Latest / Best of Business / Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Is our climate overhype coming to an end?

Transcript

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Is our climate overhype coming to an end? · Best of Business

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: You're listening to a podcast from News Talks'd be follow
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• 0:16
  Speaker 2: Right well, and yet another frankly welcome sign that the
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  Speaker 2: world's climate over hype may be over, or at least correcting.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: The latest is that the government has announced it's now
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: easing the rules on how much compulsory climate reporting the
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  Speaker 2: big listed companies have to do. Now, I don't blame
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: you if you feel it this minute like your eyes
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  Speaker 2: are about to glaze over, but do not let that happen.
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  Speaker 2: So this is actually much more important than it sounds.
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  Speaker 2: This goes back to the bad old days. I've just
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  Speaker 2: sent Dan Grant twenty twenty one, when the darn administration
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  Speaker 2: brought in rules forcing large publicly listed companies to report
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  Speaker 2: to shareholders the impact that climate change may have on them.
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  Speaker 2: It was world leading, it was groundbreaking. It was incredibly expensive. Turners,
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  Speaker 2: the car company reckons that their first report, which only
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  Speaker 2: runs to seven pages, cost them one million dollars to produce.
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  Speaker 2: Some companies have told the relevant Minister, Scott Simpson, that
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  Speaker 2: it cost them two million dollars to produce their reports.
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  Speaker 2: The ones who are getting off easy here, are still
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  Speaker 2: paying apparently close to two hundred thousand dollars. Veteran director
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  Speaker 2: Johan Withers famously complained about this in July when she
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  Speaker 2: said that climate reporting was taking up more of her
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  Speaker 2: time than preparing financial statements, which is the actual thing
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  Speaker 2: that shareholders are interested in. And that is completely nuts.
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  Speaker 2: And for all of the money and all of the
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  Speaker 2: effort that these businesses were putting into it, not one
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  Speaker 2: carbon particle was saved from going into the atmosphere. It
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  Speaker 2: did not bring down anybody's emissions. That was not the
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: point of it. It was simply to talk about it,
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  Speaker 2: and the money was just wasted on paperwork instead of
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  Speaker 2: being reinvested into the business to raise productivity, which is
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  Speaker 2: the thing that should we should be laser focused on
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  Speaker 2: in this country.
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  Speaker 1: Now.
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  Speaker 2: I applaud the government for doing what it has done today,
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  Speaker 2: but it does not go far enough because they've only
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  Speaker 2: eased the rules for the smaller companies, so about eighty
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  Speaker 2: eight of them will now not have to report, but
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  Speaker 2: seventy six of the big ones are still going to
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  Speaker 2: be required to do this utterly pointless, expensive, unproductive exercise.
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  Speaker 2: If it is pointless and expensive and unproductive for the
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  Speaker 2: small companies. It is also pointless, expensive and unproductive for
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  Speaker 2: the big companies. The government should go further than it
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  Speaker 2: has today.
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