I don’t know about you, but I am heartily sick and tired of meddling corporate boards dipping their unwanted ores in the water, endeavouring to set social agenda’s or give their unwanted opinions on political issues.
Sadly, these days we see it all too often. Be it on same sex marriage issues, or the ill-fated voice referendum fiasco, or climate change. They all have an opinion they are not shy of inflicting on us, the all suffering consumer.
Much of the time their actions only serve to divide our nation and devaluing our culture and history. Today their focus is Australia Day.
In an open letter endeavouring to mollify customers, Brad Banducci, CEO of Woolworths put his hapless case as to why the board of the egregious company had taken the position it has decided upon.
Dear Customers,
Over the last two weeks, there’s been much commentary in the media, and we have had direct feedback from our customers and our team regarding our approach to selling Australia Day merchandise.
I have tried to read all customer complaints and team incident reports, and I’m writing this in the hope of clarifying our position and also asking everyone to treat our team with respect.
In terms of the Woolworths position:
- As a proud Australian and New Zealand retailer, we aren’t trying to ‘cancel’ Australia Day. Rather, Woolworths is deeply proud of our place in providing the fresh food that brings Australians together every day. As evidenced during COVID or increasingly natural disasters such as what is currently unfolding with Cyclone Kirrily in Northern Queensland. Woolworths will always support Australians in the moments that matter.
I suppose we can assume from this statement that celebrating Australia Day doesn’t really matter:
- In terms of merchandising – our commercial decision to not stock specific Australian Day general merchandise was made on the basis of steeply declining sales. The decision to stock this mostly imported merchandise has to be made almost 12 months in advance. So as a business decision, it doesn’t make commercial sense.
- Rather than stocking imported Australian themed merchandise, Woolworths is focused on what we do best 365 days of the year – providing the best of Australian fresh food for Australia Day long weekend gatherings with family and friends and working hard to ensure we deliver great value.
There are many other ways in which we are supporting our customers and our team to celebrate Australia, such as acknowledging the best of Australian products in our stores and online and supporting our team to mark Australia Day with their local community.
As a first generation Australian who gratefully calls Australia home, I look forward to getting together with my family and I hope that you too spend Australia Day in your own way and cherish what it means to be Australian.
What Brad has failed to understand Australia Day is more than just paper plates and straws, thongs, or bucket hats. It is a day when we can, and should, come together as a nation to celebrate the values which define us: freedom, democracy, tolerance, and egalitarianism. These are aspects of our national character which define our way of life, and which have attracted millions of immigrants eager to share our journey.
Talk about been out of touch. Was there anyone on the Woolworths board who noticed what happened on October 14, when 60 per cent of Australians, including an astonishing 37 per cent of Labor voters, rejected the Voice to Parliament?
Woolworths’ board has obviously misinterpreted the lesson of the divisive Voice to Parliament debate and is now attempting to cancel Australia Day by stealth.
Misreading the national mood is never good for business.
Woolworths’ astonishing behaviour is just another example of corporate Australia’s state of disarray. An exit poll conducted at the Voice to Parliament referendum, commissioned jointly by the Institute of Public Affairs and Advance Australia, found that 64 per cent of Australians agreed that big businesses’ engagement in political debate did not represent their values. Only four per cent disagreed. This view was shared among Coalition, Labor, and Greens voters. But it was Greens voters who were most sympathetic to big business, with 56 per cent agreeing, compared with 87 per cent of Nationals voters, 70 per cent of Liberals and 58 per cent of Labor voters.
It appears that Woolworths’ top management is oblivious to how much damage they are doing to their reputation in the eyes of the community, many of whom begrudgingly shop there because of a lack of competition.
In addition to its anti-Australia Day activism, Woolworths (and other supermarket chains) stand accused of failing to pay farmers fairly for their produce, while at the same time charging shoppers higher prices in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis.
But all of these actions are condoned by an elitist board, comprised of out-of-touch political activists. Of the nine members of the Woolworths Board of Directors, four are also directors of companies which either openly supported or funded the Yes campaign for the Voice to Parliament, namely Qantas, Telstra, Origin Energy, NAB and ANZ.
Woolworths’ board members collectively oversaw the diversion of at least $5 million in shareholders’ money to the Yes campaign. Shareholders must by now be asking how constantly taking one-sided political decisions on sensitive and highly contested topics can be in their interests.
It speaks volumes that Greens voters are now the ones most likely to support the political agenda of big business. Many of Australia’s largest corporations now represent the views of the cosseted, wealthy, inner-city elite, having long ago abandoned any pretence of serving the interests of their customers.
But its not just grocers who wish to inflict their marginalised myopic views on the community at large. Sporting bodies such as Cricket Australia and Australia tennis have their own not so closeted agendas on various social and political issues.
It is an alarming trend in business today.
In recent years, many big businesses and ASX50 companies have taken public stances on issues like climate change and social justice causes such as the 2017 marriage equality vote.
Several ASX50 companies have announced their position on the Voice throughout the year 2023. All failed to read the grass root market trends which voted 60%-39% against it.
“This is your time, your chance, your opportunity to be a part of making history,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in June 2023 in a speech announcing the referendum.
“It will be a moment of national unity, a chance to make our nation even greater – a gracious chapter in the great story of Australia.” But the average grass root Australian voter thought it was just another attempt to divide our Nation. Black vs White.
Australia’s “big four’” banks, the “big four” accounting firms, supermarket giants Coles and Woolworths, and mining giants BHP, Rio Tinto and Woodside are bankrolling the Yes23 campaign to the tune of up to 2 million Australian dollars ($1.2m) each.
National airline Qantas, which has been embroiled in a series of controversies related to its treatment of customers and workers, has mounted an especially high-profile campaign, painting the Yes23 logo on some of its aircraft.
Prominent “no” campaigners have specifically taken issue with corporate Australia’s involvement, with former Prime Minister John Howard blasting companies for giving “condescending advice”.
“We are just quite baffled at why corporate Australia has bought in so heavily to one side of the debate,” Paul Scarr, a senator with the centre-right Liberal opposition party and deputy chair of the “no” campaign, told Australian television last week.
In the recent poll by Redbridge, only 39 percent of voters said they would support the Voice, down from as high as 65 percent earlier this year.
In a poll by Society Advisory, 70 percent of voters said they either disagreed with or were unsure about the prominent role of corporations in the vote.
In polls carried out early in the year, more than 80 percent of Indigenous Australians said they supported the Voice.
Intifar Chowdhury, a researcher at the Australian National University who studies young people’s relationship with democracy, said the public is cynical about the involvement of corporations like QANTAS, which has come under fire for illegally firing workers and allegedly selling tickets for cancelled flights.
“When a company like Qantas that doesn’t even seem to care about its own customers or workers suddenly supports a proposal like the Voice, people can clearly see it is virtue-signalling,” Chowdhury told the media. “The companies obviously just wanted to be on what they perceive to be the right side of history.”
Daniel Lewkovitz, director of Sydney security firm Calamity, which has won diversity awards over its hiring of disabled and disadvantaged workers, said many large companies “make a song and dance” about their support for good causes while engaging in questionable business practices.
“The ones who virtue-signal the loudest in public are often the ones doing the wrong thing when they think nobody’s looking. It’s not about actually doing good as much as being seen to do good,” Lewkovitz told the media conference.
Australia’s big brands are not the first to badly misread the public mood.
In the United States, beer giant Anheuser-Busch shed about $5bn in value after a partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney earlier this year sparked outrage among conservatives.
“They thought, let’s jump on a perfectly sensible liberal cause and show the world how socially progressive and in tune with society we are,” John Roberts, a professor of marketing at the University of New South Wales, told me. “But they did it without thinking about the effect it would have on beer drinkers of Middle America. The financial fallout was incredible.”
The flailing campaign has raised a question for Australia that resonates globally: Should companies get involved in social issues and politics, or just stick to serving their customers?
“People are suspicious of companies that have waded into a very polarised issue that does not directly relate to their core business, and that their brand has not been historically aligned with,” Mark Humphery-Jenner, an associate professor of business at the University of New South Wales, told a packed media conference.
“Their support does not seem authentic and perhaps the only reason they got involved in the first place was to curry favour with the government over its pet political cause.”
In an open letter the Opposition Leader and Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians wrote:
“Everyday Australians have had a gutful of elites seeking to crush our national pride, tear down the Australian achievement and tribalise us through every form of identity politics. Australians are facing incredible economic pressures right now. And we live in times of emboldened autocrats and terrorists.
To deal with these challenges, we need to reinvigorate our national pride, rebuild our national confidence, and restore our national unity.
We can achieve these goals if we choose resilience over victimhood, gratitude over resentment, forgiveness over retribution, self-assurance over demoralisation, truth over falsehood and unity over division.
Every country has dark chapters in their history, but most don’t allow those chapters to cast such a long shadow as we do in our country.
On this Australia Day, we don’t forget our dark chapters or the lessons of our history.
But let us begin to rediscover our Australian greatness by expressing love for our country and by pushing back against those who want us to hate ourselves and our history”.
The time has come to unite as a nation, under one flag and one Nation. Surely to God even the self-serving corporate sector surely can see the benefits for the good the country and their own bottom line that this will bring. Not to mention the prosperity and growth all of us will enjoy living in the greatest country on earth.
