Why Business Experience Belongs in Politics — Steph Cooke's Case Against Career Politicians
Before parliament, Steph Cooke ran four shops with twenty florists. She argues that real-world experience — including not knowing if you can make payroll — is exactly what politics is missing.
Steph Cooke is one of the few people in the New South Wales Parliament who knows what it's like to lie awake wondering if she can pay her staff. She thinks that's a problem worth talking about.
A business before a seat
Before politics, Cooke ran her own business for more than a decade — four shops, with twenty florists reporting to her. That experience, she argues, isn't a footnote on her CV. It's the foundation of how she governs.
She's pointed about how rare it is: she reckons she's one of very few in the parliament to have run a business for over a decade. Most, she says, arrived by a very different road.
The case against career politicians
Her critique is direct:
"For far too long we've had career politicians — people who left school, went to university, got involved in university politics, took a job with a politician, and then became one themselves. They don't know anything else."
The problem isn't ambition; it's a narrow lane. If your entire adult life has been inside politics, she suggests, there's a whole category of lived reality you've never touched — and it shows in the decisions.
What real experience teaches
The specific thing Cooke keeps coming back to is payroll anxiety — the genuine, stomach-tightening uncertainty of not knowing whether you can pay people's wages. "You have to know what it's like to not know whether you can pay people's wages." You can't read your way into that knowledge. You have to have lived it.
It connects to a theme that runs through her whole conversation: authenticity. People, she says, "want to know that when they're talking to a person, they're getting the real deal — and that if that person says they're going to do something, they follow through." Real-world experience is part of what makes that believable.
Her argument, in the end, is simple: life experience before public life isn't a nice-to-have. It's the thing that keeps a representative connected to the people they represent.
Part of a longer conversation. Read the full Steph Cooke deep-dive, or watch the episode →.