Atlassian co-founder and billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes has labelled Australia’s biggest energy generator AGL “one of the most toxic companies on the planet”.
Speaking at the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) Climate Governance Forum on Friday, Mr Cannon-Brookes said the company was responsible for producing more emissions than Portugal, New Zealand and Sweden. But he said the problem was “eminently fixable”.
“It as a single company… has more emissions than the entire country of Portugal, or the entire country of New Zealand,” he said.
“Think of every single thing in New Zealand. Every car, every business, every factory, every sheep, everything,” he said.
Grok Ventures, a private investment group owned by Mr Cannon-Brookes, invested about $700 million to buy an 11 per cent stake of AGL in May last year.
The billionaire’s words comes more than a year after he led a foiled demerger of AGL Energy’s coal-assets which led to a blitzing of the energy giant’s board of directors.
Asked about the demerger on Friday, he was blunt in his response.
“You had this demerger idea which was, I’m going to get in trouble (but) not fully thought through, let’s just say it wasn’t to the benefit of the shareholders at all,” he said.
When pressed by moderator and journalist Helen Dalley, who said it was clear AGL board members thought it was a good idea “at the time,” Mr Cannon-Brookes’ gave a withering response.
“And there’s not many of them left,” he joked, drawing laughs from the crowd.
“I don’t mean that lightly … It was presenting a single option to the shareholders and I would argue taking them for granted, and not presenting the opportunities of the alternate case.”
He said initially his proposal was “kind of laughed at and then eventually taken slightly seriously,” before it gained momentum.
“The vote would have been an absolute trouncing,” he said.
In this conversation with Dalley, the renewable energy advocate spoke widely about the potential for AGL to transition to renewables, despite being “one of the most toxic companies on the planet,” adding the issue was “eminently fixable”.
He credited AGL for its “amazing assets” as Australia’s largest electricity generator, with millions of customers and “some of the best grid connections in the world”.
Mr Cannon-Brookes said “talent transition” was another important factor.
Part of this was hiring a diverse board. In November, AGL chairwoman Patricia McKenzie confirmed the company would close its last coal-fired plant by 2035, and flagged the appointment of four Cannon-Brookes backed directors: Kerry Schott, Christine Holman, John Pollaers and Mark Twidell.
”It shouldn’t be five people who all come from a deep climate background, (or) energy grid, they need to have some diversity of thought because this is a broad company with a lot of different effects on the economy and parts of it,” he said.
“That came to obviously things like gender, but specifically diversity of experiences and industries. Age diversity is really important on boards (as well)”.
Tech billionaire puts bosses on notice
Mr Cannon-Brookes also spoke about the corporate responsibility for directors to enact good environmental, social, and corporate governance, which included embracing the shift to renewable energy and decarbonisation.
He said a focus on climate, and emissions disclosures would implicate companies who weren’t implementing environmental policy.
“It’s a pretty safe bet that 10 years from now you will have much, much stronger controls on pollution and much stronger reporting to your shareholders,” he said.
“That probably has similar risks to you as a director, and to your company as financial risks.
“I suspect … there will be pretty strong penalties for directors who are unaware or uninformed of that.”
Mr Cannon-Brookes said directors were also responsible for seeking out financial opportunities so their companies would benefit from the transition to renewables.
“The simple way to think about it is we need to move everything that’s molecule -based and fossil fuel based to being electrically based,” he said.
He added that Australia had the “largest opportunity” to reap the awards of decarbonisation. This included an abundance in physical resources like silver, nickel, wind and sun, financial resources to aid the transition, and a “highly educated workforce”.
“We are incredibly lucky in Australia. to have a hugely stacked up set of opportunities that I believe personally it’s up to us to go and embrace (it),” he said.