It’s yet another mystery of modern life that the very people who endlessly screech that ‘corporations aren’t people!’ are at the same time demanding that corporations behave like people. That is, they want corporations to adopt moral stands on issues that have absolutely nothing to do with a corporation’s core function: making money for shareholders.
Instead, corporations have been saddled by activists with supposed responsibility for ‘environmental and social license’, which in practice means being yoked to one left-wing cause after another. Often to the detriment of the shareholders.
What’s worse is that so often the supposedly hard-headed business people running the corporations have been willing accomplices. Even when they know the ‘triple bottom line’ stuff is arrant garbage. Take Air New Zealand’s ridiculous ‘sustainability targets’, which it has been forced to abandon in shame.
Their Australian colleagues are no less idiotically virtue signalling.
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?
They still haven’t learned.
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.
As the bootheel of the green nanny state grinds down harder on their necks, foolish corporate hacks are only begging for more.
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.
Have any of these blue-tied loons ever actually read the guff they’re signing on to?
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?
More pointedly, will they stop at actual equality – that is, 50/50 male/female? Or will it simply repeat the experience of fields like teaching and healthcare, which are almost wholly dominated by women?
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?
More to the point, is this what shareholders are paying them to do?
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 […]
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.
That would be the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which is already tearing the social fabric of New Zealand to pieces. Even though not a single New Zealand voter was ever asked whether they wanted it or not.
