Business community leads way on climate change, says BCA chief Jennifer Westacott

Jennifer Westacott says if anything, the risk ‘is that business runs faster than government ­policy’. Picture: AAP

Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott made one thing clear in her John Monash Oration on Wednesday.

When it comes to Australia’s future, it is business that will take the lead with long-term plans.

As she points out, it has been the business community that has and will continue to lead the way on policies on the environment and climate change – while ­government policies have lagged behind.

Operating in a global world and having to commit capital for the long term, and under pressure from both local and international shareholders, Australian businesses have had to push ahead with their own moves to decarbonise their operations.

“The government has rightly made the commitment to net zero and we congratulate them for it,” Westacott said diplomatically.

“But it is the private sector that can and that must take the lead.”

She cited the Business Council’s own detailed plan of action to achieve net zero emissions.

Leading Australian companies and others around the world, she said, were taking action on reducing emissions, not for symbolic reasons, but so they could “survive and thrive”.

If anything, she warned, the “risk right now is that business runs faster than government ­policy”.

The past two years have seen a virtual breakdown of the Australian federation, with state governments around the nation trying to protect themselves from Covid, with a confusing array of restrictions on individual movement.

Instead of acting like a nation, the reaction to the pandemic has been not only to retreat from globalism, by closing international borders, but to retreat from ­nationalism by closing state borders, while countries around the world have opened up, particularly this year.

But it has been business leaders, such as Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce and others in the tourism industry, Wesfarmers chief executive Rob Scott, universities and organisations such as the BCA and Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry that had been among those leading the charge to open up the borders again.

Andrew McKellar, in an interview with The Australian in August when he took over the role as ACCI new chief executive, declared that Australia had been “living in a gilded cage for the last 12 months” and had no realistic plan at the time to get out of it.

“Reopening to the world is the number one priority,” said McKellar, who had his own issues earlier this year trying to get his family back from Paris, where he had been working for six years.

The federal government’s original plan, as outlined in the May budget, was to “play it safe” and have the borders closed until at least mid-2022.

It has been business that has kept pushing for the reopening of state and international borders that has seen this week’s restarting of international flights for vaccinated Australians.

While some states are still closing their borders, with various ­degrees of restrictions on movement, Westacott’s speech makes it clear that Australia’s future is not about hiding behind closed ­borders.

“We cannot achieve (a vision for Australia’s future) if our sense of nationhood has collapsed and if our federation is not functioning,” Westacott said. “We can – and we must – tear down the fortress and reopen to the rest of the world. We must allow Australians to move freely around their country again.

“We must signal to the world we are open for business.”

Temporary lockdowns and border controls seemed like a good way initially to combat Covid, but with Covid and its variants now expected to be with us for the foreseeable future, and vaccination rates in Australia rising to levels above many other ­developed countries, governments have to work out ways to live with the virus or risk a collapse of their economies and rising unemployment.

As the borders reopen to vaccinated Australians, business is now pushing for a re-entry of skilled migrants.

Australia had no real appreciation of its dependence on skilled and unskilled migrants from around the world until it closed its borders and backpackers and other foreigners were told to go home.

As states such as NSW and Victoria open up, it is clear there is a labour shortage – from agricultural and hospitality workers to more skilled professionals such as those in accounting and IT.

It has been sad to see talented professionals from overseas, such as Accenture’s Australian chief executive, Tara Brady, and the ­director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Liz Ann Macgregor, decide to go home because of Australia’s long-term policy of closed borders.

As Westacott said in her speech, Australia needs to “make up a shortfall of half a million workers we need to drive our economic recovery”.

In her speech, Westcott recalled the key role of leaders such as US presidents John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, in providing leadership for their countries, including having long-term visions, which were behind the post-war expansion of the US economy and its technological leadership.

Australia’s three-year federal political cycle, and the need for short-term populism over longer-term planning, appears to be increasingly counting against the nation.

Increasingly, business leaders are around for a much longer term than politicians. Joyce has been chief executive of Qantas since November 2008, while Scott Morrison has been Prime Minister for only three years.

Business leaders active in the climate change debate recently include Andrew Forrest, who founded Fortescue Metals, and Atlassian co-founder Michael Cannon-Brookes.

Both are billionaires who have founded their own fortunes by taking a sustained, long-term view. Both will be around long after the current crop of politicians, both state and federal, are gone.

While political leaders have to focus on increasingly short-term political cycles, business has to ­operate in a global world making decisions for the long term.

Westacott herself has been chief executive of the BCA for a decade, constantly pushing the envelope for reform and progressive government policies.

She also used her speech to spell out another key message from business to government.

While pointing out that the world was seeing the “rise of a more aggressive China with an economic and geopolitical agenda that is not benign”, she insists that “for Australia to prosper, it is essential we have an economic and strategic relationship with China”.

The past two years have seen an unprecedented interference in the lives of Australians not seen since war time.

It is time for the pendulum to swing back, and government to resume its more conventional role in a free society, replacing short-term restrictions with a more open economy that encourages entrepreneurialism and national and global trade, replacing short-term fears with long-term vision.