Page 2150 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
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the right to do pretty much anything which does not hurt other people. While smoking does hurt other people, I still believe that adults should have the right to choose to smoke if they want.
But tobacco companies target tweens and teenagers. They spend huge amounts of money, partly raised by share floats, on extremely successful product placements and other marketing campaigns to make ACT people think they are uncool if they do not smoke. And remember a lot of their advisers are also advising the very large greenhouse gas producers. There is a connection, Mr Treasurer. Money might make the world go around, but money also makes it go pear shaped.
Just because they are not on the blue chip indexes, there is no reason why the ACT should not be investing in renewable energy technologies like geothermal, wave, tidal and solar energy generators. These would be far more sensible, provident and productive of social wellbeing and quality of life than brown coal or tobacco investments. Micro credit schemes for women in developing countries have a better rate of return and a lower rate of bad debts than most indexed investment funds. What about spending in the ACT to take advantage of the multiplier effect actually in the territory, in which the real owners of these funds live? And I have suggested a number of times investment in social housing.
The Treasurer no doubt gets analyses from his Treasury advisers that contain present dollar values of benefits that are predicted to occur in the future. This is mainstream accounting practice but it is based on an appalling disregard for the wellbeing of our own children and future generations. Their wellbeing should be valued as equal to our own.
The future dollar value of desirable social and environmental outcomes should not be automatically undervalued. Spending the natural capital of future generations, using the justification that value saved for the future has dramatically less value for present generations and therefore it would be economically irrational not to realise that value today, is just one example of the disgraceful assumptions and the moral confusion of mainstream economics.
Before I finish, I would like to discuss another dimension of the government’s hands-off approach to investment guidelines for its fund managers. Apparently, entities like massive hedge funds buy up, either explicitly or through unwritten agreements, voting shareholder rights in order to force companies to take actions which artificially raise or lower either their share value or their company value. Hedge funds often specialise in making profits from downturns in companies and markets. If we give no direction to our fund managers we should not be surprised if we learn some of them are subletting our shareholder rights for personal gain of one form or another to capital entities that do not have the interests of workers, public health or the environment at heart.
It was obvious at the briefing that I had on investment funds that this practice was unknown to the department or the minister’s advisers. I urge them to investigate the practice and to issue directions to fund managers accordingly. Such directions would not involve any overt ethical dimensions that Treasury is apparently so allergic to. The fact is that we should not be unwitting parties to the machinations of often antisocial private capital entities.
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