Big Super is still investing in nuclear weapons: report
Quit Nukes / The Australia Institute Media Release
A new report has found that despite claiming not to invest in ‘controversial weapons’ 13 of the top 14 Australian super funds are still investing in nuclear weapons companies, in some cases even in an option described as ‘responsible’.
One of the 14, Hostplus, has excluded nuclear weapons companies across its portfolio since December 2021.
At least $3.4 billion of Australian retirement savings are invested by these funds in companies involved in making nuclear weapons, according to the new research conducted by Quit Nukes in collaboration with The Australia Institute.
The report analyses financial returns and finds that the exclusion of nuclear weapon companies from portfolios has an immaterial impact on returns.
Rosemary Kelly, Director, Quit Nukes:
“It’s frankly unconscionable to sell super fund members a responsible investment option and then use their money to invest in nuclear proliferation.
“The thing that makes this baffling is that investing in nuclear weapon companies is just completely unnecessary in the broader scheme of things.
“Superannuation funds should divest immediately from weapons manufacturers who produce nuclear weapons. If you’re a member of 13 of these 14 leading funds you can request that your fund divest or threaten to take your savings elsewhere.
“Super funds are being sneaky by boasting of policies to exclude “controversial weapons” but not counting nuclear weapons as “controversial.” That’s pretty hard to swallow when you consider that most ESG advisers now consider nuclear weapons as controversial weapons, given the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that came into force in 2021.
Alice Grundy, Research Manager, The Australia Institute:
“The most frustrating thing about the lack of process in this area is that excluding nuclear weapon companies from super portfolios is so easy. Divesting has an immaterial impact on investment returns.
“Your super fund could divest your money from nuclear weapon companies without materially impacting your returns.
“So long as nuclear weapons exist, nuclear war is an ever-present risk. Its impacts would be catastrophic. Even a limited nuclear war, involving say 250 of the over 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world, would kill 120 million people outright and cause nuclear famine, putting 2 billion lives at risk. There would be massive impacts on global supply chains and manufacturing.
“The long-term financial implications should be factored into decisions about where to invest Australian super.”
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17 comments
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wam -
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Steve Davis -
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Arnd -
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Clakka -
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Clakka
Return to home pageWonder what the world would be like, if stalin didn’t get the bomb?
Wonder what the world will look like when iran gets the bomb?
Let’/s hope fusion comes soon???
Astute management by these super funds…never looked a better time to do so as nuclear armed states start scratching the rust off their ICBM’s…with itchy trigger fingers.Only problem is,no one’s going to be around to cash in.Maybe they’d be smarter to invest in gambling companies,where only individuals and families are blown away.
This drift further into immorality began with the clever idea that accountants should be responsible for business decisions.
Where once accountants merely kept the books, now they are elevated to run companies.
So while individual accountants may have moral standards, their training does not allow for such weakness.
They are trained to crunch numbers.
They are elevated to improve the bottom line.
And because they know where their career interests lie, that’s what they do. Investment funds are just another form of business, so they behave the same as other forms of business.
The liberal economic system that has been imposed upon us does not support the possibility that investing might have moral implications, so the only alternative is to walk away. Because it does not have to be this way.
Until communities begin to provide for their security and prosperity at the local level, where accountability can be enforced, our investments assist the preservation of a parasitical system.
@wam Wonder what the world will look like when iran gets the bomb? Why do you think it will be any different to the seppos and the zionists already having more than enough nuclear bombs to destroy our only home, probably 10 times over? You can add other ‘friendly’ countries in to that list, Russia, Pakistan, India, France, and the list goes on. What a wonderful species we are, we are hell bent on destroying each other and making the planet unlivable for thousands of years. If such a thing as a ‘god’ ever existed and had some input in to making our species he/she must be bitterly disappointed in this big brained ape with opposable thumbs. I know I am…
“Humanity … is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear
annihilation.”
Steve, please:
Can you please develop a habit of distinguishing, much more assiduously than hitherto, between 18th and 19th century (classical) liberalism, which was indeed a force for progress and outright revolutionary change; and its distorted 20th and 21st century perversion, namely neo-liberalism, which is a force for belligerent conservatism and outright reactionary virulence. There is nothing even only remotely “liberal” about neo-liberalism!
Seriously! It is a detail, but a detail that needs to be understood. Even Karl Marx recognised that:
Arnd, you said “neo-liberalism, which is a force for belligerent conservatism and outright reactionary virulence. There is nothing even only remotely “liberal” about neo-liberalism!”
Except there is.
I think you might be confusing neo-liberalism with the neo-conservatives who presently have control of the White House.
I’m about to embark on a not very welcome visit to the dentist, so will get back to you later with more detail, but in the meantime consider that the upholders of the economic system that has been imposed upon us are universally referred to as “liberal democracies”, and it was Bill Clinton who used the label “free market democracies”.
The liberal democracies are not devoted to upholding any airy-fairy so-called “liberal standards”. We see that right now in Gaza.
They, including the neo-cons, are all about upholding their precious economic system.
You know that.
Arnd, you seem to have a soft spot for the “classical” liberals.
As though they had virtues that were abandoned by the liberals who followed, and by the neo-libs.
Yet one of the early and still most prominent “philosophers” of liberalism, J S Mill, was quite open about the course that the new industrial powers should follow — “Colonization … is the best affair of business in which the capital of an old and wealthy country can engage … the same rules of international morality do not apply … between civilized nations and barbarians.”
And so we see that view perpetuated in the colonialism and neo-colonialism of the libs who followed, and the neo-libs.
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep hammering it.
Liberalism, in any of its shape-changing manifestations, has no redeeming features.
Steve, we did pick through this “liberalism” stuff a few months ago on one of Lucy Hamilton’s articles. The main point I laboured then was that our definitions of “universal and equal political liberty” and “universal and equal economic liberty” are severely incongruent, and that this incongruence develops from the fact that since the bourgeois revolutions (American and French Revolutions) political office and power cannot be passed on or acquired by inheritance – but economic wealth and power can.
This is a point of contention that has been central to my critique of contemporary politics and economics for over three decades, but which I still find impossible to communicate. I’m seriously puzzled by this fact.
Arnd, I just went over the article you linked to, and yes, we gave the matter a thorough working over!
I cannot see that your distinction between political power inheritance and economic wealth inheritance undermines my argument against liberalism at all. In fact, it supports it.
It’s a significant point, in a limited sense, but I see it as just more evidence that liberals have developed a political/economic system (representative democracy) in which their highest aim, the right to endless accumulation of property, is protected and preserved.
Liberals, the bourgeoisie, have always feared democracy. Feared rule by the majority that will not protect their minority rights. Check out the debates that gave rise to the US Constitution; that fear was ever present.
So while representative democracy appears on the surface to be giving equal power to all, the reality is rather different.
In the UK we still see lingering aristocratic influence in the House of Lords. We see that the poor man’s Magna Carta, the Charter of the Forest, was slowly undermined for centuries, to be finally extinguished only a few decades ago.
In the US we see the Electoral College system which undermines the power of individual voters. A system set up by property owners.
And so when you labour the point, (as you put it) that political power now cannot be inherited but wealth power can, I think you overstate the case.
Wealth power translates to political power.
And therein lies the problem.
SD & Arnd,
at the risk of being obscure and / or irrelevant, I can’t resist a punt.
I guess that when folks seek to elevate themselves above all other living things and their cycles, a competition arises. Even over my life, I have observed that the notion of ‘sustainability’ has arisen to be applied in all sorts of theatres, mainly as a counter to some local or broader ‘failure’ of competition to provide a ‘balance’ for the proponents of ‘sustainability’. It arises, then seems to disappear again when convenience is somehow met by competition, be it by science, tech, or pulling of political levers.
Even though competition can give rise to wars and the spread of pestilence, the chaos will somehow equilibrate to communities of ‘for’, ‘against’ or ‘uncertain’, with those ‘uncertain’ pressured to adopt a ‘for’ or ‘against’ binary – no room for nuance. And even though nuance and uncertainty may be essential drivers for the pursuit of understanding, there’s a tendency to make laws that deal in absolutes ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, and of course, on ‘available evidence’, the ‘balance of probability’, the ‘precautionary principle’, ‘common sense’ and ‘moral certainty’ in some attempt to codify some sort of ‘truth’ – for the time being.
Seeking to wrangle a commonality seems also to be rendered to a competition by an endlessly growing lexicon of terms to suit not only tangible things and events, but ideas and abstractions no matter how obscure, with the art being to make the linkages and connections. Perhaps sustaining this growth makes judgement irresolvable – even for the over-worked god(s). So, just in case, we provide ourselves with the opportunity for obliteration, and perhaps an end to conflict and competition. Hmmm, maybe best to let nature take care of itself, or maybe make more laws to set more boundaries to be pushed. Whatever! Yet another argument!
What makes me smile is the notion of quantum entanglement and timelessness, coherence and decoherence (where decoherence leaks into the environment and remains and interpretational issue), and the Yolgnu term makarrata – ‘a coming together after a struggle’, which seems not to be obliterative, but to premise that we’ll all still be here. 😎
Nevertheless a good difference of opinion keeps the blood flowing – so to speak.
Steve,
Sooo close, yet so far apart. You reproduce my chain of argument, almost verbatim … – and then, at the last possible moment, take a turn to the exact opposite conclusion!
Let me try again:
Since the bourgeois revolutions, our understanding of political liberty is predicated on individual access to and exercise of political power by public consent, and not, as up until then, by the hereditary principle.
Yet somehow, we do NOT insist on likewise disconnecting from the hereditary principle individual access to wealth and the commercial power and influence it bestows. (And obviously, and as you point out, concentrations of wealth do bestow enormous political power).
So far, so good. Up to here, we agree (I think).
But now we take divergent paths (but, please, correct me if I interpret you wrongly): you (seem to) decry liberalism in its bourgeois form for it involuntarily hapless and/or deliberately deceitful inability to rein in the abuse of commercial power – which is a line of argument that I see running off towards endorsing state power in potentially very problematic ways. See, for example, “Guided Democracy”, Singapore-style; or Chandran Nair’s Sustainable State. Others who drift off in that direction are Victor Orban and his “Illiberal Democracy”.
Even the best case scenario would be some potentially quite stifling reinvention of corporatism, like Franco in Spain or Salazar in Portugal. As well, growing up in W.Germany, the ham-fisted petit bourgeois socialism in the former East Germany gave me the creeps whenever I bothered to peek over The Wall.
Hence my strong preference for the resolute pursuit of an agenda of deliberate deconstruction of state power – and of deliberate deconstruction of concentrations of wealth and commercial power THROUGH THE IMPOSITION OF A FLAT 100% CONFISCATORY INHERITANCE TAX.
Rather than create powerful state authority to regulate and control the
activities of (inherited) wealth agglomerations, I want to do away with such wealth agglomerations, and thereby make good on the promise held out by the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment.
See Jens Beckert Are We Still Modern (pdf, 17 pages). For the record: I’m with Orestes Bronwson, page 10, top half (from memory).
Arnd, I’m with you all he way in imposing a wealth tax.
But if it’s set at 100%, you and I will have to be shoulder to shoulder at the barricades, because they won’t give that up without a fight to the death.
Far simpler and less painful I think, to simply limit the accumulation of wealth in the first place.
But we’re ahead of ourselves.
You said “somehow, we do NOT insist on likewise disconnecting from the hereditary principle individual access to wealth and the commercial power and influence it bestows.”
A fair point, but it illustrates a point I made elsewhere about the “evil’ for want of a better word, that is inherent in liberalism, whereby victories for the masses are never permanent under a liberal system. The Forest Charter being a great example. No sooner had the nobles won their rights when they began undermining the rights won by commoners.
That theme has been repeated over and over.
Even the history of your inheritance tax confirms this. We had state-based inheritance taxes until the Bjelke-Peterson era. A portion of accumulated wealth went back to the common-wealth.
Now, a distant memory. Another gain taken from the masses.
You said that I “(seem to) decry liberalism in its bourgeois form for it involuntarily hapless and/or deliberately deceitful inability to rein in the abuse of commercial power.” That’s half-right.
There’s nothing involuntary about their failure to rein in the abuse of commercial power. It’s done with purpose. It’s their business plan. It’s their raison d’être.
And your virtuous classical liberals share the blame for this.
They knew the character of the bourgeoisie.
They could see the potential for exploitation of the working class. If, in isolated instances they pointed out the pitfalls, then they were totally ineffective.
If I’m in a generous mood, I could say that they were victims of the class distinction that still permeates British society today.
We can only imagine the pull that class considerations must have exerted in their day, when a century or so later J M Keynes could write — “Ought I, then, to join the Labour Party? Superficially that is more attractive. But looked at closer, there are great difficulties. To begin with, it is a class party, and the class is not my class. If I am going to pursue sectional interests at all, I shall pursue my own. When it comes to the class struggle as such, my local and personal patriotisms, like those of every one else, except certain unpleasant zealous ones, are attached to my own surroundings. I can be influenced by what seems to me to be Justice and good sense; but the Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.”
So there we have it.
The irresistible pull of class and selfishness that lies at the heart of liberalism.
Clakka, thanks for your interest.
And nice word-play at the end.
Clakka, I second Steve. Including your concluding sentiment. “Let the blood run freely!” (so to speak).
Thanks for your reply, Steve. Including the quote by J.M.Keynes. I’ve had a few reminders recently that he was not quite as uncontroversial, agreeable and moderate a character as I might otherwise have thought.
So this, then, seems to be our divergence of opinion: I am strongly in favour of freedom (liberty, libertarianism) both at individual and collective level, and would want to extend it to all areas of political philosophy, political economy and jurisprudence. In fact, my whole outlook on political philosophy is predicated on the single basic and uncompromisingly radical understanding of liberty and the unacceptabiliy of coercive pressure to override this freedom. Hence anarchism.
Which outlook certainly is long-term, to say the least. Most will call it utopian, if not outright delusional. And I can certainly see why!
But fairly extensive and repeated reflection leads me to consider the alternative even more problematic: categorically refuting liberalism because of the hypocritical one-sidedness of its interpretation and application until now, and endowing state authority with coercive powers to limit liberty – as advocated by many revolutionaries, including orthodox Marxists – does with logical inevitability set off dynamics which will invariably beget greater need for coercive pressure, and still greater need for further coercive pressure after that, eventually descending into unlimited despotic repression.
Dystopia, in other words. I’ll stick with utopia! Even if that condemns me to turning into just another old man shouting at clouds.
Actually Arnd, I don’t think there’s a divergence of opinion, we merely articulate the path to the goal in slightly different terms.
I’m not one for putting too much emphasis on faith, but I have a feeling, faith I suppose, that anarchism is an evolutionary end-point.
That it will come about naturally.
Because it is a system that is most suited to human nature. A system that is not a system because with the liberty you mention being a foundation principle, an anarchist community can be anything its members want it to be.
Unfortunately, I won’t see this in full bloom, but I do see the shoots appearing already.
Cheers, Steve
Cheers SD and Arnd, and thanks,
Ah ha, excellent!
Kinda what I was inferring in my penultimate paragraph.
I agree, it seems to be occurring as a drift, although many or most seem to get stuck on mistrust of themselves (and others), despite that mistrust being deliberately imposed, and adopted by rote as part of the status quo of ‘normal’ alternatives. Maybe a root cause of increasing frustration and hostile absolutism?
About 30 years ago, as a provocation (mostly to myself), I used to call myself a Marxist – A Groucho Marxist – attached to his ‘clubs, members, not me’ line. Now, although I’m dependent, I just live as self-reliant as I can, as simply as possible, staying alert to necessity vs any ambition that may creep in. And that’s not to say I don’t from time to time spoil myself, and for ‘sport’ run amok in commentary on ‘regular’ politics.
Albeit, for my blunders or otherwise, others may perceive me differently.