It’s time to raise the ceiling for Indigenous leaders in business

First published on Australian Financial Review

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Opinion piece by Brad Welsh, published in the Australian Financial Review on 10 August 2025.

Almost every conversation about Indigenous Australia is framed through one lens: closing the gap.

We’ve spent decades focused on the metrics of disadvantage – health, education and employment – but despite the best of intentions, we are going backwards. Perhaps more than that though, we’ve failed to imagine a future that moves beyond disadvantage for Indigenous Australians.

It’s time to raise the ceiling, not just the floor.

We must open space for Indigenous ownership and decision-making at the heart of the economy and corporate Australia. We need Indigenous leadership that’s commercially grounded, culturally strong, and unapologetically strategic.

This is not a foreign concept to the world’s oldest living culture. Our survival over 65,000 years – through an ice age and mega droughts – depended on allocating resources wisely and adapting to change. In other words, our people were experts in managing capital and risk.

Yet today, our national strategies for closing the gap are largely benevolent in design. While benevolence has its place, it does not require Indigenous Australians to actively manage capital or shoulder risk. Nor does it prepare our communities to attract the private capital needed to drive long-term change.

Private capital speaks a global language. It moves to where there is certainty, value creation and commercial acumen. The uncomfortable truth is that many Indigenous communities – and many talented Indigenous professionals – are not investment-ready. The barrier is not potential; it is opportunity, exposure and belief.

Too many Indigenous professionals are steered towards Indigenous-facing roles that have their own value, but are usually disconnected from the balance sheet. These roles rarely involve managing a profit and loss account, driving commercial advantage or shaping enterprise risk. As a result, we foster culturally competent leaders, but not commercially empowered ones.

The truth is, cultural knowledge alone shouldn’t earn an Indigenous Australian an executive role, or even a board seat in corporate Australia. It should be matched with capability, commercial strength and the ability to manage capital and risk.

If we are serious about long-term economic participation, we need to allow Indigenous leaders to operate at the core of business.

That means teaching capital management as a form of cultural survival. It means supporting our leaders to see work in the mainstream economy not as assimilation but as cultural transmission, bringing our values into businesses and boardrooms, not leaving them at the door.

I grew up in Redfern and in my lifetime, members of my direct family were still living in tin camps in Goodooga in outback New South Wales. Despite my heritage, I’ve always introduced myself as a senior leader who is a senior leader who is a senior leader who is a senior leader who is a senior leader who is a senior leader who is Indigenous, not a senior Indigenous leader.

My ambition was to manage the balance sheet, not just Traditional Owner relations or the NAIDOC week celebrations, as important as those roles are. My view is that our culture is not diminished by commercial capability, but is amplified by it.

That’s why I am committed to providing a leadership platform for Indigenous professionals to equip them with the commercial skills, networks and mentorship to step into executive and board roles.

I want to help Indigenous leaders navigate capital and risk because that’s what our ancestors did, and it’s what our communities must do again to thrive in modern markets.

To support this, we need a step change in thinking from corporate Australia and to stop pigeonholing Indigenous people in Indigenous-facing roles.

The next generation of Indigenous leaders will face problems we can’t yet imagine. But if we raise the ceiling, not just the floor, they’ll be ready.

Brad Welsh is the Founder and CEO of Mawal, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of ERA, a Non-Executive Director of nib Health Insurance, the AFR’s Emerging Director of the Year 2025 and a Muruwari man from New South Wales.