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I meet Allen on Chapel Street in South Yarra, the suburb where she boarded at Melbourne Girls Grammar and one of the enduring anchors of her life. She lives in neighbouring Toorak, and represented the former seat of Higgins from 2019 to 2022.
Abacus Kitchen and Bar, where we sit at an airy corner table, is her local – a place she drops into with her children when they visit Prahran Market.
Katie Allen.Credit: Simon Schluter
Before we order, Allen continues to talk me through her diagnosis. While the public only learnt of her cancer after election day in May, she had kept it a secret for 18 months, a decision that left her feeling like she was fighting it alone.
Now she speaks about it without hesitation, which she says can be too much for some. It’s as if she is finally exhaling after holding her breath for far too long.
Returning to November 2023 – the morning after Jemima noticed her yellowing eyes – Allen found the second sign she had been dreading: white stool.
Now in Point Lonsdale, she and her husband Malcolm had planned a quiet Melbourne Cup weekend. From there, they immediately drove to Geelong Hospital for a scan. Within an hour, a doctor walked in, sat down and told her simply: “You’ve got a one-centimetre lesion in your pancreas.”
“She didn’t try and explain it, she didn’t try and take away the pain because you can’t,” Allen says. “She knew that I knew what that meant.”
It was cholangiocarcinoma – a cancer of the bile ducts that is rare, aggressive and notoriously hard to treat.
As a doctor, Allen had delivered news like this to parents before. Now she was on the other side.
“I wept and she waited.”
Allen recognised instantly the dissociation she had seen so often.
“The shutters come down … you have to give them the bare bones and then say nothing else. I knew that was happening with me.”
Within days, she was in surgery. Her tumour was removed, but the risk of recurrence was high – almost inevitable. She and Malcolm discussed stopping work, selling the house, travelling.
“But it is just not us,” she said.
They agreed instead to carry on. She told fewer than a dozen people: her four children – Monty, 29; Jemima, 26; Arabella, 24; and Archie, 22 – and a handful of close family.
With the preselection for Higgins days away, Allen even kept the truth from her staff, claiming she’d had her gall bladder removed. She refused to trigger a sympathy vote.
“I didn’t want to be defined by the C-word,” she says. “I didn’t want people to vote for me, or not, because I had cancer.”
Only after recounting the diagnosis do we turn to lunch. Allen orders the prawn and blue swimmer crab cake with confit kipfler, pickled watermelon radish and squid ink; I choose the Mooloolaba grilled swordfish with reef coconut sauce, potatoes and pangrattato. We share a plate of broccolini.
Allen is trying to put on weight. She is noticeably lighter, but she remains bright, animated and determinedly stylish, pausing to reapply her trademark pink lipstick before a photo.
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As her colleagues in Canberra would attest, Allen has always been forthright, but now she speaks with the certainty of someone who knows exactly how precious time is: “Malcolm said a couple of weeks ago, ‘this is a bitch of a disease but gosh it has brought some beautiful moments’.”
In the two years since she was diagnosed, there is a new rule in the Allen household: you always order the good stuff.
“You go out for dinner, and you have the extra, or you order the champagne, and you get the French, you just say ‘why the f--- not’,” she grins.
But the extra bottles of Dom aren’t for Allen. She stopped drinking 12 years ago – ironically, to reduce her cancer risk. At Abacus, we indulge in tall glasses of homemade lemonade.
If her illness has taken much from her, it has also drawn her already tight-knit family closer together. In 2024, all four of her children were living or studying in Britain. But when December came, they all flew home to spend time with their mum – the cancer still a secret. Subtle excuses kept the extended clan away, allowing a two-week cocoon at home.
‘The kids are amazing, they are my greatest story … They are very loving children.’
Katie Allen“I was crying the whole time,” Allen tells me through floods of tears. “It was the best two weeks of my life ... It was so gorgeous.”
Her children created a treasure hunt for her Christmas present, hiding gifts in the places she is at her happiest, like a book for the hammock in the garden.
“The kids are amazing, they are my greatest story … They are very loving children.”
This month she became a grandmother for the first time, a milestone that brings both joy and a fierce determination to keep going.
Allen’s own childhood was similarly close. Born in 1966, she grew up in Albury, where her father Bill was a much-loved local physician. She tagged along on his ward rounds at seven, the moment medicine imprinted itself.
“He loved what he did, he had a beautiful bedside manner.”
After boarding school at Melbourne Girls Grammar – where her grandmother, mother and daughters were also educated – she briefly flirted with journalism, making it to the final six for a cadetship at a Melbourne newspaper. Monash medicine won out.
Two decades before that fateful Cup weekend when she was diagnosed with cancer, Allen met her husband trackside at Flemington on Cup weekend. It was 1988, Empire Rose won the two-mile race, but Allen insists she “snagged” the best prize – an Englishman called Malcolm.
“He kissed me and we have never looked back. We have been together ever since. I have never looked at another man. Never thought about another man. He is my rock.”
Back in that Geelong hospital room, it was Malcolm – a management consultant – who refused to let the diagnosis upend their lives. Through floods of tears, Allen recalls turning to her husband, who was already encouraging her not to give up on her dream of returning to Canberra.
“Oh Malcolm, it’s over,” she told him.
While she absorbed the emotional shock, he shifted instantly into what she calls management mode – encouraging her to run for Higgins, even as she recovered from surgery.
“I was doing it to keep him happy,” she admits. “He just wants to keep kicking the cancer can down the road.”
Allen went on to win preselection for Higgins. Five months later, the seat would be abolished in a redistribution, forcing her into a bruising contest for neighbouring Chisholm. In September 2024, she defeated the preselected candidate, Theo Zographos, to secure the party’s endorsement.
“Now and then, if someone would do something really mean, I would think ‘If only you knew I had cancer’,” she jokes.
Katie Allen outside a polling booth on election day in May 2022.Credit: Scott McNaughton
By early 2025, with the federal election approaching, her symptoms crept back. Mild abdominal pain at first, then more unmistakable signs. She knew she should see a doctor, but put it off – a delay she now recognises as denial.
A conga line of Liberal colleagues visited Chisholm to help her campaign. She never once revealed her private health battle.
She knows the ethics of running while harbouring a cancer diagnosis will always prompt debate – voters deserve transparency and candidates owe them the full picture.
Allen grappled with the possibility of winning, relapsing, and triggering a by-election, but her family pushed her to live fully, not withdraw.
“My family all said it’s better I get in there and do it.”
A tropical cyclone pushed the election to May, stretching out the campaign as her health deteriorated. Some nights she plunged into the pool three times to soothe the pain.
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“I rang my doctor and said ‘I am deteriorating’ and she knew what that meant.”
Still, she did not want her illness to influence the result.
On May 3, she lost Chisholm. The following Monday, she was in hospital for tests and immediately started chemotherapy. The cancer had spread.
After the relapse, she said her prognosis “dropped significantly”, shifting her into what oncologists call a different “prognostic environment”. She doesn’t like the term “terminal” but acknowledges it is incurable.
Still, she holds tight to what she calls “deluded hope” – the stories of rare patients who defy the averages.
“There are some people who are the outliers who last a year or two, and you want to be the outlier.
“I know it is deluded hope, but what else have you got.”
A new clinical trial – one she nearly missed – has given her new hope. Before that, she had just wanted to make it to Christmas.
“If you are on a treatment with no side effects, that is a good quality of life.”
Allen is approaching life with vulnerability and pragmatism, largely free of regrets – except for Canberra, where she wishes she had done more to champion the party’s moderate faction.
“I went in to change the Liberal Party from the inside … but I completely and utterly failed. I did my best, but I didn’t make much difference.”
During her time in Canberra, she crossed the floor on the religious discrimination bill to vote on amendments that would prohibit vilification of and discrimination against children based on sexuality and gender identity, protecting all LGBTIQ+ students.
She also joined colleagues pushing for the Murugappan family to be returned to Biloela. And she was part of the internal push to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.
She jokes that she should have been “the Pauline Hanson of the moderates”, but said she mostly remained quiet when she should have spoken up.
Despite the recent turmoil in the state and federal Liberal parties, Allen hasn’t given up. She sees promise in younger women such as Jess Wilson and Amelia Hamer, whose rise she has quietly supported – even hosting events for Hamer as her health wobbled.
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Her medical background means she does not romanticise what lies ahead. She supports Victoria’s voluntary assisted dying laws for others but doesn’t wish to use them saying she has great faith in the health system.
When her time does come – a date she hopes has been pushed further back thanks to her new trial – she hopes to spend her final days at home.
But she is not grieving her life.
“If I were to look at the ledger of life, I have had a very fortunate life. If you were to put on one side the terrible health condition I have been handed versus all the things that have happened to me and my beautiful family, I am still way ahead.
“I am having the most wonderful life.”
