Opinion: The BCA masquerading as an advocate for climate action is beyond farcical

The Business Council’s “Seize the moment” report — or is it “Realising our full potential”, or “Living on borrowed time” — comes so heavily laden with irony it’s hard to go more than a few pages without stopping and marvelling at the front of these greedy spivs.

For example, the BCA invokes, in support of its usual demands of company tax cuts, polling that it says shows “most Australians think they pay too much tax, and don’t believe the government spends taxpayers’ money effectively. They are also concerned that a high company tax rate in Australia will make local businesses less competitive, resulting in lower economic growth, fewer job opportunities and businesses moving offshore”.

Yep, sounds plausible — Australians are kept awake at night by the idea that big corporations are paying too much tax. Who did the polling for “Seize our full potential”? Why, the Liberal Party’s own campaign strategy powerhouse (and top-flight state capture agency) C|T Group. The BCA’s new head might be a former senior Liberal staffer. It might use the Liberals’ own campaign outfit. It might have employed Liberal figures to run Liberal-aligned campaigns. But don’t dare suggest the BCA is just a Liberal Party front.

While the C|T Group findings offer such profound insights as “nine in 10 Australians agree that spending on research and development is vital to give us a competitive edge”, the irony deepens when you read in “Living the full moment” that “half of all Australians believe successive governments over the past 20 years have failed to outline a clear plan and vision for the nation”. Given that the Coalition has been in power for 13 of those years, and C|T Group and its previous iterations were their primary campaign strategisers that whole time, that seems a rather damning self-indictment.

But the irony starts plunging to Mariana-like depths on the issue of climate action, given C|T Group’s role with the Liberal Party and News Corp over the past two decades of demonising any climate action of any kind. “Almost two-thirds of Australians support reducing carbon emissions to meet net zero by 2050,” the BCA quotes C|T Group as claiming, sadly omitting the caveat that that is in spite of the best efforts of C|T Group.

But then the BCA talking about climate action and the need to reach decarbonisation targets is equally ironic. The BCA is — after the Coalition, News Corp and the big fossil fuel companies — the biggest climate saboteur in Australia, despite its blithe insistence that it supports climate action of some vague, unspecified kind. Let’s run through the BCA’s climate positions over the past 20 years:

• Opposed the ratification of the Kyoto protocols in 2007;
• Opposed the Rudd government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme;
• Opposed the Rudd government’s emissions abatement targets;
• Opposed the Gillard government’s carbon pricing scheme;
• “Welcomed” the repeal of the carbon pricing scheme by the Abbott government;
• Demanded the removal of the renewable energy target;
• Opposed any possibility of the Coalition’s version of the safeguard mechanism actually having some impact;
• Opposed Labor’s 45% by 2030 emissions reduction target as “economy wrecking”.

The BCA masquerading as an advocate for climate action is beyond farcical — it’s the equivalent of the arsonist lamenting the damage caused by the fire they lit.

And what action does the BCA want on climate? It wants more gas, and it wants carbon capture and storage — which, oddly enough, is exactly what its members such as Origin, Woodside and the big fossil-fuel multinationals like Shell and BP want as well. It quotes C|T Group to declare “more than half of Australians surveyed by the BCA said they supported more investment and government approvals for gas projects to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, with 20% in strong agreement and just 7% strongly disagreeing”. C|T Group’s links with the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies are well known.

Really, this is simply a continuation of what the BCA has been doing on climate for two decades: vaguely supporting the principle of climate action, but opposing any policy that might actually curb the emissions — and the profits — of its members.

One of the few mentions of inflation in the hundreds of pages of “Seizing the borrowed potential” — a subject otherwise absent from it, as noted yesterday — occurs in the energy section: “Australia’s domestic energy prices have increased dramatically as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This was made worse by historically wet weather in Australia and the structural problems facing our energy system as we decarbonise.”

No mention of the profiteering and price-gouging by energy producers or retailers who make up its members; no mention of how that profit-driven energy inflation has forced prices of other businesses up, in turn driving higher overall inflation across the economy — all to the benefit of energy company shareholders.

But then the BCA has never been honest in the past when it comes to energy and climate. It’s not about to start now.

This article was first published by Crikey.