Podcast transcript: EY Change Happens Podcast – Dr Bronwyn King

Intro: Change happens. How we respond to change can make or break us and our careers. Join us for an intimate insight into how senior business leaders face change – the good, the bad and everything in between, because whether we like it or not, change happens.

Jenelle: Hi. I’m Jenelle McMaster and welcome to the Change Happens podcast, a conversation with influential leaders on leading through change and the lessons learned along the way. Today I have the great pleasure of speaking with Dr Bronwyn King who’s an absolute firecracker when it comes to making change happen. She’s a radiation oncologist and founder and CEO of Tobacco Free Portfolios and, as you will soon hear, she’s on a mission – a mission to save a billion lives from tobacco, the greatest preventable cause of premature death. And he has well and truly already made a formidable impact. By working collaboratively with the global finance sector, large banks, insurers and pension funds, Bronwyn and her team have been pivotal in major financial organisations in several countries moving to tobacco-free finance. Their efforts have shifted more than US $12b away from investment in tobacco, putting a spotlight on the critical role of the finance sector in global tobacco control. Her collaborative work with finance industry executives has contributed to more than 40% of Australian pension funds implementing tobacco-free investment mandates. The not-for-profit is now working with more than 100 financial organisations, including sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, banks, insurers and fund managers. Bronwyn also has other accolades to her credit. She was awarded an Order of Australia, an AO, in 2019 for distinguished service to community health. In 2015 she got the Victorian Heath Award for preventing tobacco use and 2019 saw her achieve Melbournian of the Year. I know we’re going to learn a lot from Bronwyn and I look forward to exploring her story. Bronwyn, welcome! How are you?

Bronwyn: I’m well thanks Jenelle. It’s great to be here.

Jenelle: Bronwyn, before I get into our detailed questions I guess I’d love for you to kind of just set a scene here on what the change is that you’re trying to make happen?

Bronwyn: Well, look, in your introduction I think you outlined it pretty well at a very high level, which is that the World Health Organisation predicts that the world’s on track for 1 billion tobacco-related deaths this century. So 1 billion. There’s only 7.5 billion of us. So if we pause and think for a minute about the scale of this it’s an extraordinary problem. And the world’s health sector is really aware of that and is doing absolutely everything it can to try to help people who suffer as a result of tobacco and to try to implement better preventative health policy. Governments are on board. There’s this huge treaty, the only global health treaty that exists, that is the UN Tobacco Control Treaty and 181 countries have signed and ratified that. And governments everywhere are busily implementing better regulation to reduce the impact of tobacco on the community. And then we have teachers. We have parents. We have everyone standing together to bring an end to tobacco except the finance sector, and that’s the missing piece that we are trying to address at Tobacco Free Portfolios.

Jenelle: Mm, I’m going to get into the how of all of that shortly. But tell me how COVID-19 has been affecting the progress of your work this year? I know that you typically spend a significant amount of time on planes and in other countries. You’ve been based in Melbourne as you’ve just said. So you faced into even tighter restrictions. How have you made sure that Tobacco Free Portfolios has stayed visible and high up on the agendas during this period of time?

Bronwyn: Well I think a couple of really interesting things have happened. I mean one is that the world has realised that health is a really fundamental part of whatever conversation you’re having. And it’s really shown people during the COVID pandemic that if you haven’t got health established as a really set solid baseline, you can’t really build anything else on top of that. And so when Tobacco Free Portfolios, when me and my team we go out there and we’re engaging with finance leaders, for many years we’ve really had to really do a lot of nudging and moving and shaking to try to put health on the agenda. But we’re not having to nudge or move or shake anymore because it’s already on the agenda. So we’re finding that people want to talk about health far more than ever before, even the finance sector. And along with that is a very robust discussion around sustainability and sustainability frameworks for finance organisations. So once upon a time that was considered fairly niche, or boutique, or a bit out there but it’s not any more. It’s a really – a mainstream discussion. So we’ve been very pleased to be able to play into that. And also when it comes to, you know, my personal travel, absolutely that ground to an absolute halt in March along with everybody else around the world. And initially I was very disappointed thinking that that would be, you know, a terrible barrier or challenge. But in fact it’s been a year and it’s been surprising because it’s been the opposite, because rather than having to book meetings in with people sort o two or three or even four months in advance and look at these very tricky schedules and fly myself all over the other side of the world and take huge amounts of time out of a normal life, instead I just sit in front of my computer and ask somebody if they’re accept my meeting request. So in fact I’ve found that people are far more accessible and far more open to the exact conversation that we’re trying to have.

Jenelle: Oh that’s – I mean they’re two incredibly positive upsides, I guess, not having to convince people about the criticality of health on the agenda is one and you already pack so much into your days. I’ve known what your schedules have looked like in the past so the idea that you could now put in even more. But yours is a fascinating story of making change happen, Bronwyn. So I want to go back a little to understand a bit more about the evolution. Tell me – tell me how you arrived at radiation oncology as your medical speciality of choice?

Bronwyn: Well that was a complete accident actually. So I started my medical career not entirely sure of where I was going to land but I thought that the most likely thing would be sports medicine because I had been an elite swimmer and a very nice junior swimmer. I represented Australia at a junior level.

Jenelle: You can’t just swim in a pool?

Bronwyn: No, can’t just swim in a pool. Mind you, I wanted to be an Olympic champion! That didn’t quite work out, did it? But I – but I was really lucky actually in that I was able to take a lot of my lessons from elite sport and convert them into high performance, I guess, in other areas of my life. And there are some things that it doesn’t matter if you’re, you know, in a swimming pool or on the basketball court or doing a final exam or standing in front of an enormous crowd presenting. They’re similar skills that I’ve been able to use. So I was very lucky, I think, to have a sporting career as a young person. So I started medicine thinking that’s where I was going to – was probably going to end up. And in fact I did work as the team doctor for the Australian swimming team for 10 years. So I absolutely loved that but it was this incredible three month term that I spent working on the lung cancer ward at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne that really changed me. And in fact it was the person I worked for who changed me, which is often the way it, isn’t it?

Jenelle: Mm-hmm. It is. Someone inspiring.

Bronwyn: You know we think – that’s it! We think it’s the topic or the place but it’s not. It’s your boss. It’s who it is. And so I worked with this brilliant doctor, Professor David Ball, who’s one of the world’s best lung cancer doctors, and I just couldn’t help but be inspired by him. And during that three month term I really saw what tobacco was doing to people. I saw how people in their 40s and 50s and 60s had been really lured into smoking when they were children or teenagers. Many of them had tried to quit and really tried very hard over many years, but there they were at the Cancer Centre being treated for lung cancer. That was the ward I was working on. And despite living in what I think is an incredible country with all of this great medicine and all of these sophisticated technologies, there wasn’t really very much we could offer our patients in terms of curative treatment. And nearly all of my patients suffered terribly and nearly all of the died. And as a result of that I had this first-hand, front row seat, I guess, watching the disaster of tobacco play out in front of me. And so it just got stuck in my head as a career that had some big gaps in it. A career that really needed enormous change and enormous attention. And so, yes, I ended up doing radiation oncology and I became a specialist in 2008.

Jenelle: So how do you go from being that radio oncologist, busy treating lung cancer victims to then mobilising funders around the world to stop investing in tobacco? It feels like there’s got to be some story bridging those two things. How did that happen?

Bronwyn: Well, again, it was an accidental story. So I was just buying a house with my husband and we sat down with the accountant, and this was in sort of late 2009/2010. We sit down with the accountant and he just says to us “Come on guys you’ve got to sort out your money. How much money do you have in your superannuation plan?” And I knew superannuation existed, but that was it. I had never paid any attention. I don’t think I even knew the name of the fund, which is a terrible thing to admit but that is how it was at that moment. So he said “Sort it out”. So I organised to meet with the representative for that super fund and we met at the cafeteria at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. He’d brought along some material, showed me how much money I had and then the meeting had finished. So I shook his hand and walked away and completely as an afterthought I rushed back and I said “Oh look, I forgot to ask you, was I meant to tell you what to do with that money?” And he looked at me and said “No, no, no, you don’t need to worry at all. You’re in the default option. It’s completely taken care of”. And I said “Oh, option? Does that mean there are other options?”

Jenelle: It’s what the word suggests!

Bronwyn: That’s what it does suggest, doesn’t it? And so he just looked at me, but then he rolled his eyes at me and said “Oh, look, there is this one greenie special option for people who have a problem with investing in mining, alcohol or tobacco”. And then there was silence. And I sort of just absorbed what he said, and I said “Did you just say tobacco?” and he said “Yes”. And I said “So am I currently investing in tobacco?” And he said “Oh, yes, everyone is”. And that was it. That was just this incredible moment where I thought I just can’t continue.

Jenelle: The irony of sitting there in a hospital talking to him.

Bronwyn: And that’s it! That’s it! And I thought gosh, you know, here I am, I knew absolutely what tobacco did to people. I’d seen it so many times. Not just dozens of times. Perhaps not even just 100’s of times, maybe more than 1,000 of my patients had either died or suffered absolutely terribly as a result of tobacco and then there I am finding out that my own money invests in the companies that make the products that are killing them. And so, anyway, I haven’t really slept since that moment. So, you know, it’s about 10 years of being slightly unsettled by that discovery.

Jenelle: So what happened then? You go, OK, somehow I’m in advertently bankrolling this situation. How did you take that discomfort of the moment and turn that into “I’m going to do something about this”?

Bronwyn: Well I think straight away. I have to be honest, straight away at that exact moment I actually had a little thought to myself where I just said, well, that’s it. I just can’t leave that. That has to be fixed. And I mean I really remember it, right there in the cafeteria, just saying no. Nope, that is not – nope! That can’t go on. It just can’t. And so a few weeks later I was the radiation oncologist who was set to present at our Friday afternoon meeting where one radiation oncologist presented an interesting or challenging case to all of the others. We just had this once weekly meeting.

Jenelle: OK.

Bronwyn: And so when it rolled around to my meeting I, instead of presenting an interesting case, I presented this discovery. And I said to everybody I’m sure that you’re all going to be equally concerned but in fact all of us here at Peter MacCallum, all of us who know only too well what tobacco does to humankind, all of us currently invest our own super in these companies. And by then I’d done some homework and I had asked that super fund representative, I said to him, you know, can you just explain what exactly do I hold shares in? You know, what have I – what’s going on? And he explained that it was in the international shares portion of my portfolio, and for me that was quite a large portion, which it is for most Australian investors, especially the under 50s. And he explained that the top holdings for me in that international shares portion was number one, was British American Tobacco. Number two Imperial Tobacco. Number four was Philip Morris and number five was Swedish Match Company. So four of the top five holdings for me in that international shares portion were tobacco companies. And so everybody was very disappointed and straight away they said, look, you have to tell the CEO of the hospital. I did. He then rang me back one day later and said, look, I’ve booked you in to speak to the CEO and the investment team at the pension plan for the hospital. And that then kicked off the very first conversation that I ever had with a big financial institution. And that is quite different to the conversation that I have now because you got - 

Jenelle: Exactly. I was just about to say that firstly I’m gratified that everybody was suitably shocked and outraged and wanted to do something about it. That’s a really reassuring response. But, you know, as you say it’s a different world. You’re a doctor. You – you’re now finding yourself appealing to people in an industry that you have no background in – finance, governance, funds management, all the layers that exist within the finance industry. Oh, it’s a whole other language. Completely different mental models. Completely different business models. Completely different motivations. How did you go about making yourself heard in that world much less being able to influence them to redirect what would have been very profitable investments, right, moving them elsewhere? How do you get heard?

Bronwyn: Well I think first things first is I just did it step by step. So I think in a way being a little bit naive about how complicated it was, was probably a great thing. And sometimes I think that it’s actually an advantage that you don’t have a background in a particular sector for these very big issues that have global implications because it actually - 

Jenelle: Otherwise you’d run away and go it’s all to hard!

Bronwyn: - but also it might influence the way you think. Whereas if you come from the outside you can offer a completely fresh perspective. And I think that that’s probably what I had at the start which was a big advantage. Which was just coming in and saying I know that this is how it’s always been but can we just stop for a second because that doesn’t make sense. In today’s context, that doesn’t make sense. And with tobacco it really is the most black and white sustainability issue there is.

Jenelle: I understand that, you know, you being a radiation oncologist, you being in that lung cancer ward and seeing the aftermath or the impacts of tobacco, tobacco has a very deep and personal meaning to you, but when you speak to CEOs or national leaders who wouldn’t necessarily have a personal connection to the cause - like, they would care. As you’ve just said they’re all good people who understand it’s important but they have many, many things to care about and no doubt there’d be lots of people making lots of well evolved presentations to them about their particular issue. How do you get these people to prioritise this issue? 

Bronwyn: So I would often come home from a presentation – I can remember doing this very early - it was maybe 2012 or 13, and I remember coming home saying to my husband “Gosh, you wouldn’t believe it? I did this presentation and someone chased me out of the room to the lift and said just so you know, my mum died of lung cancer when she was 55 and I just want to say thank you so much for doing this, it means a lot, keep up the good work”. And so I told my husband that. And then about a week later I said, “You won’t believe it” - I come home again “You won’t believe it! This man chased me into the taxi queue and said look, just so you know my brother just died of lung cancer, he was 61, he’s got 2 teenage kids, keep up the good work”. All of these people suddenly had their stories that they wanted to share with me. So actually the impact of tobacco is so vast, 8 million people will die in 202 because of tobacco. Eight million people. It’s about 6 times the number of deaths from COVID to put that in perspective. So it is - and all of those deaths are terrible from COVID. That’s a terrible tragedy and many of them should have been prevented and – but in terms of prioritising it on the agenda I think that it also did come down to sometimes quite a personal reflection for the CEOs. I mean one of the biggest financial institutions in the world is Crédit Agricole and their CEO, Philippe Brassac, he just spoke at an event that we had this year in 2020 and he said that when he was considering this issue of tobacco, he went to his family, he went to his friends, he went to his community, he went to his colleagues, and he said to all of them would you want your children to smoke? And every single one of them came back to him and said no. And he just thought why on earth would I be financing or investing in a company that everyone is trying to protect their own children from?

Jenelle: So true.

Bronwyn: But tobacco’s really not complicated. You can’t use the product safely. There’s a UN treaty that exists because the problem is so big. And there’s really no other strategy, there’s no half way that you can - or approach that you can take with this issue. You can’t engage with the companies. That makes no sense. It’s a futile exercise and it’s not recommended by the UN or the World Health Organisation. There’s these other financial strategies that might exist like best of sector investing or impact investing, but they also make no sense when it comes to tobacco. So really you’re either in or you’re out. Which does mean that it is one of the easier sustainability issues to act on.

Jenelle: I once heard you share a fascinating story about how you think about changing people. And you used the analogy of a protractor and shifting people by degrees. Can I get you to explain that approach?

Bronwyn: Yes, absolutely. So I am a bit of a maths geek so sorry about the protractor analogy but I – it’s just how I imagine taking people on that journey of influence. And so I imagine this protractor out in front of me going from 0 to 180 degrees and when I meet with someone, so say I’m meeting with a CEO of a big financial organisation, in that first few minutes I try to work out where they sit on that protractor. And if they’re really not interested in the conversation at all and really, you know, you’re not getting good vibes, say that’s 0. Over at 180 degrees you’ve got someone who’s totally on board and is ready to donate to the charity that we’ve got running. And in between you’ve got everything else. So I try to find out where are they approximately on that scale and once I’ve worked that out I try to pitch my conversation 5 to 10 degrees in front of that. And I do that really strategically because there has to be some sort of magnetic tension between the two of you so that you can pull someone along on that journey that takes them from 0 to 180 in whatever timeframe it is. All I do when I meet with someone is aim for that. Just move them 5 to 10 degrees along and then try to secure a second meeting so that you can keep the dialogue and keep the conversation going.

Jenelle: You launched the Tobacco Free Finance Pledge at the UN Headquarters and, look, it wasn’t like you were invited to run that session as I understand it. You actually had to go about – you had to create this, you know, idea from conception right through to getting people along and getting them signed up. I can’t imagine how or where you’d even start to make something like that happen. I don’t know who takes it upon themselves to say of look I’m going to convene my own UN thing and make that all happen. It sort of defies my sort of frame of possibilities. Tell me about that initiative. Tell me about that process because that’s got to have been a herculean task.

Bronwyn: It, look, it really was. And I think, again, it just sort of evolved step by step. If I had of known how difficult it would have been at the start maybe I wouldn’t have done it. So I think a little bit of naivety is always good. It doesn’t hurt. But what had happened was in 2016/17 Clare Payne, my colleague at Tobacco Free Portfolios and I, we found ourselves on the global sustainable finance circuit and we were going to all of these events and we ended up being invited to the UN, during the UN General Assembly in 2017. And there we were at the UN and I could see that everybody who was addressing a global challenge of any kind seemed to be having an event. And I clocked that and I thought well that’s all very interesting. And then later that year in 2017 our work was going very well. The biggest bank in Europe, BNP Paribas, had just decided to go tobacco free and that was a $2b decision and everything was, you know, everything was great. So we’re all in a good mood – it’s summer in Australia, it’s right before Christmas and I thought, you know what? I rang up Clare and I said well why don’t we have an event at the UN? Everybody else seems to so why don’t we do one as well? And she’s like absolutely, yes.

Jenelle: She’s feeling quite festive. She goes, right, let’s do it!

Bronwyn: She’s feeling – yep, she said right, let’s do it. So I emailed three different UN agencies and I said to them, look, would you consider partnering with us to have an event during the UN General Assembly in September of 2018? And I honestly thought that there was maybe a 1% chance that 1 of them would say yes. But I was wrong because 2 days later all 3 of them came back and said absolutely, we’ll all partner with you. And I thought oh my goodness! OK, wow, this is fantastic! And so then I reached out to a whole lot of business partners and colleagues from all over the world and I said, look, if we had this event at the UN would you come? Would you come and speak? And they all said absolutely, yes we would. And then I decided to give the event a name and we decided that were going to launch this initiative called The Pledge – the Tobacco Free Finance Pledge. And then we were having our first phone call, and this was only about 8 months out, and we were all on the phone from all around the world and I was getting all very excited saying of this is going to be magnificent, it’s wonderful, everyone’s going to come together, it’s going to be terrific and then one of the heads of one of the UN agencies said to me oh, Bronwyn, you do realise if you’re going to have an event at the UN during the UN General Assembly you need to have at least one prime minister and one president that has signed off on your event.

Jenelle: Oh, no biggie!

Bronwyn: No biggie! But then he goes and – and one of them really needs to be from the G7.

Jenelle: Oh, of course they do.

Bronwyn: And at that moment I think I just sort of froze and said, right, right, right. Just leave that with me. Now, so who’s organising our next call? And I though oh my gosh. A prime minister and a president. Righty-oh! Well what on earth do we do with that. So, of course, I write down our prime ministers and presidents from – I padded it out to the G20, and then I thought well what are we going to do here? So I wrote to all these business leaders around the world and I said, look, can anyone help us with this, you know, absolutely, you know, miraculous task, but let’s just see what’s going to happen. And about two weeks later the CEO of BNP Paribas, Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, he wrote back to me and he said well what do you think about this. And he’d attached a letter that he had written and it was signed by the CEOs of four of Frances biggest financial organisations and they’d written directly to President Macron asking him to consider supporting the event at the UN and he said, you know, their letter said that they’d all worked with us at Tobacco Free Portfolios and we were doing good things and we were going to launch this Pledge and would his team accept a meeting when I was next in Paris. And the bottom line is they said yes. And so a month later I was in Paris as the Élysées meeting with President Macron’s advisor and asking if he would support the event. And President Macron’s advisor said look, President Macron is totally into sustainability. He’s going to love this. Go back home, sort this out with your Prime Minister and Australia and France we will both go together and we’ll sponsor this event at the UN. So it’s all great. And I was like OK, all right, done.

Jenelle: I hope we were on board.

Bronwyn: So this is it. So, well, this podcast doesn’t go long enough for me to tell you the whole story, but suffice to say that on the way home I secured the support of the Head of the UN Tobacco Control Treaty, she said she would come. I met the Director General of the World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros, who was sensational and he listened very carefully to what we were trying to do and he gave me a big smile and he said that is the missing piece of global tobacco control. Absolutely I’ll be there. I’ll speak at your event. And then I came home and to cut a very long story short, when President Macron came to Australia on the 1st of May 2018 I was very, very fortunate to be invited to the official dinner to welcome him and it was at the Opera House in Sydney. And that night I met him, he did sign off on our event. At the time the Australian Prime Minister was Prime Minister Turnbull. He signed off on the event and there we were in September 2018 at the UN with this full complement of world leaders from the UN sector, from finance, from health, from government agencies and we launched our flagship initiative. And that has, I mean that journey taught me so many things but having that initiative as our flagship initiative has been an incredible thing. We’ve now got financial organisations from more than 20 countries that have signed up to it and they control more than $11 trillion US dollars.

Jenelle: Far out, Bronwyn. I feel like I need a bit of lie down after that. 

Bronwyn: Well so do I! Even retelling it is exhausting. But the thing is that year I – I mean my, you know, I had a terrible carbon footprint that year because I kept seeing people. So I mean that is the other thing that was really important was to go and see people and meet them in person. I mean obviously now people will accept Zoom meetings and Teams and all of those things but I think if you had of sent a Zoom meeting to President Macron’s advisor at the Élysées in 2018 I think they probably would have just passed.

Jenelle: No, no.

Bronwyn: No, no, no, no, no. Exactly! Come and see me! So I did go to huge efforts to see people and to discuss with them what we were trying to do and to sell the vision to them. And the thing is that in the end I think everyone really does recognise that tobacco is a problem that is of catastrophic proportions and it can be fixed. It absolutely can be fixed. It’s just a matter of choice.

Jenelle: So the stats. I mean you’ve outlined some and you said more than 20 countries signed up. I know that there’s more than 100 financial organisations that are involved in tobacco free investment mandates. In Australia more than 40% of pension funds - 

Bronwyn: Well actually – actually in Australia it’s more than 85% now.

Jenelle: Is it?

Bronwyn: And really in Australia it’s become a race to the end. So once upon a time it was very tricky to encourage people to make that decision and then – but it’s like that curve of change, you know, how you have the early adopters and then the – it’s exactly that curve of change. So we’ve seen all of the early ones and the big mainstream that follow and we’re now down to the laggers. And people - 

Jenelle: It’s that real tipping point you hit.

Bronwyn: - absolutely. So we’re well, well beyond that. But every country in the world is at a different point in that change curve. And so, you know, we’re really focussing our efforts, you know, in the USA especially just because it’s got such an enormous finance sector. And although there’s been pockets of brilliance where organisations really individual organisations and unfortunately localised to really very few States have been very bold on sustainability. By and large the mainstream finance sector is just taking it up now. And I think 2020 really will be remembered as a year where that conversation just suddenly changed dramatically.

Jenelle: So tell me how it feels? Like I feel these are such big stories and they’re such big, big shifts and there would have been little small moments as well. But how do you feel when you think about these kinds of changes? Do you sort of sit back incredulous? To you kind of just go yeah, yeah, that’s all fine but we’ve got more to do? Talk to me about kind of where you’re sitting emotionally, you know, with the very first movement you made, the first change that you got over the line to sort of sitting back and evaluating kind of where things are now.

Bronwyn: Well, yeah, I mean I think – it’s funny you ask that because obviously during COVID and not travelling so much I’ve had more time to pause and think than otherwise. But because so much more needs to be done I really don’t think too much about the past. All I really want to stop and note is how important it is to recognise that anything is really possible. And this is where I go back a bit to my swimming days and then being the team doctor for the Australian Swimming Team. Very early in my life I really understood that that the concept of “impossible” was one that should be pretty much rejected. And I don’t like the word. So I always tell people if I was the Prime Minister of Australia I would ban the use of the world impossible unless - 

Jenelle: You should hang out with my daughter! 

Bronwyn: Oh, is that right? Yep.

Jenelle: She says there’s no such word as impossible, it’s “I’m possible”. That’s what she says to me.

Bronwyn: Oh, I like that.

Jenelle: Yeah. There you go.

Bronwyn: Yeah, I like that. My little take on it is that if you want to use the word you must include a time clause the in same sentence. So if you want to say it is impossible to do this today, I will accept that. But if you want to say it is impossible full stop I just don’t think that is correct. I think you need to go back and have another think because I’ve just seen so many things in my life done that even I in just this little bit of my brain thought oh, I just don’t know, I just don’t think that can be done, but then time and time again I saw swimmers in the swimming pool go faster than any other human being has ever swum. I saw them break world records when no one thought that could happen. I saw people win races that, on paper, they shouldn’t have been able to win but in real life they did. With a little bit of magic they somehow translated that into a gold medal. And I saw that then also in my life in medicine I’ve seen it, but then I have also seen it in – with this work with Tobacco Free Portfolios. Because you’re right, going back to that even at the UN there were so many little things that had to happen there a long the way for us to pull that off but they all happened. And maybe if at the start you look at all of those factors and think gosh that’s overwhelming, it’s just too much, you will think, you know, if just can’t be done. But when you do if bit by bit, step by step there is this I guess sudden realisation that just one step forwards can be done, and then one more, it can be done, and one more, it can be done. So I think it’s breaking it down into little pieces to create, you know, what might look like a little miracle.

Jenelle: I guess as a successful social entrepreneur there is quite a bit to making a, you know, not for profit business be as successful as you have. Apart from the genuine motivation that people have that’s beyond the money side of things, are there any other ingredients that you see as being essential to creating, you know, a social impact organisation that is capable of making the kind of impact that you guys have done?

Bronwyn: I think it’s – I mean I think it is to also dream big and to really outline a vision that is extremely bold and something that’s – I always say with tobacco the problem is so big that it requires really big thinking solutions. So don’t be afraid to put something on the table that is extremely ambitious. So I think maybe that’s sort of part of the culture that, you know, I’ve certainly hope that we, you know, my team members really feel here at Tobacco Free Portfolios. We’re ambitious yet it doesn’t matter how big the idea is if it’s good enough it’s something that we might need to have a crack at. And we now have a really great track record. And the truth is that it’s quite exciting work. You know, I mean I started the year at Davos at the World Economic Forum annual meeting and obviously it was just before the world was sort of came to a standstill because of the pandemic but we at Tobacco Free Portfolios get to meet with some of the world’s most interesting and influential people and so, you know, I also try to learn as much as I can from everybody else because even though they might be from a different sector attacking a different problem I think that there are a lot of common lessons that we all need to embrace to create really big global change.

Jenelle: And, Bronwyn, you’ve done an amazing of building a bridge between, you know, health and finance sectors. Are there are other sectors that need to be bridged as well? Are you starting to turn your attention to other domains that you think need to be part of this equation that aren’t already?

Bronwyn: Oh I think when it comes to sustainability I mean we have for many years already shifted from just talking about tobacco to building out a sustainability framework more comprehensively. I think early on, you know really back in 2010, 11 and 12, no one really had a sustainability framework and it was really issue by issue that financial organisations were dealing with things. But that has really gone now and it’s been gone for many years because I certainly think, you know, whole teams and whole boards can’t be held up by one issue of the day. And, as I said, it’s a never ending number of issues. So if you just think this year, most financial organisations have added to their sustainability frameworks. Absolutely they’ve added COVID but they’ve also added biodiversity, they’ve added Black Lives Matter, they’ve added AI and facial recognition technology and that’s probably just in the last 12 months. But we’re just going to see a never ending list of issues that fall into that category of sort of are they controversial sectors, or undesirable industries, where doe they fit? And they al – and they added to things like alcohol and gambling and sugar and private prisons and guns and controversial weapons and all sorts of different climate initiatives. Then there’s basic human rights and there’s ware and, you know, you can go on and on and on. And so we really encourage financial organisations to acknowledge that all of those issues are important and to work through their toolkit in terms of what are the different approaches they can take that deals with each one of those issues. Should they engage with the company? Should they use a best of sector approach? Should they use ESG integration? So environmental social and governance integration. Should they use thematic or impact investing? Or, in very selective circumstances where none of those are relevant, should they consider an exclusion policy for that particular company?

Jenelle: Bronwyn, as the economy moves into a recovery phase what are your thoughts about how Australia will recover? And what kind of impacts do you see this as having on the, you know, tobacco free landscape and maybe the landscape of the various, well, the sustainability areas you just talked about?

Bronwyn: Well I think Australia is extremely well placed at the moment to recover from COVID. So it’s almost mid-November, we’ve had very low if not zero community transmission across Australia for the past couple of weeks, and I think that Australians are going to be able to enjoy a freedom of movement and a quality of life that’s going to be pretty rare compared to the global landscape over the next couple of years. So I think Australians are going to really, really enjoy being Australian and it will have never been more clear than what’s going to unfold in front of us over a few years. So in terms of how this might play out regarding tobacco, some of the interesting things from this year have been noting the absolute uplift in the number of Australians who have contacted quit services wanting to quit tobacco. And we have seen that in other countries as well. So I think since the pandemic started two million Brits have given up smoking, which is more than ever before. So if it really - 

Jenelle: Wow. It’s honest – I actually thought it might go the other way with an increase in smoking with stress levels.

Bronwyn: So some people thought that but in fact – well, for a start tobacco – smoking tobacco actually makes your heartrate go up, so actually it increases the sense of stress even though there is that, I guess, myth that it is a stress reliever. But people have really seen this year that health is so crucial and people know that COVID is a disease that particularly impacts the lungs. So there’s been this very visceral response to that by people want to quit smoking and to really prioritise their health. I think also while the world is being disrupted and everything is on the table for reinvention, it really is a great moment to think would you allow tobacco companies to continue to operate the way they operate knowing that in the last 12 months tobacco companies have made products that have killed 8 million people? And it’s a really important thing for all of us to sort of pause and think about because when COVID came along we all realised this huge health threat that it had, and the world stopped to address it. Businesses changed the way they were working. Different ways of interacting with people were set up and many people took massive sacrifices to really protect the health of the community. Yet at the same time we’ve had what many people describe as a slow burning pandemic that’s been playing out in the background for decades that we just continue to allow to go on. So I think that we will reflect deeply and make some bold decisions as to the environment that we allow tobacco companies to continue to operate in. And there are many elements there. So, for example, while everyone’s thinking about sustainability issues, one issue has been very heartfelt, I would say, over the last year or two, and that is the issue of ocean plastic. We know people really care about ocean plastic. When plastic straws were banned they disappeared almost overnight. And many people including me, I was so shocked when I found out, that in fact cigarette filters are the number 1 ocean plastic.

Jenelle: Oh, right!

Bronwyn: More than – yeah! I bet you didn’t know that!

Jenelle: I had no idea. No.

Bronwyn: Most of your listeners would not know this. I didn’t know this. So I thought it was probably plastic bottles or bags or straws. It’s not, it’s cigarette filters. Number 1 ocean plastic. People are looking at human rights issues and supply chain issues and many people would be shocked to know that there is child labour in 16 countries that is used to produce tobacco, which is just totally unacceptable. It cannot be part of your business model. Yet an estimate occurred earlier this year showing that about 1.3 million children are involved in tobacco farming. So it’s not just a terrible health impact. There’s also environmental impact and human rights issues that are tied up with tobacco. So I think it will give people a little bit more confidence to suggest truly shaking up this industry because it is really a relic of the past.

Jenelle: Do companies lose money when they redirect their investments away from a tobacco portfolio?

Bronwyn: Well the really interesting thing has been that the tobacco industry has been under a lot of pressure for a while and there’s been a whole range of risks that have materialised, really about 3 to 4 years ago, that have had a major impact on tobacco share price. So it was hard for us to argue about the out performance of tobacco companies prior to the point in about 2017. But since then there’s been a dramatic reduction in tobacco company share price, so over the past 3 -3 .5 years In fact, in 2018 the tobacco sector was the worst performing sector on the market.

Jenelle: Wow!

Bronwyn: And many companies have now had their share prices halved or even more in the last three years. So much so that some of the big financial organisations we’ve worked with have actually ended up significantly better off. So – and there’s been much research done and a whole lot of different reports coming out showing that, in fact, there is no reason that you need tobacco in your portfolio to have excellent outcomes. And in fact the risk is so high at the moment that, in fact, it’s the opposite. So where, you know, we certainly want people to have a very solid retirement and a comfortable retirement and absolutely tobacco free is part of that.

Jenelle: And how do people check, you know, where their superannuation is being invested?

Bronwyn: Well we have just launched a new stamp. It’s a little bit like a Heart Foundation tick or a mark that can go on your product and it’s called The Pledge stamp and it’s for organisations that have signed up to the Tobacco Free Finance Pledge and it’s a nice little stamp and they can use that on their websites, on their sustainability reports or annual reports. Some people are putting it in their email signatures and some people are sending it in brochures to their members or their clients. So it’s a symbol and we hope that that will become a really recognised symbol of an organisation that is committed to tobacco free.

Jenelle: And so literally if people are speaking with their superannuation advisors they can say, look, can you make sure that my investments are going to those – a part of that portfolio is going to, you know, organisations that have The Pledge stamp. Is that the way that would work?

Bronwyn: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. So if you’re with a big super fund we are encouraging the super funds to put it on their websites in a really visible place, because we’ve always argued, you know, you shouldn’t have to spend half an hour on your super fund website click through to find some, you know, little statement in the bottom corner. Or if you sometimes get an annual report, you know, it shouldn’t be on page 35 that you don’t own shares in big tobacco. It should be very easy to see. And so the super funds wanted a way to do it. They wanted to work with us to produce this stamp and we’re really happy that there’s more than 30 super funds in Australia that have already signed up for that.

Jenelle: Fantastic.

The last three: three fast questions on change to finish the podcast

Jenelle: I’m conscious of our time coming to an end here. I always like to finish our – off my interviews, Bronwyn, with three fast questions which are more at the light-hearted end of the spectrum.

Bronwyn: I’m nervous now!

Jenelle: First one is – oh, don’t be! What is a misconception that most people have about you?

Bronwyn: Ah, yes, OK. A misconception would be that I don’t eat chocolate cakes for breakfast when in fact it turns out that the day after my children’s birthday parties that is exactly what I indulge in.

Jenelle: My favourite time to have a chocolate cake, in the morning – leftovers. What’s one guilty pleasure – and you can’t say chocolate cake. It’s got to be something else and it has to be PG.

Bronwyn: OK. One guilty pleasure – Nigella Lawson’s Ricotta Hotcakes that I make for breakfast almost every Sunday morning. 

Jenelle: Oh, wow, sounds awesome.

Bronwyn: Thank you.

Jenelle: And what’s one thing that you’re hopeless at? I’m quite interested to know this one to be honest. 

Bronwyn: Mm, I would say cooking anything except the aforementioned Ricotta Cakes.

Jenelle: OK.

Bronwyn: So I eat a lot of tinned tuna for dinner.

Jenelle: Oh, right. Well, Bronwyn, I really want to thank you for time and for being so open with your story. There’s just so much inspiring and fascinating stories in here. What I’ve loved is your ability to take what you called as an accidental moment – several accidental moments – whether it’s going into that lung cancer placement or buying a house, but the ability to turn a moment into a movement. It makes me think, you know, how moments do we all walk past that could potentially be a movement. And how do we do that? Well your words were “step by step”. I think that, you know, you talked about the naivety that carried you along, but your doggedness in taking that step by step, and the importance of degrees of change if, you know, reflecting on your comment that everybody moves. So moving people 5 to 10 degrees can collectively make the difference. And, as you said, anything is possible. And if anybody dares to say otherwise then I’m going to force them now to put a timeframe on it to finish that sentence.

Bronwyn: Please do! Please do. I think we’d all be – we’d all – it would really free our minds, I think, if we all believed in that. And the truth is that actually is how the world works. That is how we push things forwards and that is how the world gets better. So I would absolutely love that.

Jenelle: And I want to extend my virtual thanks to Professor David Ball for entering your life and causing you to be inspired to follow him and I think the world’s a far better place for having you in it. Thanks very much for your time, Bronwyn.

Bronwyn: Thanks so much Jenelle.

The Change Happens podcast. From EY. A conversation on leading through change. Discover more where you get your podcasts.

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