Mind your own business – or brace for inevitable shareholder backlash

The backlash is coming as many of our corporate geniuses prepare to embrace a new set of globally mandated traps.

Australian corporations are ‘going gaga’ over the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.. Picture: Getty Images

Air New Zealand, one of the most prominent adherents of the sustainability focus of modern corporations, has been mugged by the reality of unsustainable sustainability targets. It recently abandoned its 2030 carbon intensity reduction targets. Meanwhile, many of its Australian peers are signing up to new forms.

You may not have heard about these latest ones. No less real, these more covert environmental, social and governance straitjackets make one wonder: is there any end to corporate Australia’s gullibility, if not downright negligence?

Australian companies fawned over the incoming Albanese government, rolling over when new industrial relations policies were being discussed. Imagine their surprise when they discovered the ALP is indeed a wholly owned subsidiary of the union movement and was going to do all the unions wanted, plus more.

And who can forget how corporate Australia lined up to endorse the voice even before anyone knew what the actual proposal was, and doubled down on their negligence when the full radical overreach of the voice was known?

Now, many of those same corporate geniuses are about to embrace a brand-new set of traps as they prepare for life under mandated sustainability reports.

Treasury has released consultation papers on how to introduce mandatory sustainability reporting in Australia, including by giving the Australian Accounting Standards Board power to set standards to implement sustainability requirements. The intent appears to be not only to introduce these as soon as possible but also to make them consistent with global standards set by the International Sustainability Standards Board.

Australian corporations are already going gaga over the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Once again, they have fallen hook, line and sinker for the international treaty ruse. You know the one – if several countries sign up to a treaty, body or declaration, well, it must be a good thing. Yes, just like the UN Human Rights Council that has featured celebrated human rights champions such as China, Cuba, Vietnam and worse. To anyone paying attention, it’s painfully clear this shindig is simply the exercise of global politics by another name.

The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals are no different. It’s politics, pure and simple. But that hasn’t stopped the stampede of corporate cheerleaders signing up to the SDG goals, led by BHP and Commonwealth Bank. According to a survey done as long ago as 2019 by RMIT and Global Compact Network Australia, 37 per cent of the ASX 150 companies referred to the SDGs in their sustainability reports. Those companies in the top 20 for reporting against the SDGs represented 32.39 per cent of the ASX by market capitalisation, which included companies such as Westpac, Telstra and Fortescue.

When did it become the job of an Australian corporation to publicise its endorsement of UN policies? It is not merely the hubris of individual Australian businesses approving the work of global bodies that grates. Their negligence is more vexing, especially if you’re a shareholder.

I’m giving directors the benefit of the doubt that they have at least glanced at the list of Sustainable Development Goals. Each goal, taken as a stand-alone proposition, is an uplifting piety that no one could oppose. But you have to read past the headlines to see what is really going on. How sure are we that directors and chief executives have done this?

The fine print reveals the controversial stuff, the stuff that shareholders might well find hard to stomach – if they were told about it by directors and CEOs. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals have 169 targets attached to them, and each goal has a set of indicators to measure progress. Here the plot thickens.

Take goal five – to “achieve gender equality and empower women and girls”. That’s laudable. Except the UN’s overview of this goal advocates legislated quotas for parliaments on the grounds that these are needed to “achieve equality in politics”. If someone proposed legislating 50 per cent female-only seats in parliament, it would be an understatement to say that would be controversial. So why are companies making this their business?

It gets worse. To understand where goal five is headed, you have to read the underlying targets. Target 5.6 aims to “ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed in accordance with the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences”.

Does this mean abortion on demand and at will? Late-term abortions? You have to read the Programme of Action and the Beijing Platform and their respective “outcome documents” to find out. How many corporations do you think have done their due diligence on that one before signing up?

The bigger question is why Australian corporations – big and small – need to get into these sorts of debates at all. Is this what shareholders pay them to do?

Global companies may argue their international scope justifies them spending shareholders’ money on compliance with international law instruments dreamt up by unelected activists. But companies with exclusively domestic operations have enough to worry about in complying with Australian law – they shouldn’t be wasting time and money on virtue-signalling international exotica.

Even more perplexing, some Australian companies are signing up to international instruments that are not just collections of banal platitudes. In some cases, they would, if implemented in Australia, damage Australian sovereignty and social harmony.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at Garma 2024. Picture: Yothu Yindi Foundation/Leicolhn McKellar via NewsWire

The UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which CBA and BHP say guides their approach, is the most striking example. This declaration demands the kind of co-sovereignty so resoundingly rejected by the Australian people in the recent voice referendum.

To illustrate, article three of this UN Declaration says “Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination” and by “virtue of that right they freely determine their political status”. Article four gives indigenous peoples “in exercising their right to self-determination” the “right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs” – as well as the “ways and means for financing their autonomous functions”. Article 14 gives indigenous peoples the “right to establish and control their education systems and institutions”, while article 28 gives indigenous peoples the right to restitution or compensation for the loss of traditional lands.

Australians have enormous goodwill towards our Indigenous people and have been prepared to back up that goodwill with very significant taxpayer funds (not all of which, it must be admitted, has been well spent). However, the voice referendum as well as numerous High Court decisions make clear that Australians want, and have, an indivisible sovereignty, and equal civic rights for everyone.

The UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is precisely the kind of separatist international dogma that Australian corporations should recognise as anathema to Australians.

So why are Australian corporations diving into these debates? In many cases the answer, sadly, is negligence; each company, its management and board, is simply aping their peers without thinking about it.

Change is needed at several levels. First, corporate boards should stop signing up to the global agendas of international political activists – especially treaties that have no relevance to their corporate remit that they appear not to have read, certainly don’t understand and appear to have done no due diligence on. These companies, their institutional shareholders and proxy advisers need to heed the warnings of the voice referendum and recent research from the Centre for Independent Studies showing a big majority of stakeholders just want their company to get out of politics. A backlash is coming; they need to stop politicising Australian business.

Second, the Australian Accounting Standards Board, which will promulgate the rules on sustainability reporting, needs to stick to its knitting and avoid mandating the wish list of global activists.

Finally, if all that fails, a new government – because it won’t happen under the current one – needs to amend the Corporations Act to ensure accounting standards can’t be used to implement, via a sneaky reporting back door, an elite global agenda increasingly detested by the average voter.

Time is nearly up on the hijacking of corporate Australia for political purposes. Boards – and governments – ignore the incoming tide at their peril.