Go back a decade or two, and Australia’s large corporations were among the most trusted organisations in the land. But in the last six years, community trust in large corporations has plummeted and Australians have never been more distrusting of large corporate Australia.
On Monday, I showed how Morgan research had documented the dramatic fall in the trust of the Qantas brand, but the survey material goes further. While Qantas is a national leader in distrust, the phenomena extends throughout large segments of the corporate community.
That means that plans of large companies to campaign against the new industrial relations legislation are going to need to be much more persuasive to distrusting ordinary Australians than the current dialogue.
And Australia is on the brink of a major mining investment boom as solid materials like copper, nickel, lithium, cobalt and rare earths replace oil and gas as the generator of the electric power to drive motor transportation.
Lots of other countries, on seeing what Australia is doing in mining industrial relations, are becoming very excited that we can be replaced.
But community distrust means no one is listening to the warnings from large corporates.
Like sheep, the ALP government herded the large corporates to support its Yes vote in the looming referendum believing this was the path to certain victory, only to see the deep distrust of large corporates contributing to Australians responding by swinging to the No vote.
In an atmosphere of distrust, probably incorrectly, Australians have linked the Qantas backing of the government’s Yes campaign (led by its chief Alan Joyce) to the government blocking of Qatar sending increased flights to Australia and reducing Qantas airfare prices.
Qantas is now admitting its brand has been damaged.
I suspect using Qantas’s damaged brand to spearhead the Yes campaign helped forward impetus for the No campaign.
Much of the community tarnished, big corporate money is being directed to the advertising campaign that is being fronted by the still very ill John Farnham. And I hope the great Australian singer does not become pulled into the big corporate money pit.
Farnham is missing his former manager, the late Glenn Wheatley, who would never have allowed him to be convinced to tag his ‘You’re the Voice’ anthem to a complex and dangerous constitutional change – an issue where the majority of his fans appear to oppose what he is doing.
Meanwhile, Rio Tinto, which was discredited for blowing up the 46,000-year-old Juukan Gorge cave system for an iron ore mine in Western Australia, chipped in $2m for the Yes campaign and Prime Minister Albanese responded by wearing a Rio Tinto shirt on a visit. The winner was the No campaign.
As I pointed out on Monday, BHP also lobbed $2m into the massive large corporate money pool backing the Yes campaign even though its charter requires it to stay away from donating to political issues.
One of the reasons that big corporates are not trusted is that they have become like politicians and only present a side of the story that favours their point of view.
And so, in the voice debate, the big corporates trot out the fact that they favour a voice body to parliament. As they will know, but don’t say, the real issue is not so much the voice to parliament, which could be managed, but the voice to the public service which could see tens of thousands of representations each year covering almost all decisions. Because the representation is being made under a constitutional power, the High Court will require detailed consideration of each representation. This will clog up the entire government and may require reparations to change the rules.
The big corporations who have done their homework understand this issue, but do not discuss it.
This is another example of how the failure to tell the full truth is impacting the reputation of large businesses.
Just as PwC Australia were not up front with the full ATO story but allowed the facts to be dribbled out, so destroying the brand.
Rio Tinto directors did not explain the full details of what contributed to the cave destruction; the database breach scandals showed lack of care on data, and the full implications of what happened was often initially concealed. If companies have a Covid-19 story as to why they are holding back on returning Covid-19 grants that were made to keep employment during Covid-19, they are not telling the community and so contributing to corporate distrust.
Almost every a second week, a major corporate is pinged for not paying the correct amount to employees. Sometimes the corporation is deliberately saving money or mismanaging, but often it is a sheer complexity of the awards that cause the problems few companies speak up and so the actions multiply the distrust for large corporates.
In the industrial relations debate, it will be the small enterprises that will be able to relate to what is likely to happen to them as a result of the industrial relations legislation. If I they do it properly, they will have far more impact than the now distrusted large companies.
The tragedy for Australia is that this time what the distrusted large corporates say on the IR legislation is important to the nation.
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