Empty promises fill our world

ADAM CREIGHTON

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

The Australian

The phenomenon of BS jobs has been examined in this column before — the explosion of highly paid, sometimes-less-than-useless roles in bureaucracy and large corporations.

The trend has engulfed announcements too. BS announcements — promises that can’t be verified or where those making them won’t be around to be held accountable, are proliferating in corporations and government. They undermine public trust in institutions.

BS announcements have been a staple of defence departments and state governments for years. From the Collins Class subs to Sydney Light Rail, anything to do with expected cost or functionality of new infrastructure should be taken with a grain of salt.

But the exigencies of climate change have prompted a deluge. Becoming “carbon neutral” by 2050 is the BS announcement de rigueur. Hot on the heels of Britain, Japan announced last June it too would join the group of ­nations promising to emit zero carbon dioxide within 30 years.

Never mind that the world’s third-largest economy is in the process of building a further 22 coal-fired power stations, according to The New York Times, having shut down its zero-emissions nuclear power plants since 2011.

In a display of chutzpah, oil giant BP last week declared that it too would be carbon neutral by 2050, despite, as observers noted, having no plan to do so. Even if it succeeds, oil production and demand are set to keep rising out to 2040, according to International Energy Agency forecasts.

The Morrison government may as well cave in and promise to go carbon natural by 2050 too. None of these governments will be around to be held accountable. That’s good for them given the promise has minuscule chance of success without massive changes right now.

A hard-headed analysis by the OECD last year — The Cost of Decarbonisation — identified the need for “radical restructuring” of electricity supply, including “truly massive deployment of low-carbon technologies in particular nuclear energy and renewable energies”. “Truly massive” is not a phrase you often see in bureaucratic ­reports.

On governments’ stated policies, rather than their BS announcements, coal and gas will overwhelmingly make up the bulk of electricity supply in 2040, according to the IEA.

Indeed, investment in renewable projects has dried up in Australia, and governments in Europe and Japan are switching off their nuclear power stations, the only source of reliable emissions-free power.

Solar and wind power are not up to the task of powering Tokyo, let alone Japan. That hasn’t stopped Queensland, however, which naturally has promised to be net zero emissions by 2050, boasting about a $120m battery to be built by AGL that would power “57,000 homes”. Impressive? They forgot to say for how long: a maximum of about three hours. You’d need eight of the “giant” batteries to power a fraction of Queensland homes for a day.

For BS announcements that include verifiable goals, 2050 is a good year; much earlier and they’d be meaningless.

For instance, in a landmark policy speech last year, the Prime Minister stressed the government wanted “to make Australia a leading digital economy by 2030”.

But what does a leading digital economy look like? At least we can look forward to being a “renewable energy superpower”.

Westpac made a rookie error in 2012 by including a verifiable target — having women make up half its management by 2017. When that year rolled around Westpac reclassified some women as managers — mission accomplished.

Qantas, a bit savvier, has a plan for half its pilots to be women by 2030, likely well after today’s chief executive has departed. That said, it will be harder to reclassify cabin crew as pilots. Women make up about 5 per cent of commercial pilots. Maybe a 2040 deadline would have been safer.

The royal commission into financial services exposed the extraordinary dependence on BS announcements within finance. During a lengthy exchange with National Australia Bank, which was exposed for gouging and even charging customers for no reason, the bank’s “purpose” emerged: “to back the bold to move Australia forward”.

“Our purpose is a 50-year thing and our vision should be at least five years,” then CEO ­Andrew Thorburn told bemused counsel. McKinsey might expect a call in 2069.

Struggling to wade through it all, counsel Michael Hodge asked of the NAB chairman Ken Henry: “This document talks about culture carriers, it talks about key influencers, it talks about curating culture. What do all of those things mean?”

He didn’t sound sure: “Well, we don’t have absolute precision around any of those things at this stage,” the former Treasury secretary said.

What’s underpinning the growth in these nebulous announcements? Naturally, they have gone hand-in-hand with growth of the related BS jobs, which in turn depend on market power of big business.

But there are other factors. A decline in honesty and integrity in business and politics has reduced the personal cost of making meaningless announcements.

As Federal Court judge Michael Lee observed this month in a judgment between ASIC and AMP: “For generations, many successful financial institutions did not need ‘values statements’ setting out bromides; nor was it thought necessary to have an array of compliance executives with highfalutin titles.” People simply behaved reasonably.

Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt called “bullshit” the salient characteristic of our age in his 2005 critique. “Everyone knows this … (but) we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves,” he bemoaned.

It’s become much worse since then, given a climate change debate dominated by emotion. In the 19th century Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to mock the mores of the upper classes. Its successor, conspicuous compassion, is a lot more affordable for many more people.