Diane Smith-Gander on life, corporate politics and breaking up the boys club

Within moments of taking our seats in the back corner of the Grand Orient, Diane Smith-Gander is waved down by a friendly face and congratulated on her latest appointment.

“Will you have the school gown and everything? Look at you,” I hear over my left shoulder, before spotting former Australian diplomat and investment adviser John Goodlad.

Between lodging an interview request with her assistant and our lunch at the five-star Melbourne Hotel on Milligan Street, the corporate heavyweight has added yet another role to her lengthy resume.

Diane Smith-Gander at the Grand Orient in Perth.Credit: Ross Swanborough.

Fifty years after she first wandered the halls of the University of Western Australia as a student, Smith-Gander will succeed former chief justice Robert French to become its 16th chancellor.

Smith-Gander says she’s excited about the role. But despite being widely considered one of the state’s most successful business leaders, she concedes this appointment is different — daunting even.

“I’ve never had so many congratulatory emails, texts, LinkedIn messages and WhatsApp notifications, and there’s a little thread in there: Don’t you break our university,” she tells me, as Goodlad returns to his table.

The 66-year-old says she finds comfort in knowing she will have the backing of the Business School Advisory Board she dubs her “secret weapon”, which counts Wesfarmers boss Rob Scott, Woodside chief Meg O’Neill, and property developer Adrian Fini among its members.

Five years after becoming the first woman to helm the advisory board in the university’s 113-year history, Smith-Gander has become the first to occupy the chancellor’s office.

She tells me a recent visit to the university’s senate room lined with the portraits of her predecessors has her thinking about how she will mark the occasion.

“I was thinking I have to do something really different, maybe posing in my university basketball uniform or have a photograph rather than a portrait. Why not break the mould?” she says.

Smith-Gander arrived at the Nedlands campus in 1974 at the age of 17 to study science intending to make the switch to law until she decided to abandon the pursuit altogether.

She spent several years working and playing on the state basketball team before marrying the man who would convince her to return to university and enrol in economics, a subject her father taught.

Before graduating in 1984, Smith-Gander thought her interest in social psychology and labor relations might have led her to become a union steward or follow her parents into teaching.

But she credits her first husband’s influence with changing that and sparking an interest in business that would change the trajectory of her life.

Diane Smith-Gander being interviewed by WAtoday’s Jesinta Burton at the Grand Orient in Perth.Credit: Ross Swanborough.

Smith-Gander ventured east to study a master of business administration, rising through the ranks to become general manager at Westpac before spending eight years working at multinational consulting firm McKinsey between the United States and Hong Kong.

It was there she acquired a love of Cantonese cuisine, she tells me, while insisting I try the Grand Orient’s Peking duck pancakes.

After two decades, Smith-Gander returned home to Perth as the global financial crisis hit.

It was there she shifted from financial services to company director, acquiring board roles with Australian conglomerate Wesfarmers, grain cooperative CBH Group, Keystart and NBN Co.

In the years that followed her portfolio expanded, from Commissioner of Tourism WA to chair of fintech Zip Co, mining services company Perenti, health insurer HBF, Safe Work Australia and the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia.

Of all of Smith-Gander’s positions, the role that attracted the most scrutiny was at services firm Broadspectrum — which changed its name before pulling out of contracts to run detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island after a sustained campaign by human rights groups.

But the former Broadspectrum chair insists she doesn’t regret the decision to do that work.

“Do I query why it was that Australia was unable to find resettlement opportunities for those people, who were genuine asylum seekers? Yes. But as genuine asylum seekers, they needed to be protected and cared for,” she says.

“The period that they were there certainly stretched into longer than anyone could possibly be comfortable with, but [the decision] to do the work was not something I regret.”

WAtoday’s Jesinta Burton interviewing Diane Smith-Gander at the Grand Orient in Perth.Credit: Ross Swanborough.

Her curriculum vitae may appear as if it’s just a tapestry of happenstance, and in some ways it is, she tells me, but Smith-Gander believes her varied portfolio has made her a better director.

In 2015, she took the reins at Chief Executive Women, an advocacy body representing more than 1000 of the most distinguished women in business.

Her service earned her an Officer in the Order of Australia for her contributions to business and gender equity.

She says her involvement with the organisation was fuelled by her own experiences in male dominated workplaces.

As the Peking duck pancakes arrive, Smith-Gander recalls attending a conference in which she was the only one filing off into the women’s bathroom and being able to hear the rest of her colleagues laughing and socialising on the other side of the wall.

“There’s nothing like being the only one: it’s the loneliest, most difficult spot to be,” she says.

“I think it’s those moments that have really motivated me to be an advocate, not just for gender equity, but for equity for all.”

Eight years on, she believes the dialogue has shifted and there is a greater recognition of the battleground “the C-Suite” is for women in large corporations.

But she says recent data on the gender pay gap — the difference between what men and women earn working for the same organisation — indicates there is still plenty of work to be done.

The peking duck pancakes at the Grand Orient in Perth.Credit: Ross Swanborough.

“We have to break down this bias that women are expected to do the caring work, the part-time work. That notion has got to go,” she says.

“It’s discriminatory for anyone to assume that for some reason men are second-class parents, and I think there are many men who feel quite deeply that they weren’t able to forge the relationships with their children that they may otherwise have liked because they were working too much or expected to work in a particular way.”

According to Smith-Gander, everyone has a role to play in gender equality.

Government has more levers to pull than most though, she says, including via changes to superannuation for those on parental leave and the removal of “perverse” taxation incentives.

She believes the cause of Australian women was “pulled back decades” by the Howard government and then-treasurer Peter Costello’s approach to the 2000s baby bonus and the “have one for mum, one for dad and one for the country” mantra.

Smith-Gander isn’t one to shy away from social issues, having advocated for an Indigenous Voice to parliament and marriage equality.

In fact, she encourages more business people to do the same to allow the public to see them as more than just “faceless number crunchers” concerned only by the economic outcome.

“Equity, economic performance, good governance, those are my issues, and I don’t see how anybody could argue with me having a voice on those issues,” she says.

“When I advocated for marriage equality, I said it felt unfair to me that I was able to have two unsuccessful marriages, and gay people in Australia didn’t even get a chance to try.”

Most recently, Smith-Gander has weighed in on recent events in the Middle East by voicing her support of the Jewish community and opposition to rising antisemitism amid the Israel-Hamas war.

While maintaining that her condemnation of antisemitism didn’t amount to unwavering support of Israel, the sentiment has drawn the ire of some students at the campus the incoming chancellor will soon helm.

She flatly rules out any possibility of a foray into politics, insisting it is not something that has ever appealed to her.

The political arena lacks appropriate bipartisanship, she tells me, and it would benefit from longer terms to reduce the focus on the upcoming election.

“I couldn’t possibly have been a politician because here I am prepared to eat food with my fingers, even in front of the camera,” she says as our San Choy Bow and ginger prawns arrive.

She’s travelled and worked around the globe, but Perth is still very much home for Smith-Gander — who credits her home town and having had the same best friend since she was 14 with having kept her grounded.

I’d like to feel that women’s leadership is more normalised for the things that I have done and for chipping away at that cultural expectation of women are supposed to do

Diane Smith-Gander

In fact, she thinks Western Australia is the best place on the planet.

But her love for her home state transcends its crystal clear beaches and the Margaret River wine region, which she tells those elsewhere looks a lot like California’s Napa Valley and the north shore of Hawaii had a love child.

“People have a go here. It’s Gina Rinehart digging a hole and making something, it’s Andrew Forrest creating his empire, and Kath Giles at OncoRes in the tech space, and I love that about Perth,” she tells me.

“Everywhere you look there’s something interesting going on and people are so open to working together. I love the vastness of it, too … that I can hide out in it.”

As we push our plates away and gather our things, I inquire about what she hopes her legacy will be.

“I’d like to feel that women’s leadership is more normalised for the things that I have done and for chipping away at that cultural expectation of what women are supposed to do and the underestimation of women,” she says.

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