The Business Council of Australia is facing a major attack on its credibility after sustained criticism of its recent report predicting all manner of corporate chaos arising from the Rudd Government’s carbon trading system.
Business Spectator’s Giles Parkinson is a respected journalist not prone to hyperbole, so observers took notice when he unloaded with the following last Friday:
I’ve spent a good few hours trawling through this 170-page document and its conclusions. It makes for fascinating reading, and has got lots of useful graphs and tables. But frankly, I’d be shocked if the BCA has ever produced a report as short-sighted, misleading and profoundly disappointing as this. At a time when Australia needs and deserves strong leadership and business vision to grapple with this devilish issue, the descent into corporate doublespeak is alarming.
There has been a similar response in other quarters, such as this piece by Bernard Keane in Crikey on Monday.
All this raises some serious questions about BCA president Greg Gailey, the former Zinifex CEO, who is delivering a big speech to the Sydney Institute tonight.
Despite the change of government, it would appear that the carbon club remains in control of the peak business body for CEOs. The nine person BCA board still includes leading carbon sceptic John Marlay, even though he quit Alumina earlier this year, along with Mark Nolan, the Australian CEO of Exxon-Mobil, the world’s biggest supporter of climate sceptics.
The ousting of IAG CEO Mike Hawker and last year’s retirement of Westpac CEO David Morgan removed two high profile CEOs of major public companies who bucked the carbon club and joined with Visy, Origin, BP, Swiss Re and the ACF to commission some alternative carbon research from Allen Consulting group in 2006.
There is also the issue of Gailey’s financial interests. When he bailed from Zinifex last June, he collected a $12.5 million ex gratia payment in return for surrendering $14.9 million worth of long term benefits which are worth a lot less today. And Gailey’s pay arrangements were controversial well before his departure as the Zinifex remuneration report attracted a startling 41% against vote in 2006.
Gailey also owned an additional 1.087 million Zinifex shares at the time he quit, although these have since plunged in value from $20 million to about $6 million.
Paul Kelly’s big Inquirer cover story in The Weekend Australian, which was very sympathetic towards the BCA report, identified the lead and zinc industries right at the outset, but at the very least the commercial interests of Gailey should be identified given he used to run Australia’s biggest lead and zinc producer.
The whole point of carbon trading is to stop this poison being pumped into the atmosphere, yet the BCA is railing against the scheme led by a bloke whose old company ran the giant lead smelter at Port Pirrie which caused local children to have the highest blood lead levels in the country.
Is it any wonder Resources Minister Martin Ferguson is by-passing hysterical peak bodies and inviting 50 individual companies to Canberra for a briefing on Friday?
It’s time the BCA looked for a new leadership, rather than someone that fellow sceptic Hugh Morgan was happy to hand the presidency to last October.
*Listen to last night’s chat with Lindy Burns on 774 ABC Melbourne.
Interesting to note that the word ‘sceptic’ is used by Mayne here in a derogatory sense whilst in a truly scientific and in an intellectual sense it is viewed as a requisite.
I suppose we should be grateful that he desisted from using the ‘denier’ sobriquet.
I would certainly hope that leadership in this country not demonstrate gullibility of the rubbish peddled on both sides of the AGW debate.
And much rubbish on this topic has been peddled by Crikey.
Skepticism is a good thing, it makes us question things that should be questioned. Pretending skepticism for commercial reasons is not.
FYI Marion Wilson, “Global warming”, global cooling and “extreme weather incidents have been happening all over the world for at least 10” million years and more. And human beings for 10 million years have believed that they could influence the weather or the gods to influence the said weather also for 10 million years.
Now Rudd, Wong and Garnaut says we can influence the weather for the good of the planet……. Well it must be true because nice Mr. Rudd says ” the scientists, the people who know about these things” have told him.
But there are other respected climate scientist who do not agree.
Which climate scientist do you believe or which climate scientist do you want to believe?
Stephen: if you are not being, as you too often are, frivolous, you are disqualifyingly ignorant in referring to carbon (sic – the same objection would be open to your saying “carbon dioxide”) as a poison (sic). You quote a journalist Giles Parkinson who is supposed to be a worthy well known figure but whose name is unknown to me, and of course Bernard Keane, none of whom inspire me with confidence that they/you have a clud what you are talking about in relation either to climate change, to global warming and its causes and possible remedies (if any), or to the policy Australia should adopt in its own long term interests (who else’s?). The silly ad hominem attacks ought to give way to some evidence that you have followed the IPCC reporting and the criticisms as thoroughly as Hugh Morgan et al. And surely your economic nouse, such as it is, is up to working out what Australia adding seriously and unilaterally to its business costs is going to do to us all, and, not least, a government which perpetrates it. And that is without considering whether you are one of the fantasists who imagines that what Australia does or says could have the slightest influence on what China and India do, or more than the most marginal and trivial influence on what harm we can avert by what we do. You don’t happen to be one of those who also fantasises about the growth and employment opportunities for Australia from embracing change do you? Why not just increase tariffs on TCF again, subsidise research, and ban imports of cheap clothes and shoes???? Seriously, on this one, you ought to be clobbering those Green innumerates and economic illiterates who abstract us from the real compeitive world where others will be doing the same thing and where we can make profits out of selling technology regardless of the home market.
The qualifications for being on the BCA is the ability to run a big business…..not to hold anti-carbon views.
This will change, but I am confident that these people will be the first to know when it is best to do so…for the benefit of their shareholders and employees. Not because of the outcries of those who think this issue is cost free to them.