Penny Wong

Penelope Ying-Yen Wong (born 5 November 1968) is an Australian politician who is serving as the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Leader of the Government in the Senate in the Albanese government since 2022. A member of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), she has been a senator for South Australia since 2002. Wong previously served as Minister for Climate Change and Minister for Finance and Deregulation during the governments of prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard from 2007 until 2013.

Born in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia, to a Chinese-Malaysian father from the town of Sandakan and an English-Australian mother from Adelaide, Wong was educated at Scotch College prior to attending the University of Adelaide, graduating with Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws degrees. She then worked as a lawyer and political advisor. Wong entered politics by winning a Senate seat in the 2001 election.

Following Labor's victory in the 2007 election, she was appointed Australia's first-ever Minister for Climate Change, going on to represent the country at the landmark 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Following the 2010 election, Wong was moved to become Minister for Finance and Deregulation, and in June 2013, she was elected by her colleagues to become Leader of the Government in the Senate. Following Labor's defeat in the 2013 election, Wong held several roles in the shadow cabinets of both Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese, serving as Leader of the Opposition in the Senate throughout. Upon Labor's victory at the 2022 election, Wong was appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs, and resumed her role as Leader of the Government in the Senate.

In 2008, she became the first Asian-Australian in an Australian cabinet. She was also the first female openly LGBTI Australian federal parliamentarian, and was an instrumental figure in the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Australia in 2017, reversing her previous endorsement of Labor Party policy that had opposed it. On 6 March 2024, Wong became longest-serving female cabinet minister in the history of the Australian Parliament.

Penelope Ying-Yen Wong was born on 5 November 1968 in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, which had become part of the Federation of Malaysia in 1963. Her parents were Jane (née Chapman) (died 2024), an English Australian whose forebears first reached South Australia on Cygnet in 1836, and Francis Wong (1941–2023), a Chinese-Malaysian architect-cum-town-planner of mixed Cantonese and Hakka descent who hailed from Sandakan, the former capital and second-largest city or town located in the state's east coast. Penny Wong's parents had met in the early 1960s, when Francis Wong was studying architecture at the University of Adelaide under the Colombo Plan. Wong grew up speaking Bahasa Malaysia (particularly the Sabahan dialect), Chinese (her native vernacular dialects of Cantonese and Hakka) in addition to English which was her first or home language spoken to her mixed-race parents. At five years old, she began attending the Kinabalu International School. After her parents separated, she moved to Adelaide, South Australia, at the age of eight with her mother and younger brother.

After starting at Coromandel Valley Primary School, Wong gained a scholarship to Scotch College, Adelaide, where she studied chemistry, physics and mathematics. During her time at Scotch College, Wong toured New Caledonia as part of her French-language studies, performed in school productions of plays such as Six Characters in Search of an Author, and co-captained the hockey team.

She was accepted into the Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery at the University of Adelaide, but after spending a year on exchange in Brazil, found she had an aversion to blood. She then studied and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Jurisprudence and a Bachelor of Laws with Honours at the University of Adelaide in 1993, followed by a Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice at the University of South Australia.

Through her friendship with David Penberthy, who had also been on exchange in Latin America, Wong joined the Socialist Workers Party-sponsored Committee in Solidarity with Central America and the Caribbean (CISCAC) while at university in 1987, but was not an active member. Wong's connections with CISCAC brought her in contact with a broader group of left-wing activists who opposed the Hawke Labor government's planned changes to university fees. In a July 1988 election, Wong won a position on the board of the Adelaide University Union as part of the newly formed Progressive Education Team. One month later, while protesting outside a state Labor Party convention at the Adelaide Trades Hall, Wong had a conversation with Young Labor member Lois Boswell, who told her that "if you wanted to really make a difference, you had to be inside the room having that battle." Wong joined the Labor Party that day; she credits her decision to her conversation with Boswell, and the Liberal-National Coalition's new "One Australia" policy opposing multiculturalism and Asian immigration.