Larvatus Prodeo

So Woodside, Rio and Boral have responded to the Australian Conservation Foundation and Australian Climate Justice Program complaint to the ACCC about the yawning gap between the shrillness of public emoting and disclosures to the investment community, which increased even as the emos won greater concessions at each stage of the process. The EITEs have won some $16.4bn of public money in concessions at last count. That is an extraordinary amount of public money being handed over to pad their profitability: about 19 000 new buses, to take the Rooze’s benchmark, or 455 time-wasting, subjectively measured ‘energy savings’ schemes.

Rio Tinto’s response, that they’re not ‘battling’ a global emissions trading scheme, is laughable. How do they honestly expect a national – let alone global – scheme to gain traction if everyone keeps undercutting it? Business commentary, from the most hackneyed pining for a fanciful, counterfactual world free of political machinations (Carbontaxalia?) to more orthodox defences of industry have questioned the EITE concessions. eg. Electricity Supply Industry Apparatchik Keith Orchison has noted that, “… firms are hardly going to play up the negatives to the investment community, particularly as the legislation is still a moving playing field. However, as the analysts all read the papers, surely they must be asking these companies about their public utterances – how one wonders does the rest of that conversation go?”

One does indeed. The cut and thrust of the complaint is that with such a thoroughly impotent carbon price now firmly on the table, companies have an obligation under s52 of the Trade Practices Act to, well, make ‘the rest of that conservation’ redundant. The key issue for the ACCC will be whether the Statements ‘were made in trade or commerce’ or bear such a character. The complaint alleges that the statements were absolutely core to these businesses. Indeed, they were instrumental in delaying the scheme, increasing compensation etc. Continue reading ‘“It’s not like we’re battling it” Part I – EITEs’