While I thought that leaving politics meant leaving the business of public opinion - I was wrong.

Business does not have that daily dynamic. There's no poll on whether the public still backs your ideas. The feedback loop is slower, so it's easier to assume the case for your existence is self-evident. It isn't. And when you stop making it, someone else makes it for you.

If leaders don't explain why their organisations matter, they shouldn't be surprised when somebody else claims that they don't.

That's true whether you're running a government department, a media company, or a mining company. And it's truer for the resources sector right now than for almost anyone else in this room.

Facts don't tell their own story.

Business tends to communicate in facts - jobs, taxes, investment, production. The people arguing against you tend to communicate in stories - about people, values, consequences. It's not a fair fight. You can be completely correct on the substance and still lose the argument.

A billion dollars of investment doesn't explain itself. Ten thousand jobs don't explain themselves. Someone has to connect those numbers to an actual person's actual life - their job, their kids' options, their town. That is a responsibility of leadership.

I was Shadow Treasurer and Shadow Minister for Federal-State Relations when the Rudd government proposed its mining tax. My relationship with my federal Labor counterparts was, let's say, tested.

The tax was defeated because the community turned on it, hard enough that Federal Labor genuinely feared losing seats in WA and Queensland at the next election.

What's easy to forget is why people turned on it.

They weren't marching to protect mining company profits, and they weren't especially interested in anyone's balance sheet. They understood something more specific than that: the resources sector had spent the years before 2010 building a real, visible connection between new projects and their own prosperity. The Global Financial Crisis had just shown the sector's value directly. It cushioned WA through a global downturn while the rest of the country felt the full force of it. The project pipeline was public and well understood. People could see what was coming and what it meant for them.

So, when the mining tax arrived, people didn't rally to defend a company. They rallied to defend the opportunities that these companies gave to people, their families and their communities.

Ask yourself honestly whether that same understanding exists today. I don't think it does.

The easy explanation is that activism drove the sector into a defensive crouch, and there's some truth in that. But I think we, and I include myself, and the companies I now sit on the board of, need to own more of it than that.

Success bred complacency. We assumed the economic contribution was obvious, so we stopped explaining it. We got very good at talking to government, to investors, to analysts - and correspondingly worse at talking to the person standing in the Coles queue who has no idea what your company actually does for them. Somewhere in that gap, the social licence that saved the sector in 2010 started eroding.

That's on us. Not on the activists who filled the silence.

Every leader in this room should be able to answer three questions.

Why does my organisation matter?

Who is better off because it exists?

And could an ordinary West Australian explain that answer to someone else, in their own words, without your annual report in front of them?

If the answer to the third question is no, you have work to do. Most of us do.

Australia is genuinely world class at resources extraction. Not just blessed with the resource base, but the capability to find, extract and export it better than almost anyone. That capability is why our energy exports now carry strategic weight with our trading partners, particularly through LNG, at a moment when energy security is back on every government's agenda.

Our capacity in resources and energy is why the Prime Minister could recently visit our regional trading partners and lock in supplies of liquid fuels - because Australia, our resources and energy, are so incredibly important for the economic development, and energy transition commitments, of our trading partners.

But only if we choose to leverage it.

If we do not choose to play this role others certainly will, eroding our ability to influence in our region in a volatile world where influence is more valuable than ever before.

The cost of losing that argument is no longer just a bad tax. It's strategic influence Australia will not get back.

Today, our mining and energy sectors operate in a more globally competitive environment than they did in 2010. Governments need their communities to understand the value of the resources sector so that they can understand the importance of policy that attracts capital to invest. It is a mutual dependency.

When I moved from the Cabinet table to the boardroom, I expected the leadership challenge to change. It didn't.

The resources sector is at the frontline of this discussion and understands, perhaps better than most, that shareholder value is a consequence of the revenue you extract from community assets, but only ever with that community support.

Crown Perth is another clear example of where the intersection of community support and shareholder value is most pronounced. The holder of a rare privilege, a monopoly right, Crown is fresh out of a Royal Commission, a public assessment of whether Crown had been meeting its 'suitability' requirements. The success of all these businesses, and the value creation for their shareholders, is dependent on the support of the community and the satisfaction of Government.

The best project, the best technology, the strongest balance sheet - none of it is enough on its own anymore.

If your community doesn't understand why your company exists and why that matters to them, your licence to operate gets fragile, and the good public policy you need becomes harder to get, and the bad public policy you fear becomes harder to stop.

I spent sixteen years as a political leader with the obligation to explain our decisions to the public. What I've learned since is that business leaders have exactly the same obligation. You cannot outsource the case for your own existence.

If Australians understand what our companies make possible, good policy gets easier. If they don't, bad policy becomes inevitable.

Making that case isn't a side project for the comms team. It's the job.

That's why leadership matters.

This piece is an edited version of a speech given at the 'Leadership Matters' Breakfast, hosted by The West Australian, on 20 August 2026 in Perth.

Ben Wyatt AO is a Yamatji and Noongar man and was Treasurer of Western Australia from 2017 to 2021, the first Indigenous person to hold a treasury portfolio in any Australian state or territory. He now sits on the boards of Rio Tinto, Woodside Energy, The West Coast Eagles, Crown Perth and Perth Festival.