The kiss of death: energy policies keep killing our PMs

If you were born in 1989 or after, you haven’t yet voted in an election that’s seen a Prime Minister serve a full term.

Some point to social media, the online stomping grounds of digital natives, as the cause of this. As Emma Alberici pointed out, Twitter launched in 2006, the year before Kevin ’07 became PM.

Some blame widening political polarisation, of which there is evidence social media plays a crucial role.

If we take a look though, the thing that keeps killing our PMs’ popularity in the polls and party room is climate and energy policy. It sounds completely anodyne until you realise what a deadly assassin it is.

Rudd

Kevin Rudd declared, “Climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation”. This strategic focus on global warming contributed to him defeating John Howard to become Prime Minister in December 2007. As soon as Rudd took office, he cemented his green brand by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, something his predecessor refused to do.

There were two other major efforts by the Rudd government to address emissions and climate change. The first was the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme(CPRS) led by then environment minister Penny Wong. It was a ‘cap and trade’ system that had bi-partisan support from the Turnbull led opposition party… until Turnbull lost his shadow leadership to Abbott over it. More on this soon.

Then there was the December 2009 United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, officially called COP15 (because it was the fifteenth session of the Conference of Parties). Rudd and Wong attended the summit and worked tirelessly with other nations to create a framework for reducing global energy consumption. But COP15 was unsuccessful in that no legally binding emissions limits were set.

Only a few months later, the CPRS was ditched by the Labor government who saw it would never be legislated due to a lack of support. Rudd was seen as ineffectual on climate change policy, the core issue he championed. His popularity plummeted.

Gillard

Enter Julia Gillard. She took poll position in the Labor party in June 2010 in what will be remembered as the “knifing of Kevin Rudd”.

Ahead of the election she said she would “tackle the challenge of climate change” with investments in renewables. She promised, “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead”.

Had she known the election would result in the first federal hung parliament since 1940, when Menzies was PM, she may not have uttered those words. Gillard wheeled and dealed to form a minority government with the support of a motley crew – Adam Bandt, a Greens MP from Melbourne, and independents Andrew Wilkie from Hobart, and Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor from regional NSW. The compromises and negotiations required to please this diverse bunch would make passing legislation a challenging process.

To add to a further degree of difficulty, the Greens held the balance of power in the Senate. Gillard suggested they used this to force her hand to introduce the carbon tax. Then Greens leader Bob Brown denied that claim, saying it was a “mutual agreement”. A carbon price was legislated in November 2011 to much controversy.

Abbott went hard on this broken election promise, repeating his phrase “axe the tax” at every opportunity. Gillard became the unpopular one.

Rudd 2.0

Crouching tiger Rudd leapt up from his grassy foreign ministry portfolio and took the prime ministership back in June 2013. This second stint lasted three months until Labor lost the election.

Abbott

Prime Minister Abbott launched a cornerstone energy policy in December 2013 that might be described as the opposite of Labor’s carbon price. Instead of making polluters pay, it offered financial incentives to those that reduced emissions. It was called the Emissions Reduction Fund and was criticised for being “unclear”. The ERF was connected to the Coalition’s Direct Action Plan which they promoted in opposition.

Abbott stayed true to his “axe the tax” slogan and repealed the carbon price in 2014.

As time moved on, the Coalition government did not do well in news polls – they lost 30 in a row at one stage. Turnbull cited this and creating “strong business confidence” when he announced he would challenge the PM for his job.

Turnbull

After a summer of heatwaves and blackouts, Turnbull and environment minister Josh Frydenberg created the National Energy Guarantee. It aimed to ensure Australia had enough reliable energy in market, support both renewables and traditional power sources, and could meet the emissions reduction targets set by the Paris Agreement. Business, wanting certainty, backed the NEG. It was signed off 14 August.

But rumblings within the Coalition party room over the policy exploded into the epic leadership spill we just saw unfold. It was agitated by Abbott who said:

“This is by far the most important issue that the government confronts because this will shape our economy, this will determine our prosperity and the kind of industries we have for decades to come. That’s why this is so important and that’s why any attempt to try to snow this through … would be dead wrong.”

Turnbull tried to negotiate with the conservative MPs of his party on the NEG. When that failed and he saw his leadership was under serious threat, he killed it off himself. Little did he know he would go down with it.

Peter Dutton continued with a leadership challenge. Turnbull stepped back saying he would not contest and would resign no matter what. His supporters Scott Morrison and Julie Bishop stepped up.

Morrison

After a spat over the NEG, Scott Morrison has just won the prime ministership with 45 votes over Dutton’s 40.

Killers

We have a series of energy policies that were killed off with prime minister after prime minister. We are yet to see a policy attract bi-partisan support that aims to deliver reliable energy at lower emissions and affordable prices. And if you’re 29 or younger, you’re yet to vote in an election that will see a Prime Minister serve a full term.


From NEG to Finkel and the Paris Accord – what’s what in the energy debate

We’ve got NEGs, NEMs, and Finkels a-plenty. Here is a cheat sheet for this whole energy debate that’s speeding along like a coal train and undermining Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s authority. Let’s take it from the start…

UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – 1992

This Convention marked the first time combating climate change was seen as an international priority. It had near-universal membership, with countries including Australia all committed to curbing greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol was its operative arm (more on this below).

The Kyoto Protocol – December 1997

The Kyoto Protocol is an internationally binding agreement that sets emission reduction targets. It gets its name from the Japanese city it was ratified in and is linked to the aforementioned UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Protocol’s stance is that developed nations should shoulder the burden of reducing emissions because they have been creating the bulk of them for over 150 years of industrial activity. The US refused to sign the Protocol because the two largest CO2 emitters, China and India, were exempt for their “developing” status. When Canada withdrew in 2011, saving the country $14 billion in penalties, it became clear the Kyoto Protocol needed some rethinking.

Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) – 1998

Forget the fancy name. This is the grid. And Australia’s National Electricity Market is one of the world’s longest power grids. It connects suppliers and consumers down the entire east and south east coasts of the continent. It spans across six states and territories and hops over the Bass Strait connecting Tasmania. Western Australia and the Northern Territory aren’t connected to the NEM because of distance.

Source: Australian Energy Market Operator

The NEM is made up of more than 300 organisations, including businesses and state government departments, that work to generate, transport and deliver electricity to Australian users. This is no mean feat. Before reliable batteries hit the market, which are still not widely rolled out, electricity has been difficult to store. We’ve needed to continuously generate it to meet our 24/7 demands. The NEM, formally established under the Keating Labor government, is an always operating complex grid.

The Paris Agreement aka the Paris Accord – November 2016

The Paris Agreement attempted to address the oversight of the Kyoto Protocol (that the largest emitters like China and India were exempt) with two fundamental differences – each country sets its own limits and developing countries be supported. The overarching aim of this agreement is to keep global temperatures “well below” an increase of two degrees and attempt to achieve a limit of one and a half degrees above pre-industrial levels (accounting for global population growth which drives demand for energy). Except Australia isn’t tracking well. We’ve already gone past the halfway mark and there’s more than a decade before the 2030 deadline. When US President Donald Trump denounced the Paris Agreement last year, there was concern this would influence other countries to pull out – including Australia. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott suggested we signed up following the US’s lead. But Foreign Minister Julie Bishop rebutted this when she said: “When we signed up to the Paris Agreement it was in the full knowledge it would be an agreement Australia would be held to account for and it wasn’t an aspiration, it was a commitment … Australia plays by the rules — if we sign an agreement, we stick to the agreement.”

The Finkel Review – June 2017

Following the South Australian blackout of 2017 and rapidly increasing electricity costs, people began asking if our country’s entire energy system needs an overhaul. How do we get reliable, cheap energy to a growing population and reduce emissions? Dr Alan Finkel, Australia’s chief scientist, was commissioned by the federal government to review our energy market’s sustainability, environmental impact, and affordability. Here’s what the Review found:

Sustainability:

  • A transition to low emission energy needs to be supported by a system-wide grid across the nation.
  • Regular regional assessments will provide bespoke approaches to delivering energy to communities that have different needs to cities.
  • Energy companies that want to close their power plants should give three years’ notice so other energy options can be built to service consumers.

Affordability:

  • A new Energy Security Board (ESB) would deliver the Review’s recommendations, overseeing the monopolised energy market.

Environmental impact:

  • Currently, our electricity is mostly generated by fossil fuels (87 percent), producing 35 percent of our total greenhouse gases.
  • We’re can’t transition to renewables without a plan.
  • A Clean Energy Target (CET), would force electricity companies to provide a set amount of power from “low emissions” generators, like wind and solar. This set amount would be determined by the government.
    • The government rejected the CET on the basis that it would not do enough to reduce energy prices. This was one out of 50 recommendations posed in the Finkel Review.

ACCC Report – July 2018

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s Retail Electricity Pricing Inquiry Report drove home the prices consumers and businesses were paying for electricity were unreasonably high. The market was too concentrated, its charges too confusing, and bad policy decisions by government have been adding significant costs to our electricity bills. The ACCC has backed the National Energy Guarantee, saying it should drive down prices but needs safeguards to ensure large incumbents do not gain more market control.

National Energy Guarantee (NEG)– present 20 August 2018

The NEG was the Turnbull government’s effort to make a national energy policy to deliver reliable, affordable energy and transition from fossil fuels to renewables. It aimed to ‘guarantee’ two obligations from energy retailers:

  1. To provide sufficient quantities of reliable energy to the market (so no more black outs).
  2. To meet the emissions reduction targets set by the Paris Agreement (so less coal powered electricity).

It was meant to lower energy prices and increase investment in clean energy generation, including wind, solar, batteries, and other renewables. The NEG is a big deal, not least because it has been threatening Malcolm Turnbull’s Prime Ministership. It is the latest in a long line of energy almost-policies. It attempted to do what the carbon tax, emissions intensity scheme, and clean energy target haven’t – integrate climate change targets, reduce energy prices, and improve energy reliability into a single policy with bipartisan support. Ambitious. And it seems to have been ditched by Turnbull because he has been pressured by his own party. Supporters of the NEG feel it is an overdue radical change to address the pressing issues of rising energy bills, unreliable power, and climate change. But its detractors on the left say the NEG is not ambitious enough, and on the right too cavalier because the complexity of the National Energy Market cannot be swiftly replaced.


Big Thinker: Germaine Greer

Feminist firebrand or second wave scourge? When The Female Eunuch was published to international success, it was obvious Germaine Greer (1939—present) had hit a nerve – something she continues to do.

This article contains language and content that may be offensive to some readers.

Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and public intellectual who rose to international influence with her book published in 1970, The Female Eunuch. It was a watershed text in second wave feminism, a bestseller around the world, and it made Greer a household name.

Greer’s infamously bold voice and sense of humour permeates throughout the book. Her strong character and take no prisoners approach to public debate saw her regularly contribute to panels and broadcast media. Greer was launched into the public eye as a young, bolshie feminist star.

Since then, Greer has written many books spanning literature, feminism and the environment. She has become one of Australia’s most ‘no-platformed’ thinkers. Almost five decades on, we take a look at her contributions to feminist philosophy.

 

 

Human freedom is intrinsically tied to sexual freedom

Greer is a liberation, rather than equality feminist. She believed achieving true freedom for women meant asserting their uniquely female difference and “insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination”.

Greer wanted to be certain about this female difference, and for her, this certainty started with the body.

You can think of Greer’s claims like this:

  1. Women are sexually repressed.
  2. Men are not sexually repressed.
  3. The difference between men and women is their biological sex.
  4. Biological sex determines if you’re sexually repressed or not.

The second part of her argument is as follows:

  1. Women are expected to be ‘feminine’.
  2. Women are sexually repressed.
  3. The expectation to be ‘feminine’ is sexually repressive.

Greer is scathing in her portrayal of ‘femininity’. She claimed it kept women docile, repressed, and weak. It stifled women’s sexual agency, hence the ‘eunuch’, which was intrinsically tied to their humanity.

Only by liberating women sexually could they remove this imposed submissiveness and embrace the freedom to live the way they wanted.

“The freedom I pleaded for twenty years ago was freedom to be a person, with dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, pride that constitute personhood. Freedom to run, shout, talk loudly and sit with your knees apart.” – Germaine Greer (1993)

A feminist utopia is an anarchist utopia first

In the London Review of Books 1999, Linda Colley wrote, “Properly and historically understood, Greer is not primarily a feminist. More than anything else, she should be viewed as a utopian.”

For Greer, the greatest danger of the widespread female eunuch is not an unfulfilling sex life. It is in her being so concerned with femininity that she is incapable of political action. Greer believed this social conditioning was dire and its enforcers so embedded that revolution rather than reform was required.

Greer called for this revolution to start in the home. She spoke openly about topics that at the time were taboo: menstruation, hormonal changes, pregnancy, menopause, sexual arousal and orgasm. She decried the agents of femininity that she felt kept women trapped: makeup, constricting clothing, feminine hygiene products, stifling marriages, misogynistic literature and female sexual competitiveness. She reserved her greatest fury for widespread consumerism, which she believed kept women dependent on the systems that forged their own oppression.

Like Mary Wollstonecraft before her, Greer argued neither men nor women benefited from this. She called upon women to rebel again these “dogmatists” and create a world of their own. But the solution she presents is exploratory instead of pragmatic. Perhaps women could live and raise their children together, making their own goods and growing their own food. It would be somewhere pleasant like the rolling landscapes of Italy, with local people to tend house and garden. (It’s unclear whether these local people would be liberated too.)

Intellectual criticisms

Greer’s celebration of non-monogamous sex in The Female Eunuch and her derision of Western society’s obsession with sex in Sex and Destiny led critics to label her ideas slipshod and too inconsistent for a public intellectual.

The root of most criticisms and controversies surrounding Greer, tend to stem from her view of the sexes. Like other second wave feminists, she suggested biological sex determined women’s oppression. This stands in stark contrast to the perspectives of third wave feminists and queer theorists, such as Judith Butler, for whom gender’s learned behaviours play the crucial role.

Greer and her contemporaries are often criticised by third and fourth wave feminists for predicating their philosophies on a male/female binary. A binary that does not account for the broad chromosomal spectrums found among intersex people or the many ways in which individuals feel and express their gender.

Infamous commentary

Greer is not the docile feminine woman she warned of in The Female Eunuch. She has long been celebrated for bucking trends and being refreshingly bold and frank. She is also heavily criticised for being rude, offensive and out of touch. She has been described as having “the self-awareness of a sweet potato”, a “misogynist”, and “a clever fool”.

After she extolled the work of Australia’s first female Prime Minister Julia Gillard on an episode of ABC’s Q&A, she was slammed for criticising Gillard’s body and clothing:

“What I want her to do is get rid of those bloody jackets … They don’t fit. Every time she turns around you’ve got that strange horizontal crease which means they cut too narrow in the hips. You’ve got a big arse Julia…”

Social media lit up with calls for Greer to “shut up” after she linked rape and bad sex in the age of #MeToo:

“Instead of thinking of rape as a spectacularly violent crime – and some rapes are – think about it as non-consensual, that is, bad sex. Sex where there is no communication, no tenderness, no mention of love. We used to talk about lovemaking.”

It is probably Greer’s public statements around transgender women that have attracted the most protest. In an interview after an intense no-platforming campaign to cancel a lecture Greer was scheduled to give at Cardiff University on women and power in the 20th century, she said, “Just because you lop off your penis and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a fucking woman”.

This sentiment probably links with Greer’s ideas on sexed bodies. A sympathetic reading of the comment might see it as one about being born into oppression – a rather second wave feminist sentiment that echoes the racial and queer politics of the same era. An idea that’s sometimes cited as analogous to Greer’s controversial comment is that you cannot understand what it is to be black, unless you were born black and experienced discriminations since the day of your birth. Perhaps she was suggesting we cannot understand the oppression experienced by women and girls unless we are born into a female body. Perhaps not. Either way, the comment was received as incredibly offensive and naive to transgender women’s experiences.

“People are hurtful to me all the time. Try being an old woman. I mean for goodness sake! People get hurt all the time. I’m not about to walk on eggshells.” – Germaine Greer, 2015

Greer and second wave feminists generally are at odds with intersectional feminism which is prominent today. Intersectional feminism holds that many factors beyond sex marginalise people – age, race, nationality, disability, class, faith, sexual orientation, gender identity… Different women will be oppressed to varying degrees.

Whether Greer is a trailblazer or tactless provocateur, it is doubtless her ideas have influenced the political and personal and landscapes of gender relations and feminist thinking.


The energy debate to date – recommended reads

Australia, we put it to you. ‘Is it too soon to ditch fossil fuels?’ We’ve waded through political waters and presented our shiniest pearls for your perusal. 

 

Cheat Sheet

From NEG to Finkel and the Paris Accord – what’s what in the energy debate

The Ethics Centre
18 October 2018

Before action must come knowledge. And before knowledge must come sorting through a heap of confusing, jargonistic, off-putting acronyms, reviews, and accords. Worry not, we’ve got your back and did it for you. Our cheat sheet will brush you up on all those names that keep getting dropped in the Australian energy debate like they’re hot coals.

Video

Australia’s energy crisis: “Absolute shambles, national embarrassment and a disgrace”

7.30, ABC News
Ian Verrender
13 Feb 2017

This 7.30 report is a perfect backgrounder to the mess that is Australia’s energy crisis. The NEM broke leaving hot and bothered South Australians without electricity (you read the cheat sheet so you know the NEM is a fancy acronym for the grid). A Victorian power plant that supplied 20 percent of the state’s energy simply closed shop. Renewables are unreliable but fossil fuels are killing the planet. Holy calamity!

Interactive

They Vote For You – How does your MP vote on the issues that matter to you?

Open Australia Foundation

If you’re rearing to parade your opinion, hold on. Haste makes waste. While we’re between elections, how about taking a look at how your local MP voted on energy? Did they champion a fast switch to renewables or continued support for fossil fuels like coal and gas? Forget what they said in the run up to an election and check out what they did.

Movie

Mad Max: Fury Road

And one for fun. Maybe a post-apocalyptic energy crisis isn’t so bad if we can also have double-necked flame guitars.


Ethics Explainer: Authenticity

Is the universe friendly? Is it fundamentally good? Peaceful? Created with a purpose in mind?

Or is it distant and impersonal? Indifferent to what you want? A never ending meaningless space? We all have ideas of how the world truly is. Maybe that’s been influenced by your religion, your school, your government, or even the video games you played as a kid.

Whatever the case is, how we think about ourselves and what we consider a life well spent, has a lot to do with the relationship we have with the world. And that brings us to this month’s Ethics Explainer.

Authenticity

To behave authentically means to behave in a way that responds to the world as it truly is, and not how we’d like it to be. What does this mean?

Well, this question takes us to two different schools of thought in philosophy, with two very different ideas of the nature of the world we live in. The first one is essentialism. Now, essentialism is a belief that find its roots in Ancient Greece, and in the writings of Socrates and Plato.

They took it as a given that everything that exists has its own essence. That is, a certain set of core properties that are necessary, or essential, for it to be what it is. Take a knife. It doesn’t matter if it has a wooden handle or a metal one. But once you take the blade away, it becomes not-a-knife. The blade is its essential property because it gives the knife its defining function.

Plato and Aristotle believed that people had essences as well, and that these existed before they did. This essence, or telos, was only acquired and expressed properly through virtuous action, a process that formed the ideal human. According to the Greeks, to be authentic was to live according to your essence. And you did that by living ethically in the choices you make and the character you express.

By developing intellectual virtues like curiosity or critical thinking, and character virtues like courage, wisdom, and patience, it’d get easier to tell what you should or shouldn’t do. This was the standard view of the world until the early 19th century, and is still the case for many people today.

 

 

The rise of existentialism

But some thinkers began to wonder, what if that wasn’t true? What if the universe has no inherent purpose? What if we don’t have one either? What if we exist first, then create our own purpose?

This belief was called existentialism. Existentialists believe that neither us nor the universe has an actual, predetermined purpose. We need to create it for ourselves. Because of this, nothing we do or are is actually inherently meaningful. We were free to do whatever we wanted – a fate Jean Paul-Sartre, French existential philosopher, found quite awful.

Being authentic meant facing the full weight of this shocking freedom, and staying strong. To simply follow what your religious leader, parent, school, or boss told you to do would be to act in “bad faith”. It’s like burying your head in the sand and pretending that something out there has meaning. Meaning that doesn’t exist.

By accepting that any meaning in life has to be given by you, and that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are just a matter of perspective, your choices become all you have. And ensuring that they are chosen by the values you accept to live by, instead of any predetermined ones etched in stone, makes them authentic.

This extends beyond the individual. If the world is going to have any of the things most of us value, like justice and order, we’re going to have to put it there ourselves.

Otherwise, they won’t exist.


New framework for trust and legitimacy

In our report The Trust, Legitimacy & the Ethical Foundations of the Market Economy, we outline why legitimacy is more important than trust to the success of Australian companies and must be underpinned by an ethical framework.

It’s a distinction between trust and legitimacy that must be understood by corporations today who are facing a precipitous decline in levels of public trust. Trust is wholly dependant on legitimacy, which can only be maintained when performance is linked to a legitimate purpose and guided by a core ethical framework. While trust in corporations, can be compensated for by increased surveillance, legitimacy once lost, cannot be recovered at any cost.

This report draws on philosophical thinking to identify a minimum threshold of four fundamental values and principles companies must meet to maintain legitimacy: respect people, do no harm, be responsible, and be transparent and honest.

Dr Simon Longstaff AO, The Ethics Centre’s Executive Director and co-author of the paper says “The privileges of incorporation and limited liability were justified by a broad appeal to the common good.  If those privileges are to be preserved, then it may be time to establish a new, core ethical foundation for corporations.”

“This framework must enable agility and protect against the risks of poor decision-making. An alternative and complementary approach to more compliance is to establish a values and principles framework that guides rather than dictates decision-makers.”

The report includes threshold indicators for the four fundamental values and principles identified to help companies undertake a legitimacy self-assessment.

The full report can be accessed here: trustandlegitimacy.com.au


How to break up with a friend

If your friendship is a battlefield, you’ve got to know when to wave the white flag. How do you break up with a friend – ethically?

It might’ve been a slow fade after leaving high school. A messy split over unpaid bills. Maybe it was an awkward part at the airport, or a text silence that lasted a few months longer than usual.

Though not as lamented as ending a romance, ending a friendship can be just as painful. Maybe even more. While some of that is because of the hurt and disappointment of any unfulfilling relationship, another part can be attributed to its ambiguity.

The due process owed to an ex (counselling, teary conversations, logical explanations to well-meaning buddies and family) doesn’t exist for the friendships in our lives. If we want to break up with a friend, how do we do it ethically?

If you’re keen to rip off the friendship band-aid, keep reading. Here are some questions our Ethi-call counsellors would ask to help you act in line with your morals and values.

1. What is the purpose of friendship?

Let’s get back to basics. Asking yourself what a good friendship looks like can help you see if there’s a disconnect between what you’d like it to be and what it really is.

A good friendship could be one where you:

  • Love and accept each other
  • Are role models for each other’s children
  • Feel safe expressing your honest thoughts
  • Feel grateful that you share each other’s lives

If any of these questions cause discomfort, maybe your friendship has crossed a line it shouldn’t have. What is your duty to yourself? Is it fair to expect these things?

2. How could you create the least harm and most benefit?

Owning that your needs aren’t being met is important. But equally as important are the needs your friend is owed in a reciprocal relationship.

  • What are your obligations to your friend?
  • Have you any part to play in this?
  • What would a wise person suggest?

Every relationship takes effort. Part of loving someone, warts and all, is acknowledging the effort is worth it. But when that isn’t true, a breakup may not be the only way to deal with it. Consider if your actions are going to cause more benefit than harm – to all the people involved.

  • What are the consequences (of a friendship breakup)?
  • Is doing nothing an option? If so, what would be your tipping point?
  • What will the lasting impact be?

A breakup isn’t the end of anyone’s story. People carry these formative experiences with them and may do so for the rest of their lives.

3. How can you preserve and prioritise dignity?

If you’ve considered all this and still think you need to end the friendship, remember to be kind. Considering why you were friends in the first place means this transition isn’t about kicking anyone when they’re down.

How will you break up? Does your friendship lend itself to a face-to-face conversation or is it better through email? Is one session or message enough or are more required?

Your friend might not agree with what you consider to be good and right, but handling such a delicate situation in a way that is in line with your moral character might be one of your greatest accomplishments.

Some positive outcomes might even eventuate, such as:

  • Renewal of your friendship and commitment to each other
  • Knowing that you both did your best
  • Revelation in self-knowledge and commitment to personal growth
  • Speaking well of each other to mutual friends (and meaning it)
  • Shared sense of closure and grief

Friendships and relationships don’t exist in vacuums. Whether good or bad, a history of contact with each other comes with its own particular language, traditions and memories. None of us are the centre of the universe, and believing so runs counter to the reality of multiple subjective experiences. Continuing on that path can not only make it harder for you to be a friend, but for you to be fully human.

Even if it wasn’t love, you shared each other’s lives. And that’s always worth respecting.

If you or someone you know is at risk of harm or feeling suicidal, get help immediately. Call Lifeline 13 11 14 or 000 if life is in danger.


Are diversity and inclusion the bedrock of a sound culture?

We need to think about diversity in the workplace beyond gender, argues Alison Woolsey, Director of Diversity & Inclusion at Clayton Utz, a member of The Ethics Alliance.

In December 2017, Chartered Accountants Australia NZ, The Ethics Centre, Governance Institute of Australia, and Institute of Internal Auditors released a publication titled Managing Culture – A good practice guide.

Inspired by the discussion, I wondered how important the link between diversity and inclusion (“D&I”) and a sound culture in which ethical decision making is a given? Being able to point to clear evidence of a link could only advance the case for D&I in our organisations and help address any resistance to change.

A lot has changed in the Australian market. In spite of, and perhaps because of, the Hayne Royal Commission and its fallout, the connection is worth exploring. It’s a topic that has been investigated by others in the past – certainly with a gender diversity focus. For example:

  • Professor Robert Wood of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Ethical Leadership, summarised several articles and studies linking more women on boards and in senior management with improved risk management and corporate governance
  • The above paper references a study which found Fortune 500 companies with a higher percentage of women on their board of directors were more likely to be on Ethisphere Institute’s list of the World’s Most Ethical Companies.
  • ‘The Lehman Sisters Hypothesis’, a study that concludes empirical literature backs the claim “more gender diversity in finance, and particularly at the top would help to reduce some of the behavioural drivers behind the crises”.

A little less on point, but worth noting as it often comes up in gender diversity discussions, is John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio’s 2013 book, The Athena Doctrine: How Women (and the Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the Future. It offered a global survey of 64,000 people and revealed that two thirds felt the “world would be a better place if men thought more like women”.

What I would like to focus on here, however, are two key and interrelated theses around diversity and inclusion and their role in driving workplace culture:

  1. Diverse teams drive better decision making.
  2. Inclusive workplaces inspire better team performance (as well as employee satisfaction, success and security).

If these theses hold true (and I consider each in more detail below), the unavoidable conclusion could be that D&I helps shape an organisation’s culture for the better, and will be increasingly valued – and even demanded – by boards and investors as corporate governance rules are strengthened and companies’ social licences to operate come under increased scrutiny.

Diversity is a trigger for better decision making

Much is written about the “value of diverse teams” and “diversity of thinking”. Many leaders and organisations use the expressions liberally when promoting their diversity policies. But do we really understand what these expressions mean?

In her book, Which Two Heads Are Better Than One, Australian author Juliet Bourke acknowledges the collective intelligence that diverse teams can offer, but debunks any theory that it’s easy to achieve through simple gender balance and diversity of background.

Bourke introduces several enablers of diversity of thinking. These include the composition of any group and the process they use to think and debate. Gender balance in a group, she says, “promotes psychological safety and more conversational turn-taking, thereby encouraging people to speak up, offer their views, and elaborate on the ideas of others”. Racial diversity “triggers curiosity, causing people to ask more questions, make fewer assumptions, listen more closely, and process information more deeply”. Age and geographic location also play a role.

In addition to this, we need to consider more direct factors – firstly, diversity of approach to problem solving. Bourke identifies six key individual approaches to problem solving but notes we tend to focus on two in particular. She says that by deliberately taking a more balanced approach, groups report they reduced blind spots and “were able to develop more robust solution” and moreover “followers report greater faith in the ultimate solution”.

The second direct influence on diversity of thinking comes from the mix of functional roles such as general counsel, chief risk officer, and chief HR officer. These executive positions expose members to different domains of knowledge and social networks, Bourke says.

This theory challenges the simplicity of the proposition that having women in a group mitigates risk. Australian academic Cordelia Fine similarly dismisses the existence of any gender gap in risk taking in her 2016 book, Testosterone Rex. So too does Elizabeth Sheedy, who concludes in a 2017 study that senior female bankers don’t conform to stereotypes and are just as ready to take risks.

This rich research linking gender diversity and improved business performance suggests organisations also need to consider a wider range of diversity forms beyond women to men ratios. When you begin to grasp the complexity of optimal diversity, you begin to realise the opportunities and value that teams can deliver or destroy.

Inclusion and workplace performance

Achieving the ideal diversity mix in any group is no mean feat. However, a group can still underperform if its members do not feel included.

According to the Diversity Council of Australia, inclusion occurs when a mix of people are respected, connected, progressing, and contributing to organisational success. Deloitte’s HR research body, Bersin, shows organisations with inclusive cultures are six times more likely to be innovative, anticipate change, and respond effectively, and twice as likely to meet or exceed financial targets.

We see evidence that inclusion is associated with being treated fairly and respectfully, being valued for one’s uniqueness and sensing group belonging. The Deloitte Inclusion Maturity Model identifies the highest level of inclusion as being when people report feeling both psychologically safe and inspired to do their best work. At a more granular level, this is about people feeling (or leaders encouraging people to feel) they can contribute in a meeting, have a voice in decisions affecting them, and can disagree or challenge group decisions.

Leaders are instrumental in creating a culture of inclusion. Diversity commentators and practitioners largely agree on a common set of leadership capabilities including being collaborative, accountable, open and curious, a champion of diversity, and relational.  A big piece in the discussion on inclusive leadership is the importance of counteracting biases and assumptions in decision making. In recent years, not only have we seen a growing level of awareness of unconscious biases but also a push to explore practical ways (policies, processes and structures) to mitigate against them.

Positive traits of an inclusive leader include being particularly mindful of personal and cultural biases like confirmation bias and groupthink. Juliet Bourke also highlights the importance of leaders being cognisant of the situations and factors such as time pressures and fatigue which can cause them to be vulnerable to such biases.

As several authors have argued, there was potential for diversity of thinking and good decision making in the Enron board, but the decisions “concerned matters of high complexity, difficulty and moral uncertainty” and ultimately it succumbed to groupthink, says Bourke.

Does diversity and inclusion lead to sound culture?

If we have ideal diversity in a team and have cultivated inclusion through good leadership, does a sound organisational culture necessarily follow?

Logically, yes. We’ve canvassed positive outcomes such as good decision making, effective team work, psychological safety, and innovation. We’ve considered the impact of leaders being more open and curious, conscious of biases, and accountable. In both the Managing Culture paper and APRA’s report on the Commonwealth Bank, we see references to the need for improved behaviours of boards and senior leadership along the lines of these themes. If D&I doesn’t at least influence ethical behaviour or underpin the concept of an ethical framework, it would be easy to argue inclusive leadership can facilitate embedding an ethical framework.

McKinsey in its 2018 update suggests that, for many companies, D&I is a “matter of license to operate”. This is a theme at the heart of proposed changes to the ASX Corporate Governance Council’s Principles and Recommendations. In a substantial redraft of principle 3, the current words of “act ethically and responsibly” become “instil and continually reinforce a culture across the organisation of acting lawfully, ethically and in a socially responsible manner”. The ASX says that “preserving an entity’s social licence to operate requires the board and management of a listed entity to have regard to the views and interests of a broader range of stakeholders than just its security holders, including employees”. It goes on to suggest this may include, by way of example, “offering employment to people with disability or from socially disadvantaged groups in society”.

On one view this could be saying good culture drives greater levels of diversity, and not vice versa. What’s interesting though is the earlier editions of the Principles and Recommendations also included diversity under principle 3. It was then relocated in 2014 to Principle 1: “lay solid foundations for management and oversight”. In my view, D&I sits comfortably under both principles – a recognition of it being business critical but also critical for ‘good’ or ‘right’ decisions.

More reflection on the point may be required but I think investors and our regulators should care about what organisations are doing to make D&I a priority in the way they conduct business and as employers. D&I may be an undervalued lever to promote positive change in business behaviours and workplace cultures in Australia. The world’s largest asset manager BlackRock has identified board diversity as a “stewardship priority”. Larry Fink recently wrote in his annual letter to CEOs:

“We also will continue to emphasize the importance of a diverse board. Boards with a diverse mix of genders, ethnicities, career experiences, and ways of thinking have, as a result, a more diverse and aware mindset. They are less likely to succumb to groupthink or miss new threats to a company’s business model. And they are better able to identify opportunities that promote long-term growth.” – Larry Fink

It makes sense to continue to make the case for diversity and inclusion as being a driver of positive change – for business, and for the community.

Alison Woolsey is director of Diversity & Inclusion at Clayton Utz, a member of The Ethics Alliance.

This article was originally written for The Ethics Alliance. Find out more about this corporate membership program. Already a member? Log in to the membership portal for more content and tools here.


Why your new year's resolution needs military ethics

Weight loss goals and the laws of armed conflict seem pretty far removed. But stick with us! Military ethics provide useful principles to test the worth of our new year’s resolutions.

The ethics of war are based on making sure the inevitable harm, pain and suffering caused by violence is minimised as much as possible. Most resolutions also involve some pain and suffering. After all, we don’t need resolve to do what’s easy! So let’s apply these principles of warfare to the hardships of our resolutions and check if they’re are morally justified.

Just war theory, the most common approach to the ethics of war, says war is justified only if it satisfies a set of conditions. These include:

Just cause

War is only just when it is fought in response to a serious violation of state or human rights (basically, because war causes death and destruction it has to be responding to a grievous offence).

Right intention

The declaration of war is not motivated by private, self-interested or vicious intentions but out of a desire to bring about a just outcome.

Legitimate authority

Only the leader or leaders of a political community have the right to declare war.

(Macro) proportionality

The peace the war aims to create has to be preferable to the way the world would be if no war was fought (a nuclear war will almost always be disproportionate).

Last resort

Are there less harmful measures than war which might bring about peace?

Probability of success

Do not undertake the pain and suffering of war if there is no chance of winning, otherwise lives are wasted in vain.

(Micro) proportionality

The benefits gained from a military operation must outweigh the harms it inflicts.

Discrimination

Only combatants may be targeted by military attacks. Civilians are off limits.

Good goal

An ethical resolution will aim to achieve something good (health, travel, education). Don’t aim to do something you know to be bad (“This year I resolve to make profits at any cost”).

Right intention

Is your resolution motivated by a genuine desire for self-improvement? Or is it motivated by shame, peer pressure, greed, vanity or fear? If the latter is true, it might be worth considering whether it’s really a resolution worth making.

Is your resolution motivated by a genuine desire for self-improvement? Or is it motivated by shame, peer pressure, greed, vanity or fear?

Accept your limits

You only have the ‘authority’ to make resolutions for things within your control. Don’t resolve to get a promotion at work. Instead, resolve to reinvigorate your attitude at work so your application for promotion has the best chance of success. But remember, getting the promotion is outside your control.

Holistic improvement

Make sure you will be a better person overall after succeeding in your resolution. You might be able to run a marathon, but make sure it isn’t so detrimental to your health, relationships, work or other interests that you’re worse-off overall.

Avoid drastic measures

Have you tried less intense measures to achieve your goals? Maybe before you sign up for a 10 day silent yoga retreat you could try signing up for a weekly class and see if it helps.

Probability of success

Set realistic goals you can actually achieve. If you and your partner aim to spend more time together after three date nights in the last year, resolving to have a weekend away once a fortnight might be a bit extreme. Be honest to avoid setting yourself up for failure and making the effort and sacrifices you make futile.

Cost/benefit analysis

Is the inconvenience, expense or pain of your resolution worth it for the goal you are trying to achieve? Trying to have a body like Chris Hemsworth might be more trouble than it’s worth.

Own your resolution

Your resolution is your resolution – everyone except you is an innocent bystander! If you’ve decided to go vegetarian, that’s fine. Insisting everyone in your share house skips on meat to suit your new diet isn’t.

So there you have it – your guide to an ethical new year’s resolution with help from military ethics. These steps won’t guarantee your resolution is successful but they will guarantee it’s a resolution worth making. For tips on how to form the resolve, perseverance and courage it takes to stick to your new commitment, you might want to talk to a soldier.


The Royal Commission has forced us to ask, what is business good for?

AMP Capital was applauded last year when it committed to selling $600 million worth of shares that did not meet its ethical guidelines. However, barely a year after announcing it was getting rid of its direct and indirect interests in tobacco and landmines, AMP was itself ejected into a basket of “untouchables”.

Australian Ethical announced in May it was divesting itself of AMP shares in the wake of searing revelations from the Financial Services Royal Commission.

Billions of dollars were wiped from the value of AMP after the public and investors discovered the wealth manager charged “fees for no service” and steered people into investments that rewarded their financial planners, at the expense of the clients.

Head of ethics research at Australian Ethical, Dr Stuart Palmer, says there were a number of reasons behind the decision to divest, “… but specifically, a senior decision made within the financial planning business to charge clients fees for services they weren’t receiving. They knew it was wrong, they knew it was illegal.

“There were people in the business saying we need to stop doing this, and they kept doing it at a senior level”, he says.

The Royal Commission into Financial Services has been exposing the rot eating away at some of our biggest and most powerful corporations and has reenergised an ongoing debate about what is the actual purpose of business and who it serves.

Palmer says legal cases in the US established shareholder primacy a century ago, with the primary responsibility of business interpreted as creating profits for shareholders.

“Since then, and before then, there has been a debate about whether that is right, whether there are other ways of thinking about corporations having independent interests and responsibilities to all their stakeholders, including shareholders, but also employees, customers, suppliers and society”, says Palmer.

“None is necessarily dominant over the others, but they need to be balanced in the interests of all.”

This discussion about the role of the corporation is being weighed up at all levels, including by the chairman of NAB, Ken Henry, who delivered a speech in March saying that it was not enough for companies to use the “pursuit of profit” to explain away their contribution to negative consequences, such as greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution.

“If that’s the best we can do, then we shouldn’t wonder that we find it so difficult to occupy positions of trust and respect in society. Neither should we wonder that politicians of all political colours have such an uneasy relationship with us”, he told a gathering of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

This was a debate that the Commonwealth Bank non-executive director, Harrison Young, was alluding to when he wrote last year, “banks should not be profit-maximising institutions. They have duties to the community that oblige them to forego a certain amount of upside”.

Judith Fox, the CEO of the Australian Shareholders Association, says she is aware of increasing numbers of companies and boards having this discussion.

“I’m seeing a lot of conversations that ultimately are all about how something needs to change in the way we operate”, she says.

“I think we are one of those transition periods where there has been a social norm that the purpose of a company is shareholder return and that has been accepted in markets worldwide for four decades”, she says, adding the realisation that companies should stand for more than just profits may come as a surprise to people whose knowledge of economics does not extend further back than US economist Milton Friedman’s pronouncement in 1962 that there is only one social responsibility of business and that is to make money.

Friedman wrote in Capitalism and Freedom:

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

Fox says the current debate about the role of the corporation is a return to the concept, popular in the 1930s – that business had a social role to play as well.

Professor of Human Rights Law at Sydney University, David Kinley, agrees that many people’s attitudes are formed by what they have experienced in the past 20 years.

“It is what they have seen since the 80s, which has been a long – until 2008 [the start of the Global Financial crisis] – largely uninterrupted boom period.”

Kinley says Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith would be horrified to see the societal cost of rampant free marketeers.

Smith had written in The Wealth of Nations, nearly 250 years ago:

“… that individual acts of economic self-interest combine, through the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces, to further the best interests of society at large”.

Says Kinley, “So, he certainly would be turning in his grave to see all this wealth, so much of it is now concentrated in the hands of the few. Yes, we are better off than we were 200 years ago. Unquestionably. But by God, it’s been at a big cost to the notions of equity and fairness.

“And [investor] Warren Buffett says often – and he is the second richest man in the world – he said he is amazed there are not more people with pitchforks heading for the rich like him because he can’t see how they don’t appreciate this appalling inequality.”

Kinley, author of Necessary Evil: How to Fix Finance by Saving Human Rights, says he is not advocating some sort of Socialist revolution, but remaking the “financial, commercial, corporate neoliberal system that we now have one that works better for people as a whole”.

“If you don’t do that, you have a bubbling up of disquiet, of resentment, that no matter what happens – even things like the global financial crisis – the rich, the powerful, the banking, the financial system, they sail through it, on the back of public funds that bailed them out because they had to be saved. When people ordinary people look at that, they say, ‘How is that fair?’.

“So you get the reaction of, ‘Well, let’s vote in somebody who is willing to drain the swamp, you know, shake up the area and I don’t care if he’s mad or narcissistic or a nincompoop. You put him in there in the White House and just see what happens.’

“These sorts of reactions are almost desperation. I don’t think they are logical, I don’t think they are at all laudable, but you see why people are doing it.”

While there is evidence ethical investments outperform the average large-cap Australian share funds over three, five and 10 year time horizons, Kinley maintains corporations and their executives should be ethical because it is the right thing to do, not because it might make them money.

“What I would suggest what all of us want to do in the morning, truly, is to stand in front of the mirror as you’re brushing your teeth and say, ‘I’m proud of what I do or at least I can see why I do what I do and it is something that is worthwhile’.

“You don’t want to look in the mirror and think, ‘Oh I’m making a lot of dosh, but Geez it is dodgy’.”

This article was originally written for The Ethics Alliance. Find out more about this corporate membership program. Already a member? Log in to the membership portal for more content and tools here.