The Nightly On Leadership: Why Allegra Spender chooses to lead hard-headed but warm-hearted

Allegra Spender can recall December 14 with absolute clarity. It was a day that began perfectly. And ended tragically.

“We had been to Bondi, at the beach, because it was such a beautiful day,” Spender says.

From there, she went with her family to sister Bianca’s house for an early family Christmas dinner. Not long after arriving, one of her nephews alerted her to a situation unfolding at Bondi Beach.

As the Federal independent MP for Wentworth, Spender represents many of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, with Bondi at its heart.

After a flurry of phone calls, including with the Prime Minister, to establish exactly what was happening and confirm that this was an attack on the Jewish community, Spender was quick to respond.

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“I spoke with Jewish community leaders to ask, ‘Is there anything you need? Is there anything I can get for you?’ And then reached out to a wide variety of people, like the surf clubs and community groups, asking, ‘Are you getting what you need? If you’re not, how can I be a conduit?’ Because that’s our job — supporting people.”

Grassroots support, meeting people where they are, is something that Spender has built her political career on.

It’s one thing to be able to lead from day to day, quite another to know how to be a leader in times of great tragedy. Both call for listening to what people have to say.

“I spent a lot of that (following) week at the Bondi Pavilion, being present, just listening to people’s stories, what they’re afraid of, their anger,” she says.

“Part of your job is to be physically present for people, which in a community like this — which is very local, very tight-knit — is really important. And then, how do you make sense of it for people? This is an incredible tragedy. It’s a tragedy for the Jewish community. It’s a tragedy for the local community. It’s a tragedy for the country.”

Spender’s ability to listen to what her constituents want and need — both locally and for the country at large — was a major factor in her election to Parliament in 2022, toppling the long-time Liberal seat then held by Dave Sharma.

It was a skill that she learnt from her father, Liberal politician and diplomat John Spender. (Her grandfather, Sir Percy Spender, was also a Liberal politician.)

“We did have a lot of debates around the dining table,” she says of family dinners growing up.

“Dad would hear you out, he really listened and was genuinely open-minded. You could change his mind. He looked at the facts and he was also very courteous in politics as well.”

Spender notes as an aside that her father lost his Liberal seat to an independent, Ted Mack, in 1990.

“So the fact that he supported me as an independent shows a great open-minded support for his daughter.”

She also listens to advice, and one piece from a friend has stayed with her: “‘Forgive yourself now for the mistakes you’re going to make.’

“That’s such good advice. If you lead, you have to do hard things,” she says.

“But when you do hard things, you’ll make mistakes. And if you let your mistakes dominate you, then you will retreat and you won’t take risks — and you have to keep on taking risks.”

Nothing’s going to change unless someone says ‘this has to change’

Listening may be one thing, but Spender understands all too well that “part of leadership is actually creating the space for people to speak”.

She cites Teach Us Consent founder Chanel Contos as a prime example, using her platform to give a voice to sexual assault survivors.

Spender’s first job after studying economics at Cambridge University was at McKinsey & Company, where employees were encouraged to voice their opinions if they felt the company was making a bad decision.

“They had this saying, ‘You have an obligation to dissent when you disagree.’ And it doesn’t matter if you’re the most junior business analyst or you’re the senior director, you have an obligation to speak up if you think the business is making the wrong decision.

“And I think it’s a really important question — how do you create the space as a leader where people can tell you that you’re wrong? And I’m not saying I’m perfect at it, but I think that’s a really important quality in leadership that I try and create.”

Women should be in the room

One of the many reasons she went into politics — almost despite growing up in a family in which politics was writ large — was to take up space as a woman.

“In 1996, the year after I left school, there was (around) 22 per cent women in the house of reps in the Coalition. In 2021, when I decided to stand, I think there was 21 per cent,” she says.

“It had never been above 25 per cent. It still hasn’t. But the Parliament is now 50 per cent (women). At a certain point, you just have to go, well, nothing’s going to change unless someone says ‘this has to change’.”

You don’t have to pretend to be a man

Spender cites a number of women in leadership she admires, who have managed to climb to the top in male-dominated fields.

Women such as Scientia Professor Michelle Simmons, a quantum physicist and the director of the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of NSW, and Shemara Wikramanayake, managing director and CEO of Macquarie Group, “one of the toughest places in the country”, says Spender.

“And then you meet people who give their lives to making a difference and do not get the praise,” she says, such as Renuka Fernando, co-founder of ReLove, which rehomes unused furniture and homewares to those in need.

“She’s amazing. And she’s a local woman who saw a problem and just couldn’t walk past it.”

And while Spender calls her own leadership style “hard-headed but warm-hearted”, all of these women display qualities that she admires: “Gutsiness and the pursuit of excellence — do it, do it well. As women, we’ve been apologetic about doing those two things and we shouldn’t have to be.”

Of course, one of the most influential female role models for Spender was much closer to home. Her mother, fashion designer Carla Zampatti, was the embodiment of those qualities, an immigrant who built a local fashion empire from nothing, and would later bring her business expertise — and gender equality agenda — into corporate boardrooms.

“Mum was incredibly gutsy, and she just showed me that women should be in the room and we should never apologise for that,” Spender says.

“She always said she only regretted the things she didn’t do.”

That lesson came into sharp relief when Spender was approached to run for Parliament in 2021, just months after her mother had died.

“I thought a lot about her courage in relation to women, and thought, what’s the worst that can happen? I lose — and public humiliation,” she adds with a laugh.

Another lesson that her mother taught her was that “you don’t have to pretend to be a man”.

“Mum was a very feminine woman. And people expected her to be sort of aloof as a fashion designer, but she never was. She was always very real, and she was a better leader for it. And that affected me — you can be your real self,” Spender says.

Growing up in the family business, Spender was always interested in the business side of fashion rather than the glamour.

While she was managing director of the fashion company for eight years, her interest in business and economic policy more broadly has been one of her main interest points in politics, along with action on climate change, integrity in politics and the cost of living.

For Spender, a self-confessed “policy wonk” who once worked as a policy analyst for the UK Treasury, last year’s economic roundtable with Danielle Wood, the first female chair of Australia’s Productivity Commission, was like “Christmas — I can’t imagine something I’d prefer to do than spend three days with some of the most thoughtful and qualified people in the country talking about productivity”.

In terms of her own contribution, to her constituents and to the country at large, Spender is intent on “making sure that this country continues to be a place where every generation can thrive, that you can create a good life for yourself, and that we continue to be the most successful multicultural, tolerant country in the world”.

And perhaps even more than this, she adds: “I think the biggest contribution I can make is actually to help step up ambition, because I don’t think politics has been particularly ambitious in the last period of time.

“So, what’s my ambition? To be ambitious for the country.”