Dialogue Done Differently – Jennifer Westacott AC
She’s one of Australia’s most respected business identities with leadership positions at Western Sydney University, KPMG, Wesfarmers and more. But how does Jennifer Westacott AC find the energy to drive change in Greater Western Sydney, and across the country? This edition of Dialogue Done Differently shows a different side to Ms Westacott; her love of golf, the inspiring story of her tough upbringing in public housing and the biggest regret she has from her decades-long career, which she says, is nowhere near finished.
AL = Adam Leto | CEO, Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue
JW: Jennifer Westacott AC | Western Sydney University, Bradfield Development Authority, KPMG, Wesfarmers, Reserve Bank of Australia
AL: Talk to me about golf – it’s obviously a big passion of yours, how did you get started?
JW: It started by absolute accident. My partner and I were down in a place called Crackenback, staying in a resort sort of thing there in the middle of summer, we decided to go walking in the Snowies. There was this little par three golf course and we just started walking around and playing golf and I thought, this is fantastic, and I wasn’t too bad at it.
AL: Were you a sporty child growing up?
JW: Oh yeah, I was a pretty strong hockey player. I played hockey for UNSW, and I really loved squash. I miss playing it actually. In fact, when we build the Sports Centre at Western Sydney University, I’ve said to Bill [Parasiris], we’re putting a squash court in!
AL: You’ve got a lot on your plate these days, how do you find the time for things like golf?
JW: I think if you’ve got a busy life, and lots of people have got busy lives, you’ve got to do three really important things. The first is to establish an absolutely consistent routine.
I get up at a very early hour in the morning, read all the newspapers, do all my emails, make sure that I’m sort of set for the day, and then, subject to having to not go somewhere, I go for my morning walk. Everyone knows, maybe don’t call between quarter to seven and quarter to eight, and then I go to work, come home, and if it’s summer, I’ll go and have a swim. The second is prioritize what matters, you tend to get better at that as you get older.
And the third is plan for leisure. I don’t play golf every week anymore. I’d love to, but I do make sure that once every three weeks I’ve got a game of golf scheduled with my grandson. I think the crucial thing when you’re busy is to have structure, have routine, have prioritization, and be productive when you must be.
AL: Do you think that you’re a workaholic?
JW: I’m a bit of a workaholic I think. A lot of people think time is the equivalent to productivity.
Time is equivalent to effectiveness. Concentration is equivalent to effectiveness, prioritization is equivalent to effectiveness.
When I pick up that Wesfarmers board pack, I don’t go to page one I go to a particular section that I know is the most important thing we’re going to talk about at that board meeting. And then I work my way around the papers based on prioritization.
If you’re doing things that you enjoy, and you’re doing things where you think that you’re making a difference, you can find a lot of time in your diary, and I just don’t use time inefficiently.
AL: Looking back on your professional journey – any regrets?
JW: I think when you’re going back through your life, you could always have spent more time at home and you sort of wished you had more time. But do I regret that? No, not really.
The big regret I have had is that KPMG once asked me to go and live in London and run one of their big global practices, and we just had a lot of personal circumstances at the time and I said no. That is the one decision I’ve always regretted, because I think getting to live, albeit I’d lived in London when I was on scholarship although that was living in kind of semi poverty, going and living in a place like London where you’re working for a big firm like KPMG would have been an incredible experience. That’s the one regret I have that I didn’t take that role.
AL: You’ve had to overcome a fair bit of adversity to get to this point…how has that helped shape your personal and professional outlook?
JW: Most people know I came from a very disadvantaged background, a very violent home, in many respects a pretty dysfunctional family. I’m not the only person who’s ever come from that background. I lived on a public housing estate, and I think what does that give you? It gives you great insight into a sense of unfairness. So that’s what I had as a kid, this sense that life was not fair because my parents weren’t career people. They had jobs and they worked hard, and they often had times of being unemployed when things weren’t good in the economies. They just couldn’t get ahead. What gave them a kind of bit of a leg up was getting into public housing. But before that, things were extremely difficult, very difficult.
My family was so embarrassed to talk about where they lived because that housing estate was sort of like a joke at school. People were embarrassed to say ‘I lived at Springfield’. We used to write East Gosford on the Christmas cards and people just make a whole lot of assumptions about people, about what expectations they can have in life, what their trajectory in life is going to be.
I’ve just always had this sense of pushing against that unfairness, pushing against that sense of injustice and wanting to sort of be part of whatever movement you could be that gives people that sense of hope and purpose. I think a lot of Australians just get up every morning and they just cannot see how they’re going to get ahead. And I know that for my family, that was heartbreaking. Every Christmas was not a joyous time. It was a nightmare. Birthdays were a struggle. School excursions, you just didn’t go to them.
AL: That fight for equity and fairness is something that has shone through, via your roles with WSU and Bradfield Development Authority?
JW: I’m kind of willing to turn that conversation around about Western Sydney, as you have, to say this is the land of potential, this is the land of opportunity. This is not the land of disadvantage. And I think all of us have got this collective responsibility to stop that language of poor old Western Sydney. There’s a structural unfairness there that still has to be fixed, but I think that this is the place where, I’m trying to get the big global companies in there.
The people who are passing through the doors of that building now at Bradfield would blow your mind, and I’m excited about that, but we got a long way to go, obviously, but I just didn’t have a sense of just how much innovation was already in that economy.
AL: You’ve built a strong reputation around business, education and innovation – but recently we’ve seen you take a bigger stance on some of the health and social issues in Western Sydney – specifically mental health. What would you like to see happen to help shine the spotlight on this issue?
JW: We kind of know what to do, but we just don’t seem to get coordination to do it. First of all, we need to make sure we really protect young people, so the headspace programs, but also the work we’re doing in schools, around psychosocial safety, around kids using social media, around education about the signs of mental health.
The second thing we need to do is change the attitude about recovery and functionality. So there’s kind of this stigma that if you’ve got a mental illness, you can’t recover and you can’t participate. And of course, that’s just simply not true.
Then we’ve got to think about services. When people are very ill, the data that always really depresses me is the number of people who present with a suicide attempt, who are discharged, who then have another attempt and are successful, that that says something is awfully wrong with the way the acute inpatient system discharges people, and yet we know great, hard working clinicians are in that system doing their best.
I just think we need total system reform. I think you can break that down into chunks, but we’ve also then got to keep momentum, because I get very depressed every 10 years where we have another royal commission, and we all say it’s a disaster.
AL: You’ve got a number of big jobs, roles that carry serious responsibilities – is there a lighter side to Jennifer Westacott?
JW: I mean, everyone has a light side. I have a light side. I think most people who know me would say I was pretty funny. We used to have a lot of theme parties. I think, for my 40th we did a cabaret, for my 50th we did South Pacific, and we just put the whole show on for people. I think everyone has a light side. I have this great rolling set of jokes with my grandson and I think if most people, heard that conversation they would say, is that the same Jennifer Westacott on Sky News?
AL: Has there ever been any thought of hanging up the boots?
JW: There’s more to come. So many people said to me when I left the Business Council, why don’t you just go and play golf? And I love golf, but it would not be enough. It would not satisfy me at all. You get to a kind of leadership position in society, you’ve got to decide to yourself, well, do you pick up the golf clubs, or do you keep going? Who knows how long we’ve got on this planet. You’ve got to use the advantage you’ve been given in life to give someone else an advantage, and to give people across the board an advantage.
I call the university my spiritual home. I’m really diving into that, I call Bradfield my other spiritual home, because I fundamentally believe that what we’re doing there is changing the economic course of Western Sydney.
There’s a young girl out there at the moment, I won’t say her name, a kid from Mount Druitt who didn’t finish school and did her HSC through TAFE. She’s now an apprentice at the Advanced Manufacturing Readiness Facility, and I am going to get that girl into university, if it kills me.
And there’s thousands of people like her, and so, you know, I’m just going to keep going.
I’m also absolutely committed to institutional success. My work at KPMG, helping government, my work on the Reserve Bank board, these are important things to do.
So it’s that institutional stuff, but it’s also that stuff where you get a chance to change some people’s lives. And in 20 or 30 years’ time, what I’m hoping is that Bradfield has driven this massive change in western Sydney’s economy, and there are thousands of these kids who’ve got a pathway into an advanced job, a great income and a terrific life.
