Original keynote delivered and summarised by Cranlana’s Associate Professor of Ethics and Impact Leslie Cannold.
During September 2025, the NSW Government hosted its Values Week, a series of events focused on promoting the values of integrity, trust and accountability within the public sector.
Associate Professor Leslie Cannold delivering the keynote at the NSW Government's Values Week.
The final keynote, delivered by Associate Professor Leslie Cannold, addressed the importance of values-led leadership in reducing Australia’s high levels of affective polarisation.
In this summary, Leslie explains the key concepts and practical tools Australian leaders in the public, private and NFP sectors need to lower the temperature on values conflict in their workplaces and neighbourhoods, to enhance social cohesion and protect Australian democracy.
Why leaders must lead
Leaders play an outsized role in building and maintaining an ethical culture. Most people, most of the time, are followers. They lack the structural authority, the knowledge, the know-how and/or the confidence to take charge, and so are looking for others to show the way.
This means many will follow a leader, even when they don’t know what they’re doing or if they’re taking an ignoble path.
This grants leaders a huge amount of responsibility that they can’t shrug off. If you occupy a position of power, there is no point protesting that you didn’t ask for the responsibility that comes along with it.
You have the position. Because of it, others will follow your lead. The end. The only question you have to ponder is, what example will I set?
An ethical leader seeks the right ends using the right means. That means that to increase social cohesion in their workplace and neighbourhood, they require an effective toolkit to reduce stereotypes and threat, and to build connection and trust.
Luckily, these tools exist.
The part Australian leaders can play in saving democracy
Right now, we need Australia’s everyday leaders to take the threat to Australia’s social cohesion and its democracy seriously, and to play their part in turning the temperature down.
Why is democracy so important?
Because – for all its faults – it is the most ethical way to govern that we know.
Why?
Because democracies are rhetorically and structurally committed to the logical and moral truth that all people are created equal.
Because of that inherent equality between persons regardless of race, colour, creed, class, gender, sexual orientation, geographic location etc, we are all deserving of equal dignity, the right to self-governance, and protection from arbitrary or unjust interference by others.
We also share duties with one another, as participants in the cooperative project of living together harmoniously and productively.
The values, mechanisms and practices that have emerged from the radical equality between persons supposed by Australia’s democracy include:
- Truthfulness and transparency
- Respect and tolerance
- Equality between citizens represented by one person one vote
- Autonomy represented by one person, one vote
- Religious and economic freedom
- Procedural fairness
- Social safety net including income support and public health system
- Majority rule within the above constraints
We have become dangerously intolerant of moral difference in Australia of late.
Driven by the polarising effects of neoliberal economic pressures, the social and political fallout of Covid-19, and the amplifying nature of social media, our public discourse has become more aggressive, polarised and self-righteous.
Rather than attend to the way this approach totalled American democracy, our media and leaders are following in the same path.
Viewing their own side as morally righteous and “them” as stupid, brainwashed and at fault for when it all goes to hell in a handbasket. If I had a dollar for every time a leader said, “enough is enough” and “we can no longer tolerate” as if there is some magic bullet for what ails us that we have simply failed to use, I’d be a billionaire.
There are no magic bullets. However “fed up” we may feel with the other side’s insistence that their freedom-based values should trump “our” fairness ones – or vice versa – we don’t get to quit.
“We’ve tried frankly yelling at people. We’ve tried telling people they’re bigots. We’ve tried telling people that what they’re saying shouldn’t be ever said,” McBride said. “That didn’t work, and so we’ve got to try something different.”
McBride stressed the importance of creating an incentive for people to grow and change, rather than outright rebuking their ideas as wrong.
“If people think that they will be permanently guilty for having been wrong,” McBride said, “not only does that leave them no incentive or space to change, it actually creates an incentive for them to not only maintain their position, but to maintain their position as the mainstream political position.”
– Sarah McBride, the first trans member of the US House on civic discourse.
Source: The Eagle Online
As citizens of a shared democracy, we have to keep talking or at least let others who have the listening skills, humility and patience, to keep the conversation afloat.
Otherwise, we’ll continue on with the unhelpful shaming, shunning and deplatforming that has contributed to the “my way or the highway” attitude we’ve seen on all sides and that eventually leads – as we’ve seen in the US – to utilising violence in all of its forms to settle our differences.
You can do it. And you most likely already do.
Most likely, you do this already in some of your relationships. Consider how you feel and respond to your beloved Nan, who can sometimes say things you believe are prejudiced. You may do your best to understand where she’s coming from (“she’s set in her ways, they didn’t know better back then”), and even try to respectfully persuade her to your point of view using reasoned argument, not personal attacks.
But ultimately, if you can’t win her over, you don’t shun her.
Or evict her from the Xmas dinner.
Or let your voice drip with contempt every time you speak to and about her.
You tolerate her because this one moral error does not render her ineligible for all the privileges of being included as a member in good standing in your family. That is, you continue to treat her with respect.
The same respect that as a citizen of Australia’s democracy you owe to all fellow Australians.
In this keynote, I’ve argued that leaders have an obligation to step up and model the humility, patience and tolerance that Australians need to practice to turn the national temperature down.
I want to close by reminding leaders that at Cranlana, we have their backs. We are here to support them to remember the skills they already have when it comes to tolerating those with diverse and even morally offensive points of view.
And we have their backs when it comes to sharing the toolkits they need to reconnect their workforces and neighbours in ways that reduce threat and increase the trust we need to reconnect Australians at home and at work, and to strengthen Australian democracy.
Please note, this summary has been edited for clarity and where necessary, context and examples have been provided.
Explore the ways Cranlana can support you to step up in your ethical leadership practice.
- Learn directly from Leslie on the value of lowering the temperature on polarisation during our online course: Lowering the temperature on values conflict at work. 2026 dates will be available soon.
- If you sit within the public service, please explore this resource provided by the NSW Government: Ethics hub for the public sector, which they update with guidance on foundational ethical issues in the sector.
- Find a Cranlana experience that suits what you’re seeking at this stage of your career. Our 2026 dates are now live:
