"[T]he Environmental, Societal and Governance mantra ... has proven to be a drag on commerce since it emerged two decades ago. ...
"Social responsibility, the forerunner of ESG, was a popular way for executives to appear virtuous while spending their shareholder’s money ... [Milton] Friedman ... claim[ed] that there is 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.'
"The Chicago University economist was campaigning against business leaders voluntarily engaging in acts of moral worthiness with other people’s resources, but today we face a more pernicious evil; state-mandated virtue. ...
"Section 7A of the Financial Markets Conduct Act 2013 ... obligates certain large firms, from AA Insurance to Z Energy to prepare climate statements and report on their greenhouse gas emissions.
"It is an absurdly onerous regime that achieves nothing. ...'[C]limate change reporting,' harrumphed [Warehouse chair Joan Withers] to the NBR, 'is taking up more director’s time than financial statements' ... [with] not one carbon molecule less ... emitted as a result of the thousands of pages these reports produce. ... a symptom of a wider malaise. ...
"New Zealand has become trapped in a malaise of wanting to be seen to do good at the expense of achieving anything."~ Damien grant from his column 'Why climate change reporting is achieving nothing'
Monday, 7 July 2025
"New Zealand has become trapped in a malaise of wanting to be seen to do good at the expense of achieving anything."
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Performative excellence ahead of achievement excellence as public policy has long been popular in NZ. David Lange’s nuclear-free moment is a historical example which contributed nothing to nuclear disarmament and the end of the Cold War, yet continues to detrimentally distort both foreign policy and energy policy.
This is especially a malaise for a country which slips further behind in GDP per capita amongst OECD nations. There is a bizarre tendency among some NZers, especially politicians and academics, to think the world should "pay attention" to the lower income developed country far away from the rest of the world, as some sort of moral example, when most of the world simply says "you don't know how lucky you are, we don't care what you think or do". Australia pays NZ hardly any attention at all on anything, it's extremely arrogant to expect anyone else beyond the small poor Pacific neighbours to care much either.
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