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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8 comments
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wam
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Harry Lime
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Steve Davis
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John C
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Arnd
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Steve Davis
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Steve Davis
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Arnd
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.