Corporate Australia is finally stirring from its decade-long nap in the soft pillows of virtue signalling. A boardroom revolt by the ASX leadership against ever increasing demands by their own inclusivity diversity reporting committee signalled a return to sanity — a recognition that profit, not progressive politics, is what keeps the wheels of commerce turning. Shareholders, not activists, are now back in charge, and the era of corporate moral theatre is being shown the door.
As Janet Albrechtsen wrote in The Australian (22 October 2025):
“The nation’s stock exchange may have staggered from one (management) disaster to another in recent years, but in sacking its Corporate Governance Council (CGC) it has, at a stroke, not only eliminated a dysfunctional body captured by vested interests, zealots and the commercially illiterate but also given ASX a small chance of rejoining the competition for global equity investment.”
The business community and its representatives on the CGC finally lost patience with demands for ever more intrusive scrutiny of race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and even religion or ethnicity when appointing directors — and blocked the latest proposal of virtue signalling simply to keep the teal voting types happy. Even in Europe, regulatory mania is fading. The rush to require companies to report their so-called Scope 3 carbon emissions (the ones they can only guess at) is showing signs of slowing down.
Yet in agriculture, too many of our own leaders are marching the other way — clutching “environmental social governance scorecards”, “natural capital frameworks,” and “social licence” manuals as if they were tablets from Mount Sinai.
It seems as if every month that goes past, a new check list lands on the farm desk: sustainability, traceability, animal-welfare verification, biodiversity counting, regenerative certification. Each brings a new form to fill, a new levy to pay, and a new consultant to hire.
The pitch is always the same: the market demands it. But when you dig for evidence — real market signals, not slogans — there’s little beyond hearsay from the leafy suburbs and the activist class. We’re told Europe insists we mirror their farming standards and that the world frowns on our animal welfare practices. Yet despite the endless parade of certification schemes promoted as the road to global applause by the jet-set crowd, growers haven’t exactly been rushing to sign up.
Why? Because the road to profit isn’t paved with paperwork. Most of our output is bulk commodities, and “Brand Australia” already stands for clean, sustainable, well-regulated production. Premiums for certified products are rare and often vanish once markets turn. Still, the sermon continues.
Vested interests and the political class keep chanting the same line: the global community demands it. Ask for evidence — a poll, a mandate, a price signal — and there’s silence. The so-called “community” usually boils down to a handful of urban activists, a few university institutes, faceless bureaucrats, enthusiastic peak-body staffers, and the ABC’s moral theatre troupe.
Meanwhile, the real community — shoppers at Coles and Woolworths, Asian and Middle Eastern importers — don’t demand a farming framework they simply want what we grow but are only prepared to pay what our global competitors price it at.
When consumers are being crushed by food price inflation, they don’t care whether their meat or flatbread came from a carbon-neutral paddock or a “traceable supply chain” blessed by a sustainability officer. They care that food is affordable and available — not which stamp came on the importers or producers paperwork.
When grain prices sit roughly where they were a decade ago while production costs have doubled, it’s fair to ask why we keep deluding ourselves that magic high paying new markets will appear if we can just prove we are clean and green. Sheep and cattle prices may have lifted recently, but few farmers are willing to take on the extra expense of certification schemes with they know the next downturn is just around the corner. Every new audit, label, and box to tick only bleeds more from the farm gate.
Yet the agricultural and political elite talk as though a gold rush awaits the ESG box ticking sustainable producer. The truth: that market is as small as the one for organic kale — loud in marketing, tiny in volume. In a world where production is easy to ramp up, niche premiums vanish fast, it does not take long for the supply curve to shift, which means margins disappear, and costs remain. There’s no free lunch — not even an organic one.
As the corporate sector rediscovers that profits, not pronouns, pay the bills, diversity quotas, carbon-neutral pledges, and “social impact” reports are quietly fading. The big banks and major boards that once opened every AGM with a Welcome to Country, a diversity scoreboard, and a climate slide deck are now shifting focus back to dividends, not decarbonisation. Less box ticking more profit reporting.
They’ve learned what farmers already know: you can’t buy off the activists with paperwork. The pursuit of invisible virtues has no closing balance. Yet while corporate Australia trims its ideological fat, too many in politics and bureaucracy still demand that farmers sign up to yet another framework — or risk being locked out of imaginary markets.
Even within our peak farming bodies, some staffers have been swept up in the excitement of tracking and tracing every step of production, with little thought to cost-benefit. They insist that unless farmers are counting their green sheep, cattle, or grain, export markets will collapse — or that new ones will magically appear. But back on the farm, growers are beginning to suspect that these promises and threats are more sales pitch than substance.
In the real world Australia’s clean-green-caring image has been built on efficient production systems and sound regulation — not endless accreditation. The market for “climate-friendly beef” or “sustainable lamb” is tiny and the margins even smaller. Standards and traceability has its place — canola into the EU, non-mulesed wool for select markets but only where there is a premium on offer— certification for its own sake is nothing more than signing up to work for free.
If growers refused to tick another box, would domestic and international buyers still take our grain, livestock, wool, cotton, wine and horticultural produce? Of course, they already do. The vast majority of our markets are not interested in sustainability frameworks or ESG box ticking.
Would banks still finance us? Absolutely. In the real world of global finance Chinese, Middle Eastern, and Australian lenders care about collateral and cash flow, not carbon footprints. Let’s be clear food and fibre is indispensable, but the market for premium certified produce is limited. The growing markets are not in over-regulated Europe but in Asia and the Middle East, where “Grown in Australia” is certification enough. Yes, we export $5 billion of grain, lamb, beef, wine, wool, and horticulture to the EU and UK — but the other $65 billion mostly goes to foreign markets that are not demanding it comes with a signed form.
The danger isn’t the market; it’s the bureaucracy. Every time we volunteer for another accreditation on the argument we need it for our social license, we feed an industry of auditors, consultants, and regulators who thrive on paperwork and penalties.
Net zero will breed a new rent-seeking class — extracting fees, not creating value. For family farms already stretched by labour shortages, another layer of reporting to help government hit its 2030 and 2035 targets will drag someone out of the paddock and into the office. That isn’t “future-proofing”; it’s working for the government for free.
That’s not to say every scheme is a waste of time. The former Coalition government saw what was coming and put $4 million into the National Farmers’ Federation to create a single cross-commodity certification system — the Australian Agricultural Sustainability Framework (AASF) — to replace the patchwork of programs already out there. If it works, it could become a one-stop brand for Grown in Australia.
But serious questions remain. How much box-ticking will it demand? Will it become a gatekeeper that keeps lifting the bar? Who owns and controls the data? Will Coles, Woolworths, the UK, and the EU accept it and scrap their own schemes? Or will activists hijack it as a Trojan horse to embed bans and ideology? For now, it looks promising — but farmers should keep a close eye on it.
So what’s the takeaway? It’s time for agriculture to take a page from the ASX’s playbook. Corporate Australia has finally woken from its decade-long nap in the soft pillows of virtue signalling, remembering that profit — not politics — keeps the lights on. The ASX dumped its governance zealots and refocused on shareholders.
Farmers should do the same. When another accreditation, certification, or quality assurance scheme is waved in front of you, ask one question: what’s in it for your farm? Stop chasing invisible virtues and box-ticking for its own sake. By all means, measure and record what matters — spray use, farming systems, soil carbon, animal wellbeing — but only fill in a form if it opens real doors to markets and profit. Don’t fall for the scare campaign that every market will close without another certificate. It’s just not true.
Until the day a Chinese bank refuses your overdraft because your sheep fart too much, or a Middle Eastern importer demands a sustainability certificate before unloading the ship — forget the boxes and get back to farming. The world needs your grain and livestock, not your paperwork.
