Corporate Social Responsibility

Over the past 50 years many corporations have grown to such a size that they have greater financial resources than many small or 3rd world countries.

In Australia some of our corporations have turnovers that make neighboring countries appear miniscule by comparison - PNG has a GDP of only $14B yet the NAB and Telstra are 2 or 3 times that size.

In 2007 the NAB Bank listed a profit of over $4.5B and Telstra despite its protestations grew its profit to over $3.2B. Despite this the two companies total contribution to amatuer sport was less than 0.001% of profit (lets not even think about what it is against their turnover). Of course if you look at payments to professional sport that is another thing entirely.

If you have the time go here and read the NAB banks CSR review of itself.

After you see the side bar on the second page you will realise that there is a lot of talk and little real world activity - CSR makes for good press copy but not good business apparently. When you dig deeper you will find the one section on Community support and then you will see a small amount of detail. You have to love a bank that regards loaning money to people as a community service!! Ok it's a "low interest loan" but its still a loan, how is it that they can regard this as a community service?

They do invest in AUSKICK which is a great program - but then lets see what they do about that - OH YES they market it to death....so is it really being responsible and helping the community or is it just another clever marketing ploy?

I'll let you decide on that one.

It would be quite simple to go through the pages and compare what they regard as a serving the community to servicing themselves or their business needs. The entire document is quite frankly self serving drivel and deserves to be dealt with the way you would any fluffy 3 layer piece of paper on a roll..........

As for Telstra and many many other organisations in Australia CSR is a dirty acronym.

CSR should be about total responsibility to the community. Banks have and continue to offer over priced services to their customers mortgages, insurance and credit cards are signficant profit earners yet when things get tough for those that have these "services" the bank seems to lose its community spirit entirely. Witness the repossesions over the recent months for those that were sold in to mortgages that they really could not afford.

If corporate Australia is to truly value its social responsibilities then it needs to start providing returns in direct proportion to the spending of its customers.

As customers we need to start looking at who we associate ourselves with and decide if they are really doing the right thing by you and your community.

Australia has over 90 companies listed in the top 2000 companies in the world yet their total contribution to the communities that put them there over the last 10, 20 or 50 years would be negligable.

Each and every corporation owes a debt to the community that put it their and it is now time for those companies to start repaying the debt, just like a "low interest loan" in the end we want our share back.