Andrew Bolt: Corporate Australia corrupted by the left

We are being forced to sit and watch as the left uses other people’s savings to force big business to promote its agenda.

Do you feel powerless? Do you feel like big business, big unions, big media and big government are changing your world for the worst, and you can’t do a damn thing about it?

No wonder.

Take the latest evidence: a threatening letter – essentially a blackmail note, in my opinion – sent this month to the biggest 300 companies on our stock exchange.

It’s from HESTA, one of the giant superannuation funds linked to our biggest unions, and chaired by former Labor attorney-general Nicola Roxon, apparently an activist still.

The letter shows one of the ways corporate Australia is captured by the left in an underground “culture war”.

It warns each company that HESTA “manages the retirement savings of more than 950,000 Australians” – mostly health workers – and has “over $68bn of assets under management”.

Then comes the threat: HESTA plans to use that money to invest in companies to make money for its members but will also force those companies to push policies of the left, particularly on global warming.

HESTA chair Nicola Roxon.

For their members’ own good, of course!

But not just that. HESTA tells companies to also get on board its huge political agenda; to fight “gender equality” and “social inequality”, appoint more female directors, shrink the alleged “gender pay gap”, rely less on casual workers, offer “flexible work practices”, act on human rights and stop “loss of nature”.

Note that the HESTA agenda is totally left wing. It does not include doing something conservative to fight far bigger threats to this country. HESTA does not demand support for free speech, for instance, or a race-blind Australia, divestment from the Chinese dictatorship, or policies to deal with the economy-killing disruptions that will come from the predicted war over Taiwan.

HESTA’s demands are detailed and a brazen interference in the right of employers to run their businesses as they think works best.

For instance, it warns: “Your company has a key role in mitigating climate risk and reducing emissions”, and if the company doesn’t draw up a “verified climate strategy” to cut emissions and put people with global warmist “skills” on its boards HESTA will hit it with an “escalation”, including “votes against directors, support or failing or shareholder resolutions and/ or consideration of divestment”.

This super bully isn’t kidding, and Australians could soon pay big time. Already HESTA has pushed AGL, our oldest power company, to “decarbonise” by scrapping its coal-fired generators.

Loy Yang power station is set to close earlier than expected.

It’s worked, unfortunately. Along with AGL’s biggest shareholder, global warming extremist Mike Cannon-Brookes, HESTA helped force AGL to last week announce it was closing Victoria’s biggest coal-fired power station, Loy Yang A, a decade earlier. That’s 30 per cent of Victoria’s electricity gone by 2035.

AGL also said it would close the Bayswater generator in NSW, and to replace all this lost energy AGL offers only hope, dreams and untested technologies such as hydrogen.

This company, now worth just $4.6bn and planning to scrap its biggest assets, promises to try to raise an astonishing $20bn on finding some other “green” energy instead, mostly unreliable wind and solar. Seriously?

Why HESTA thinks this vandalism of our already stressed electricity system helps its members astonishes me. Since when did a super fund for health workers become an expert in power supplies and the truth behind this insane global warming scare?

But HESTA threatens our top 300 companies with a breathtaking arrogance that seems driven more by ideology than a laser-like focus on the bottom line to make sure health workers get top dollar for their retirements.

And be warned. HESTA also holds nearly $50m in other fossil fuel companies, Woodside and Santos. What more damage could it do?

Even more ominous, HESTA is far from alone. Its threatening letter was signed by chief executive Debby Blakey, who is also president of the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors which manages more than $1 trillion in funds.

HESTA’s policies are in fact shared by many of the union-linked industry funds that meanwhile funnel some $30m a year to unions.

These super funds are playing politics with superannuation savings Australians are forced by law to hand over, while having close to zero say on the politicking they are financing.

But this is just one snapshot of the corporate statism – an incipient fascism – now promoted by the left that used to claim to oppose it.

Yes, we still have elections.

But watch as the left uses other people’s savings to force big business to promote its agenda, or else, without that untidiness of having to ask voters to agree.