Mark McGowan, the former premier of Western Australia, has one key piece of advice for Australia’s superannuation funds: engage, engage, engage.

“Build relationships with governments and oppositions,” McGowan told the Investment Magazine Insurance in Super Summit, kicking off proceedings on Tuesday morning in Sydney’s Double Bay.

“You’ve got to constantly do it and it never stops, because people in government are always changing. And that goes for the elected representatives in particular, but also the administrators, the public servants, the bureaucrats. Relationship building never stops. Australia runs on relationships, and the more of that you can do, the better off you’ll be.”

It’s sound advice for a sector that has endured significant regulatory and policy volatility over the last decade, including a freeze on the rise in the Superannuation Guarantee, the introduction of the Your Future Your Super reforms and the early release scheme during the Covid-19 pandemic. And there’s more change to come, with funds getting a chance to shape the Delivering Better Financial Outcomes reforms and tweaks to the performance test and retirement policies.

But McGowan – who retired from politics in 2023, having led Western Australia through the difficult Covid-19 years while achieving an incredible 91 per cent approval rating – also had a point to make about leadership that super funds could learn from as they struggle to reconfigure their organisations for the retirement phase.

“If you want to be a leader, you’ve got to make yourself do it,” he said.

“If you don’t want to get up, if you don’t want to make that difficult decision, if you don’t want to make that phone call, if you don’t want to sack that guy, if you don’t want to defund that program or go and address that rally where they’re all going to yell at you, don’t be a leader. You’ve got to make yourself do what you don’t want to do.”

McGowan went to high school in the northern NSW towns of Casino and Coffs Harbour; by the end of Year 12, only a third of the students that started there remained, and few of them went on to university, and he “never imagined that [he’d] amount to much at all”.

“But you don’t know what you’re capable of until you really, really, really try.”

Of course, being in politics requires a thick skin, McGowan said, but nobody starts out with one. When McGowan first got elected to Parliament in the mid-1990s, a critical letter to the editor in the local paper would “floor” him. But by the end of his run, very little bothered him. In politics – and in any leadership position – you’ve got to be tough, he said.

“I think about people who send people off to war. How do you do that? You think about some of these leaders who had to confront these situations, you’d have to be a little bit sociopathic to actually go to sleep at night knowing the sorts of things you’ve done or will have to do.

“I think there’s something to be said for experience. The best leaders in politics have been there a long time, and so the best prime ministers have generally been in public life a long time because you’ve learned you’ve watched and developed a thicker hide as time goes by.”