[3] McKew currently lives in the Sydney suburb of Epping with her partner, former ALP National Secretary Bob Hogg.

A letter requesting a job—written by McKew on BBC letterhead paper—was rewarded with a cadetship at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in Brisbane in 1974 following a brief stint as a news analyst at the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

[9] From 1999 to 2004 she wrote Lunch with Maxine McKew, a column for The Bulletin, a weekly magazine, based on her interviews with prominent Australians.

McKew frequently elicited newsworthy revelations from her subjects, and was named by The Australian Financial Review as "one of the top ten exercisers of covert power in Australia".

[10] Following her election as the member for Bennelong in 2007, the Canberra Times had a photo of McKew in a Basic Instinct moment, referring to the scene where Sharon Stone was allegedly not wearing underwear.

Latham recorded in his diary that his efforts failed because the broadcaster would not move from her home in Mosman to Labor's outer-suburban heartland, an area which he represented as the Member for Werriwa,[15] while McKew told ABC Radio that a big factor in her 2003 decision was that she regarded the party as being without direction at the time.

The Australian reported in early February that McKew was again in contention to gain preselection for the Division of Fowler, a safe Labor seat held by Julia Irwin who had supported Kim Beazley in the December leadership ballot.

A previous week's Morgan poll conducted for the website Crikey put Labor's two-party preferred vote in the seat at 55%.

"[23] In a press conference held on 26 November, McKew declared Bennelong "a Labor seat for the first time", but stopped short of formally claiming victory.

Less than a week after the official declaration of her victory, McKew launched a book and described the Howard era of government as one characterised by "brutish" politics.

[34] McKew works for Social Ventures Australia, advising on education issues,[35][36] and is a Vice Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

[40] McKew is a long-term participant in the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue, a bipartisan bilateral civil diplomatic initiative founded by Melbourne businessman Phil Scanlan.

Emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed McKew had encouraged the scrutinising of Lebanese Australian Muslim poet Omar Sakr's social media to monitor his support of Palestine and views about the Israel-Hamas war.

She added: "It doesn’t mean we vet everyone for their social and political views, but it does mean on a subject such as Gaza/Israel we have a duty to be absolutely thorough and super careful about the way language is used by the people we engage.

After this was made public, McKew told The Guardian that her decisions were informed by "the policy of political neutrality which covers all the major Victorian cultural institutions" that the library had been "entirely consistent" in applying.