As I noted earlier this year, wealth inequality in Australia is flourishing. The top one per cent of household wealth in Australia is moving toward being 20 per cent of total wealth, and the country is a preferred destination for millionaires.
With a government that prefers to impoverish and vilify the disadvantaged and spend big on coal mines while locking up refugees, this does not look likely to shift any time soon.
But there are always other paths to social justice, and in Australia one may be through the millionaires — or at least the companies on which their fortunes are built.
Shareholder activism, the practice of using (including deliberately buying) shares in a company in order to have a voice in decisions the company makes, has been growing in Australia for some years. And it has had an increasing influence on matters of serious consequence, such as Indigenous land rights, the human rights of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, and the protection of the environment.
Shareholder activism is not a new practice in Australia. In late 1998 for example, opponents of the Jabiluka uranium mine led by the Gundjehmi Aboriginal Corporation successfully protected the land rights of the Indigenous Mirrar people in the Northern Territory.
Shareholder activism was a concerted part of this movement. A group of opponents bought shares in mining company North Ltd and used their ensuing voting bloc to put pressure on North, who eventually pulled out of the project, which was abandoned by the company who inherited it, Rio Tinto, in 2003.
More recently, in 2014 the Canberra-based Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR) led a shareholder campaign to force the Big Four banks (Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank, NAZ and Westpac) to tell shareholders how much carbon they finance.
In the words of the ACCR, 'faced with having to distribute carbon-related resolutions to millions of shareholders, all of the big four banks have improved their carbon disclosure'.
"This kind of pressure, directly applied in the boardrooms of the corporate partners of Australia's abusive immigration detention practices, has created a situation where corporations cannot enter into such partnerships without considerable reputational and financial risk."
In 2015 the activist group No Business In Abuse formed to place direct pressure on shareholders in Transfield Services, now known as Broadspectrum, by revealing their profitable relationship with the Australian government as the contractors that run the immigration detention centers on Manus Island and Nauru. As Chloe