Zoe McKenzie MP
Shadow Cabinet Secretary
Shadow Assistant Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations
Federal Member for Flinders
TRANSCRIPT – ABC AFTERNOON BRIEFING WITH PATRICIA KARVELAS AND JEROME LAXALE
Thursday, 19 March 2026
Topics: Iran war; Australian economy.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: I want to bring in my political panel for today. Jerome Laxale is the Labor MP for Bennelong. Zoe McKenzie is the Shadow Assistant Minister for Employment. Welcome to both of you.
ZOE MCKENZIE: Thanks PK.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: There’s pretty dire news coming out of the Middle East. If you look at financial markets across the world, if you look at the oil price, things are looking quite ugly. The Treasurer’s speech today was absolutely sobering and even alarming. I’ll start with you, Jerome. Are we about to enter a kind of COVID-like financial crisis?
JEROME LAXALE: Well, let’s hope not, PK, but we need to be honest with the Australian people, and I think that’s what the Treasurer has outlined today. I share your concerns, you know, reading the reports every morning as I wake up and throughout the day seeing this war continue to escalate, it’s concerning. Attacking energy infrastructure, red lines being crossed left, right and centre. So, yeah, it’s a real concern, not only for the people and Australians that are over there, but also the global economy. I hope the war ends soon.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: Zoe, already we’ve got this national coordinator to coordinate where fuel goes. Presumably that could look at lots of measures if we don’t have enough and this continues. Are we entering a new phase of crisis?
ZOE MCKENZIE: Let’s hope the national coordinator takes the power and the narrative out of the hands of the energy minister. Remember at the start of last week he said there was no problem, everything was fine, just don’t go out and buy too much fuel. By the end of the week it was a national crisis. I’ve been out and about in schools in my electorate this week and you’d be amazed how many kids, grade sixes, year sevens, year eights are saying to me, “Are we going to run out of fuel?” I have never ever heard that question from children. “Are we going to run out of fuel? Will we be able to afford fuel? Will my parents be able to get me to school?” So this is terrible planning by this government and indeed what you’ve heard from Jim Chalmers today was just endless bad news. In part because none of the hard work has been done by this government for the previous four years. No careful planning of the economy, no setting aside debt, no management of inflation. So, we now have layer upon layer of inflation. The Reserve Bank is doing the heavy lifting and indeed the forecast from the Treasurer today who seemed very keen to blame everyone but himself is that it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Now if you’re one of the Australian families who have got $1500 less in your back pocket because your purchasing power has decreased under this term of government, that is very bad news indeed.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: How about the things that the Prime Minister had to say today? Jerome, the Prime Minister says hopefully you can see the end point of the war. He’s also declared that the key objectives of the war against Iran have now been achieved. Have they? I mean, that’s not what the US has said.
JEROME LAXALE: Well, look, the US obviously started this war along with Israel and they’ll be held accountable for that and for the reasons in which they did. What we did support, though, was the denuclearisation of Iran. That objective seems to be complete. I guess what the world wasn’t expecting was this escalation across the region and that’s what’s put you know certainly energy supplies both in oil but also gas under extreme pressure. Just touching on what Zoe said earlier…
PATRICIA KARVELAS: You say seems to be complete. On what basis is it complete? Like where’s the evidence that it’s complete?
JEROME LAXALE: Well, you’ve seen the US say that the nuclear infrastructure has been obliterated, their ballistic missile program, by reports that we’re all reading and watching through your show, PK, have shown US targets on military infrastructure. It’s a regime that has been weakened, and that is a good thing. What isn’t a good thing is the escalation across the region, that Australians are threatened, not only in Iran, but across other countries as well, and that’s what we have concerns about. I share the Prime Minister’s concerns that this war may go on for much longer than it needs to. And I think we’re right to continue to argue for a de-escalation.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: Just to be clear, US intelligence says what you’ve just described, that that was effectively complete last year.
JEROME LAXALE: Well, we’re not privy to the intelligence that the US had for the commencement of this war, and I’m sure, I’m hopeful that it will come out in good time. Israel and the US made a decision to start this war. They’re in it. We’re hopeful that it ends sooner rather than later.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: But your government backed it in and this is the question. Zoe, Was that a mistake? I mean, look at the consequences for Australians. Isn’t it the job of Australian politicians to think of the national interest in Australians’ interests first? How can this war possibly be in Australia’s material interests if you look at some of the projections and the energy prices people are already playing?
ZOE MCKENZIE: To be fair, I hate to do this government’s publicity, but the main involvement of the Australian ADF is to keep secure the 115,000 Australians who live in the Gulf area and indeed our military bases there and our personnel. So that has been our engagement. I don’t see any evidence that this war is finished. Indeed, in the last 24 hours, we’ve had the attacks on Iran’s gas fields, and I suspect that things will amp up before they amp down. In terms of your ability to plan, we have been making that point about this government for the last four years. We’ve been unable to send a ship that could have been helpful because we don’t have a ship that’s ship-shaped to go. We’ve been unable to assist in other ways that may have been helpful to our own residents in that part of the world. We’ve been able to send one aircraft and that is indeed something to help in terms of surveillance. But I don’t think there was any appropriate planning. It’s quite clear that we are not ready to assist if called up at short notice.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: Should we be assisting though if called up at short notice?
ZOE MCKENZIE: To be fair, I think we are all on a unified ticket when it comes to the Iran regime and the terrible misery that it has enforced upon its people. I would have obviously preferred, as I suspect most of our allies would have, that there had been some discussions before active action was taken in the Gulf states. But it is what it is, and I think ultimately we all wanted to see a denuclearised Iran, and that is at least happening through this conflict. The flow-on effects, that’s something that the government needs to think about and manage and be ready for. And starting last week by denying that there was a problem, when in fact in electorates like mine, diesel had gone up from about 198 to about 274, it’s now well over 280, was just denying that there’s a problem.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: Jerome, do Australians have any reason to be optimistic about their financial future, their living standards, after the Treasurer outlined a really bleak picture?
JEROME LAXALE: It’s a bleak time. There’s no denying that. You look across the world, we’ve got two wars raging. We’ve of course got our own economic challenges. But we’ve spent our entire time in government being honest with Australians about the situation that we’re facing and working on it. We’ve found savings at each and every budget over $114 billion. We’ve paid down Liberal debt. We’ve invested in people through higher real wages over the term that’s under pressure at the moment. But I just really take objection to some of the comments from Zoe there about not being prepared, particularly when it comes to fuel. Like, we’re in a better situation under this government than we were in the last one. We had more fuel in reserve in 2023 than we did under the former government’s policy. So we have been taking the job of preparing for our energy security and fuel security seriously, and we will do the same with the economy. The Treasurer has been very open about this budget being one that he’d like to see a lot of reform. I would back that in and I’m working as closely as I can with the Treasurer’s office and with other ministers to try and see us tackle those really difficult intergenerational equity issues that constituents in my electorate talk to me about all the time.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: Zoe, a lot of people talk about big reform. It looks like the government is getting us ready for some big changes when it comes to the tax system, isn’t this the right time to make these big changes?
ZOE MCKENZIE: Well, one may have said that they’ve had four years to make significant changes to put the Australian economy on better footing. Remember, we had the productivity circus, can’t remember exactly what it was, but we weren’t allowed to talk about AI and we weren’t allowed to talk about industrial relations. Nothing has been done to drive up productivity in this country. And at the same time, sometime in the next few days, we’re going to tick over a trillion dollars debt. I don’t think this government has done anything near enough to put us in the best possible position to find ourselves a bit flat footed. These are the times when you should make the most of your good economic conditions, start to pay down debt, but debt is actually still growing. It will hit that trillion-dollar mark sometime in future days.
JEROME LAXALE: We’ve paid down debt, $176 billion of debt we’ve paid down. I saved $60 billion in interest payments.
ZOE MCKENZIE: A trillion is still a trillion, Jerome.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: We will keep debating the budget, I suspect, for the next couple of months. Thank you to both of you.
JEROME LAXALE: Thank you.
ENDS.
