Matt Keogh

Biography

Matthew James Keogh is an Australian politician who was born on November 11, 1981, in Armadale, Western Australia. He belongs to the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and has been serving as the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs and Minister for Defence Personnel in the Albanese government since 2022. Keogh is a member of the House of Representatives, representing the Western Australian seat of Burt, which he has held since 2016. Before entering politics, he worked as a lawyer.

Keogh spent his childhood in the Kelmscott Hills and attended Mazenod College. Later, he pursued a Bachelor of Arts (Hons.) in politics and history and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Notre Dame Australia. While studying, he worked as a customer service officer for iiNet and also worked as a clerk and bookkeeper at his mother’s law firm, Travers & Keogh. He went on to work as a policy officer at the state Department of Premier and Cabinet from 2003 to 2005. In 2006, Keogh became a prosecutor at the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions before joining private practice as a commercial lawyer with Herbert Smith Freehills in 2011. He was president of the Law Society of Western Australia in 2015 and a director of the Law Council of Australia.

Keogh joined the Australian Labor Party in 1997 and served as state president of Young Labor in 2007. He is affiliated with the Labor Right faction. He contested the September 2015 federal by-election in Canning as the Labor candidate but was unsuccessful. In the 2016 federal election, Keogh won the seat of Burt, which included a third of Canning’s old territory. He served as the deputy chair of the Labor Caucus, was appointed the Labor Opposition Waste Watch spokesperson, and became a member of several committees, including the House Economics Committee, the House Agriculture & Water Committee, and the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services. Keogh was re-elected in 2019 and was elected to the Labor front bench, where he held the portfolios of Shadow Minister for Defence Industry, Shadow Minister for WA Resources, and Shadow Minister Assisting for Small and Family Business.

Following the ALP’s victory in the 2022 federal election, Keogh was appointed as the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs and Minister for Defence Personnel in the Albanese government. Keogh met his wife while studying law, and they married in 2011. They have two sons.