“Things that some people take for granted today, but were very, very special back then.”
Sadly, though, her father passed away just a year later. “My father died very suddenly at an early age. He was in his early 50s.”
While she’s always been good with money and is a trained accountant, Walsh says that changed her attitude towards spending and enjoying life.
“I’m quite conservative in the sense that I do want to have financial security. That’s really important to me. I want to be able to cover the unexpected.
“However, possibly because I did lose my father young, I do have a bit of a ‘make the most of it and you’ve gotta enjoy it’, kind of sentiment. So I am known for a little bit of spending.
“I’m certainly really clear that you have to do things when you can because you might not be able to do them later.”
Walsh doesn’t buy Lotto tickets but, asked about the idea of a Lotto-style windfall, she offers some good advice.
“I think if you were to come into money – and people come into money through inheritances and other windfalls, redundancy payments and things like that – I think, for me, it would be about being careful with that money.
“What’s a significant amount of money to make a difference in your life? I think for me, it’s about if you’ve got the fundamentals covered, if you’ve got your mortgage covered, if you can pay your bills and pay for things that happen along the way that you don’t anticipate, then anything you win on Lotto is just a bonus.
“So ... if you earned a ridiculous amount of money from Lotto, you’d wanna give it to other people. The way my upbringing has worked is that I like to be secure and I like to be able to cover the things that I don’t expect, but I also don’t aspire to be incredibly wealthy either.”
Now a high-flying corporate director, Walsh was made a dame for services to sport, for her work co-ordinating both the 2011 Rugby World Cup (as chief operating officer of the New Zealand Rugby Union) and the 2015 Cricket World Cup.
Despite the sporting association, she confesses she never really excelled as an athlete, describing herself as a keen participant.
“It’s very funny because I was made a dame for sport administration. I sat on a couch the other night with Dame Farah Palmer and Dame Susan Devoy, who were world champions. And I was like, gosh, I’m a fraud sitting here, aren’t I?
“I participated in all sports as a kid. I was very active, but I was really not very good.”
But her family loved sports. “The transistor radio was always going. We got up in the middle of the night to watch the All Blacks tests. So sports was just part of that Kiwi experience and so important.”
After a successful career with accounting firm KPMG, she took some time out to become a mother and the opportunity to step back in part-time with the NZRU came along just at the right time.
The role grew from there. While it was a bit of an old-school, male-dominated place back then, Walsh says she was always treated with respect.
“When I first walked in, it was a novelty. It was strange. I used to walk into the board meetings to present and everyone would stand up, which of course you can’t keep doing every day in business or you’d be up and down and never get anything done.
“It did have a conservative, male-oriented vibe to it, let’s be honest. But everyone was very respectful.”
Walsh is now a champion of women in the corporate world and is a founder of mentoring group On Being Bold with other business leaders such as Joan Withers and Jolie Hodson.
She is also involved with charity at the other end of the social spectrum as an ambassador for the Wellington Homeless Women’s Trust.
Her other passion is the environment. She is chairwoman of Chapter Zero, a governance organisation dedicated to helping corporates make the transition to a carbon-neutral future.
Listen to the full interview with Dame Therese Walsh here for more on her life story.
Money Talks is a podcast run by the NZ Herald. You can follow the series on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are out every Saturday.
