Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

At every available opportunity the government has used the pandemic as cover to try to increase corporate power and decrease protections for investors and consumers. The Corporations Amendment (Meetings and Documents) Bill 2021 is the latest attempt to capitalise on COVID for the sake of the rich and the powerful. It would do that by making permanent the temporary dispensation granted to companies from having to hold in-person AGMs.

The Australian Greens accepted that that measure was necessary during the period of extended lockdowns, and we do support making permanent the capacity for companies to hold hybrid AGMs. However, we do not support the provisions in this bill that would allow companies to hold wholly virtual AGMs, because AGMs are one of the few occasions that corporations actually have to account for themselves publicly. They are an opportunity for investors to scrutinise what is being done with their money. But AGMs also serve a broader and legitimate public purpose. Just once a year, those who have the power to direct capital and shape economies, societies and people's lives, with all of the protection of a limited liability corporation, have to sit down and front up to ordinary people and look them in the eye and explain themselves and answer questions. It is this humbling of the executive class that this bill is seeking to avoid.

The pursuit of profit at all cost relies on those that run corporations being able to abstract themselves from any destruction that they are wreaking on people, on communities, on the environment or on the climate. For CEOs and chair people, the prospect of being personally confronted with the human or ecological cost of their actions or simply being quizzed as to whether they really deserve their obscenely large executive bonuses can be just a little uncouth. They can find it just a tad difficult.