Penny Wong

Penny Wong (born 5 November 1968) is an Australian politician who has served as Australia's Minister for Foreign Affairs since 2022 and as a Senator for South Australia representing the Australian Labor Party since 2002, also serving as Leader of the Government in the Senate.

In July 2025, Michael Salla highlighted a clip from an Australian Senate exchange in which Wong was asked by a senator whether she was aware of reports that U.S. military exercises had been cancelled because of UAP observations. Wong appeared to giggle before responding, and framed her concern in conventional national-security terms — "my biggest fear is that some adversary has made a technological leap... that would be really bad news and that we have been caught... flat footed on it" — while acknowledging the stigma attached to the subject: "There's a stigma associated with it, right? Nobody wants to be known as the UFO guy."

The exchange was cited as an instance of the persistent "giggle factor" — the stigma that, by Wong's own account, deters senior officials from engaging publicly with the subject — rather than as any disclosure of Australian government knowledge.

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