by having a rogue foreign policy, i.e. a foreign policy that sticks with what Australia’s always had, and hasn’t followed a change by Labor. How do you read this intervention from her?
ZOE MCKENZIE: I think it was very important that Sussan Ley today was very clear about where the Coalition stands and that this is indeed a very sad division in what has been a long-standing bipartisan approach in terms of a two-state solution. To go and recognise the state of Palestine this week at the United Nations breaks a fundamental kind of trust between the parties on this particular position, not to mention undermines one of our allies in Israel, not to mention mounts a grand fantasy about how we can determine what will happen in elections in the West Bank at some future time.
CHRIS KENNY: Yet Penny Wong calls this a rogue foreign policy that works against the national interest. Is that responsible?
ZOE MCKENZIE: Most definitely not. And of course, the clips that you’ve taken from what the Foreign Minister has said today are quite disappointing indeed, especially in relation to Israel. She seems to have completely forgotten that all began on the 7th of October, when hundreds of Hamas fighters moved into Israel and slaughtered people in their homes. Six o’clock in the morning, slaughtered them as they were making breakfast, as they were dancing at the dawn at a music festival. And that terror from that day lives on in the hearts and minds of the Israeli people because the hostages are still being held in the tunnels of Gaza. That event for them has not ended. And at this point in time, as the Jewish community in Australia are celebrating the new year, the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister choose to go to New York and to recognise the state of Palestine, based on a series of conditions that frankly can never be met.
CHRIS KENNY: Yet as you’ve just heard, the Foreign Minister has also said very clearly that she believes Israel is not seeking an end to the conflict.
ZOE MCKENZIE: It’s extraordinary. We know that the day France, who was the first mover, said that they would recognise the state of Palestine, that the ceasefire talks that were happening with Hamas that very day ceased. So it sent all the wrong messages to Hamas in terms of what the international community was demanding of them, that being the immediate release of the remaining hostages and putting down their weapons so that peace could be forged and redevelopment of Gaza and re-establishment of peace in the region could be pursued.
CHRIS KENNY: Now, you’ve got a long experience before politics in diplomacy and international negotiations. Why do you believe Donald Trump hasn’t found time for a face-to-face meeting with Anthony Albanese?
ZOE MCKENZIE: It’s a great question because it’s been quite a long time. I remember at the time when President Trump was president-elect and a number of world leaders were going to meet with him and having early conversations when he was in Florida. And the Prime Minister could have done that. I think he was in Peru for APEC. It’s a pretty easy flight from Peru up to Florida. And yet he failed to do that. At the end of the day, whatever you think of President Trump, the United States is our most important strategic ally. We must have a vibrant, deep, permanent relationship and ongoing conversation with the United States. And for the Prime Minister to be unable to have a conversation with the President is utterly bewildering. I suspect that whatever he’s done, between our ambassador in Washington or the comments he’s made here, somewhere the Prime Minister has made an epic fail and our country is at risk as a result. That must be our strongest relationship. And how many hundreds of days? I think we’re almost beyond a year now. Nothing.
CHRIS KENNY: Might be time to bring Kevin Rudd back and try somebody else, I would have thought. Thanks for joining us, Zoe McKenzie. Zoe there, the Member for Flinders in Victoria.
ENDS.
