Is ANZ’s climate policy ‘wokeness over profits’ … or the price of doing business?

Illustration: Johannes Leak

There was a battle royale between Nationals MPs in Canberra on Thursday for the gold medal in stupidity — the most inane contribution to ANZ Bank’s new ­climate policy.

In the end, it was impossible to separate Michael “sheer virtue signalling” McCormack from Matt “wokeness over profits” Canavan, Keith “eco warrior” Pitt, and David “warm and fuzzies” Littleproud.

Clearly, it has escaped these gentlemen that climate change is a critical, mainstream business issue, no longer the province of wild-eyed student radicals and ­activist groups.

In fact, in many cases, it’s the issue that dominates the conversation between Australian corporations and powerful institutional investors when our chief executives drop into Asia’s fin­ancial centres or London and New York.

CEOs ignore these investors at their peril. If they can’t present a convincing plan to navigate their companies to carbon neutrality by 2050, in line with the Paris Agreement, they’re kidding themselves — they’re seen as living under a rock that’s slowly warming.

It’s not just that. The ultimate sanction against such companies is the so-called “Wall Street walk” — investors sell their stock, share prices plummet and the corporation’s cost of capital escalates, rendering them uncompetitive.

Either that or their assets become stranded, incapable of ­attracting capital at all.

Maybe the likes of McCormack, Canavan, Pitt and Littlepround could direct their confected outrage to the likely impact on their superannuation funds, unless, of course, the people who manage those funds are already doing their job properly and discharging their fiduciary duties.

So to ANZ. The extraordinary thing about the bank’s climate policy is that it’s not particularly radical. It’s mainstream, entirely what you’d expect from a mainstream financial institution.

The thing that caused the four MPs to splutter with outrage was the idea individual farmers were targets. It’s nonsense. As one wag said on Thursday, any farmer fearful of being touched by the policy will have to own a lot of cows to earn a position among ANZ’s top 100 carbon emitters.

They are the real targets of the policy. According to ANZ, they overwhelmingly recognise the climate challenge and have prepared transition plans to net zero.

Maybe they got a good laugh out of Thursday’s events, but it’s safe to say ANZ chief executive Shayne Elliott did not enjoy the complete distortion of a strategy years in the making.

For him, the big climate “pivot” came a couple of years ago, when the local shutdown of coal-fired power stations began.

Stranded assets, anyone?

“This is real,” the ANZ boss told The Australian. “Renewables is the future but there’s obviously a role for transition fuels. The thing I’ve learned about these big shifts … is they come very fast.”