Top Aussie executive: ‘We are not talking to working Australians in a respectful way, we will pay a high price for that’

Distinguished Australian executive Jennifer Westacott says social cohesion will begin to fray if the cost of living crisis isn’t handled with sensitivity and people’s mental health isn’t properly addressed.

One of Australia’s top executives says we abandon the working class at our peril with social cohesion and hope for the future at risk without intentional change.

In a wide-ranging interview, Jennifer Westacott has also spoken of purpose and her personal life with her partner of 37 years beyond her high profile position as the Chancellor of Western Sydney University.

“We are not talking to working Australians in a respectful way, we are talking around them and I think we will pay a high price for that,” Westacott said on the latest episode of the Mental as Anyone podcast.

Chancellor of Western Sydney University Jennifer Westacott during the recording of the Mental As Anyone podcast with Jonathon Moran. Photographer: Christian Gilles

“These things boil over, they end up in violence, they end up in people doing things they never thought in a million years they would do, they end up with people taking their lives.

“We just have to kind of stop and reset on the cost of living issues because … it is not an inconvenience, it’s a catastrophe. If your daily grind is juggling bills and juggling really fundamental things, not peripheral things, life is a tough existence.

“And we’ve got to do better at talking to people more respectfully and … acknowledging that there are mental health issues associated with cost of living that people are blaming themselves and they are bewildered. They are like, ‘hang on, how do I get through the day?’.”

Westacott is one of a vanishingly small proportion of female business leaders and believes it will be a decade before we see more women in executive positions.

Statistically, 2023 data from the Australian Government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency showed that women made up just 22 per cent of chief executive positions, 37 per cent of key management personnel and 42 per cent of managers in Australia.

“The idea that it was kind of an easy run, it was not, it was hard,” the former chief executive of the Business Council of Australia said.

“It gives you a lot of toughness. And I have to say, it gives you a lot of resilience because you got to be kind of pushing all the time, but it also at times was exhausting, to be honest.”

Westacott, a non-executive director on the Wesfarmers board, attributes the data to “mostly things that are controllable”.

Westacott says it is important to acknowledge that “there are mental health issues associated with cost of living” pressures. Picture:NewsWire / Monique Harmer

“We don’t have enough women in the pipeline of leadership,” she explained on the podcast.

“Too many women are slotted into what I call the corporate affairs HR side of the business, there’s nothing wrong with that. You can’t run a company if you haven’t run the profit and loss, if you haven’t done the actual operations.

“The other thing that’s made it really difficult, which again, we’re working hard to fix, is access to childcare, access to paid parental leave.”

Times are changing though.

“I think in the next decade we’ll see those numbers double,” she said.

“But it takes a long time to turn that ship around, because you’ve got to get people in so that they’re successful in their jobs. This is why I’m a fan of targets, but not quotas, because the last thing you need to do is to have people failing their jobs, because that just creates a whole lot of ignorance and bad perceptions. You need women to be successful in their jobs, and that’s about doing the hard yards of running the profit and loss, running the operations, understanding the business and then getting into a leadership position and then staying there.”

Westacott grew up in public housing on The Central Coast and said she had experienced “my fair share of difficult things” through life.

Jennifer Westacott and Jonathon Moran share a laugh.

She and partner Tess Shannon have been together for nearly four decades.

Westacott came out socially when studying arts at the University of NSW but not professionally until much later at a time where homosexuality was less frowned upon.

“I was most out during the marriage equality debate (2017) because people were like, ‘you’ve got to step up here’,” she said.

“When people started talking about kids that people like me could not be around children and I’d run the child protection system, I’d run the Department of Housing and run the Department of Education, I knew what child protection looked like … that got my blood boiling.”

* A new episode of Mental As Anyone is released each Tuesday.

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