STATEMENTS BY SENATORS – ESG Policies

Many people in recent years may have come across an initialism known as ESG. In theory, our corporate sector has been desperate to apply ESG principles—so called environmental, social and governance principles—to itself in recent years. It doesn’t really mean it, though, because in practice what ESG has meant for our corporate sector is ‘exempting ourselves from guilt’. That’s what this has been about. We’ve seen, time and time again, large corporate entities engage in the most gross misbehaviour and then turn around within weeks and start lecturing us all about what we should do, in some pretty lame attempt to absolve themselves from guilt. The latest example was just last week. Woolworths, an organisation that has been accused of terrible treatment
of small businesses—a great ABC Four Corners documentary went through that at length earlier this year, followed by a Senate inquiry which pilloried the conduct of Woolworths and its treatment of farmers and small businesses—last week released its latest sustainability report. In that report, they have committed themselves to sourcing beef only from ‘no deforestation’ areas. They’ve done this with reference to something called the Science Based TargetsInitiative. That initiative defines forest areas of this country as 44 per cent of grazing land. So we’d reduce our supply of beef across vast swathes of Australia if we were to apply these United Nations and WWF standards. All Australians, I think, would probably have some interaction with Woolworths from time to time, and almost all of them lately would have been shocked when they got to the check-out and saw how much their grocery bills were. A lot of it is because of this kind of rubbish that groups like Woolworths are putting in place, which restricts the supply of products and pushes up prices. ESG doesn’t just mean exempting ourselves from guilt; it also means extreme shortages guaranteed.