Axed by Abbott, backed by crowdfunders: How Amanda McKenzie keeps finding hope in a crisis

When Amanda McKenzie – climate wunderkind, activist for hope and Climate Council chief executive – and her husband and two young children came down with COVID-19 recently, she got out the roller skates.

She and her husband unearthed some jigsaw puzzles, turned their living room into a makeshift roller rink, and told the kids to have fun.

As she tells this story over lunch, I’m struck by two things. First, it says a lot about their commitment to community that McKenzie and her husband chose to lock down their family at home for a week, regardless of whether they were still symptomatic.

We’re meeting at Patsy’s, a tranquil up-market vegetarian wine bar in Melbourne’s inner north, where almost all the produce prepared in the kitchen is grown in the owner’s regenerative farm in Victoria’s Central Highlands.

McKenzie has nominated this lunch spot, which seems an almost too-perfect choice to interview one of the most senior women in Australia’s environment movement.

“I’m quite a utilitarian eater, but my husband has a very bougie, foodie vibe, so he’s made me more of a foodie,” she says. “I think if I was just left to my own devices, I’d be just eating a salad … premixed leaves with sun-dried tomatoes or something.”

Today, McKenzie eschews wine in favour of a pot of English breakfast tea, while I order a hibiscus spritz mocktail. It is a bougie wine bar, after all.

McKenzie has lived almost half her life in the public eye, although she isn’t necessarily a household name outside environment circles. Her first leadership role came 20 years ago when, aged 23, she co-founded the Australian Youth Climate Coalition with fellow law graduate Anna Rose.

The pair hit the ground running, growing a fledgling coalition of 27 youth groups to a national organisation numbering 100,000 members three years later.

Back then, as she travelled around organising meetings and strategic campaigns, McKenzie often found herself the only woman in the room. There were many who underestimated this young woman and the importance of the message she was trying to convey.

“I talked about [the impacts on our] kids and grandchildren, and it strikes me now, these kids I was talking about 20 years ago, they’re here: they’re eight and five, and experiencing the impacts already.”

Without intending to, it was former prime minister Tony Abbott who lit the fuse that propelled McKenzie into making her life’s mission the fight against climate change.

In 2011, she joined the fledgling Australian Climate Commission as a senior communications adviser, determined to shift public debate on Australia’s changing climate.

The commission was established by former prime minister Julia Gillard and led by Professor Tim Flannery.