Page 1627 - Week 05 - Thursday, 8 May 2008
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putting parking at a premium, an integrated rapid transit system for Canberra is both necessary and possible in the interests of the environment and social equity.
Over a year ago I called for an account of investments the government was holding on behalf of the people of Canberra. At first, the government refused to disclose the information, claiming it was much too difficult to quantify its investments. This should have set alarm bells ringing, but it did not. Fortunately, a journalist was interested in the story and requested the information himself. When it became obvious that it could no longer be hidden, the government responded immediately and gave the Canberra Times a list of investments within 48 hours. It beggars belief that it did not have the information when I asked for it a few weeks before, but that is another story. The fact that a journalist was able to spur the government into action while an elected representative was not is scandalous.
So what were we investing in? It turns out that we were investing in the standard mix of share indexes, financial instruments and risk-spread portfolios. The list includes tobacco and alcohol companies, the gambling industry, fossil fuel companies, and armaments manufacturers who specialise in producing weapons that look like toys and blow limbs off children who try to play with them. The Chief Minister said he was outraged by these latter products, and I believe him. He was so outraged that he commissioned a report to tell him what to do about it. The obvious answer, of course, is to move those investments. But, no, the Treasurer informed us that it would be irresponsible to adopt a values-based approach and it could risk the profitability of our investments.
What has the government done now, over a year later? Well, nothing of substance. It commissioned a report, had some discussions and is still drafting guidelines to fund managers. No speeches have been made at shareholder meetings; no coordinated representations have been made to company boards or industry conferences. We do not even know how the fund managers are using their substantial voting power in company meetings.
The climate change impact of buying gas-powered buses pales into utter insignificance beside the impacts of roughly $4 billion of investments which have next to no environmental or ethical dimension or guiding principles whatsoever. The only direction to fund managers is to return a specified level of profit. They are not even subject to the ACT procurement guidelines. Aren’t share purchases procurements?
It is this kind of compartmentalised thinking that governments have to break out of. It makes no sense to support industries such as the tobacco industry, which creates problems that cost society and the government far more than the meagre dividends and capital gains we get from our share dealings. Has any thought been given to applying an accrual accounting analysis to this spending to sort out how much can truthfully be accounted for as climate change expenditure and how much is merely urban transport and urban infrastructure expenditure?
While I have been very disappointed in the wholly negative response to this budget by the latest Leader of the Opposition, he did get it half right when he said that the
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