Of Emails And Little Pencils

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen the power of the email. Last year we experienced saw the power of the pencil – or as Churchill called it, the ‘little pencil’.

By now, you would have come across the news that Brad Banducci, the CEO of Woolworths, is leaving the company. Ordinarily, a CEO leaving standing down as the boss of a big corporation after eight years in charge wouldn’t be front page news that it’s been. But Banducci and Woolworths are in the media because they deliberately decided to make themselves the news as they aggressively promoted left-wing causes.

The final straw for Banducci appears to have come after what’s been universally described as his ‘trainwreck’ appearance on the ABC Four Corners program when he got up and walked out in the middle of the interview. But before that, there were other straws, and no straw was bigger than Woolworths’ decision to stop selling Australia Day-themed merchandise because, according to a company spokesperson, ‘there’s been broader discussion about 26 January and what it means to different parts of the community.’

Robert Gottliebsen is one of Australia’s very best business journalists – in the over half a century he’s been covering the corporate world, there’s not much he hasn’t seen. In his piece today he described Wooldworths’ cancelling of Australia Day as ‘Banducci’s great single mistake’.

Both Woolworths and Qantas had a board with personal views about the voice referendum and ignored the dangers posed in becoming players in racial issues facing the political system. Both backed the ALP rather than the Opposition, and this stand antagonised the 60 per cent of their customer bases who voted No.

Qantas went quiet, but Woolworths doubled up and stopped selling Australia Day merchandise, propelling itself into more controversy and customer and political fury.

It was Banducci’s greatest single greatest mistake and creates the danger of the Opposition and the Greens coming together to try and split Woolworths along with Coles.

This is not a prediction, but when a board’s personal views on racial matters are pitted against the views of the majority of their customers and a major political party then they are asking for trouble.

Since announcing his departure, Banducci has been lauded in the business press – and maybe on purely financial metrics, he did a good job as CEO. It wasn’t the financial performance of Woolworths that hastened him leaving the company. But – as we are constantly told by the likes of Banducci and others – a company’s profits are only one measure of corporate performance. Banducci put at risk Woolworth’s ‘social licence to operate’. It could be said he’s a victim of the woke capitalism that he championed.

A fortnight after Australia Day, Banducci gave an interview to The Australian Financial Review.

After reading 3,500 emails from customers and visiting stores over that long weekend in January, Banducci also confesses the group misread its customers’ priorities.

That’s nonsense. Woolworths didn’t misread’ its customers’ priorities. Its customers’ priorities have never been to cancel Australia Day. According to a poll of 1,000 Australians commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs released in January, only 17% of respondents disagreed with the statement that Australia Day should be celebrated. 17% is an interesting figure. That’s exactly the same percentage of Australians who at the 2022 federal election gave their first preference Senate vote to either the The Greens, the Legalise Cannabis Party, or the Animal Justice Party.

In the IPA poll, 63% of respondents said Australia Day should be celebrated, and 20% had no opinion. I’d like 100% of Australians to want to celebrate Australia Day, and there’s much work yet to be done, but one thing is clear. At no stage, ever, was Woolworths’ decision to cancel Australia Day a reflection of its customers’ priorities. Instead, Woolworths executives were imposing their own priorities on customers. The same thing happened when Big W, owned by Woolworths, broadcast messages over store loudspeakers advocating a Yes vote at the Voice referendum. On Banducci’s logic, Big W did this in response to its customers’ priorities. Obviously, this wasn’t the case, and after an outcry from customers, Big W stopped its Voice advertising.

Woolworths cancelling Australia Day (but celebrating Easter, Chinese New Year, Ramadan, and Diwali) is no less significant than 80 local councils around Australia cancelling Australia Day. It’s not only the government that has the power to change the country.

There is one key difference between Australia Day and Chinese New Year, Ramadan, and Diwali. Australia Day is for all Australians. By all means, Woolworths should celebrate the religious holidays and festivals of the nation’s multicultural community. But the only reason we can be a multicultural community is because of what’s commemorated on Australia Day.

In today’s The Australian, Glenda Koporaal identifies that it’s not the priorities of customers or mainstream Australians big business is responding to as they adopt progressive social agendas. It’s the priorities of their left-wing staff (and more than likely their own children and family members) CEOs are reacting to.

While businesses have learned not to align themselves with any political party, given the real possibility of governments changing, high-profile business leaders have seen fit in recent years to become commentators on social issues of the day.

Issues such as same-sex marriage, the Indigenous voice to parliament, the merits of celebrating Australia Day, and the war in the Middle East have become areas drawing in some business leaders.

But the pendulum may be swinging the other way, with the risks outweighing the perceived social halo – despite the prevailing corporate speak for having ‘purpose-led’ organisations.

As Banducci found out, when his company tried to explain its reasons for not stocking Australia Day goods this year with a statement saying that not all staff supported the celebration of the day, taking a stand on social issues can be a high risk strategy.

Corporate leaders have argued in the past that taking a high-profile stand on social issues goes well with the increasing ranks of more idealistic younger workers. But getting it wrong risks alienating other staff who have different views, as well as customers who may not agree.

In an interview in 2022, the ‘GM Inclusion for Woolworths Group’, Catherine Hunter, was explicit about Woolworths’ decision to play politics at the behest of its staff. ‘The business wants to cultivate trust with its employees – and with this comes an increased mandate, and permission, to demonstrate a public position on key societal issues’. In that interview there was no mention of the opinion of Woolworths’ owners (its shareholders) or its customers about the company taking ‘a public position on key societal issues’.

When the Liberal Party lost the 2022 federal election, Australia’s woke corporate community didn’t miss the opportunity to tell the country what they thought of the Liberals’ defeat. A week after the election, Angus Armour, chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, told The Australian Financial Review that ‘the election sends a critical message to boards about trust.’ It would be interesting to know what sort of message Armour believes Anthony Albanese is sending about trust after the PM broke his ‘my word is my bond’ promise on Stage 3 tax cuts.

In that same article appeared one of the most extraordinary statements I’ve ever heard from a business leader in Australia.

Graeme Bricknell, head of executive search at executive search and consulting firm Korn Ferry, says: ‘Boards need to pay attention [to the election]. If you’re a die-in-the-ditch, right-wing board member with fixed views about how things were done 15 years ago, your time is nigh.

Gosh. So much for diversity. Australia’s boardrooms embrace every kind of diversity. Except diversity of political opinion.

When those advising on the hiring of senior executives and board members speak like this, you can easily see how not a single ASX 100 company supported the NO case at the Voice referendum. I’d like to know what are the ‘fixed views’ of ‘right-wing’ board members to which Bricknell objects. These days, it’s ‘right-wing’ to believe in freedom of speech, promotion on merit, and that it’s not the job of CEOs to proselytize for fashionable leftish causes.

3,500 emails had an impact. They sent a powerful message to Banducci and his staff, and the sentiment of those 3,500 emails was reflected on talkback radio, conversations around the dinner table, and ultimately through the political process when Peter Dutton called for a boycott of Woolworths. That’s the power of an email. While Woolworths has yet to reverse its position on Australia Day, we’ve made a start on rolling back the cultural arrogance of big business.

If democracy is ‘the people speaking,’ then 3, 500 emails and what’s happened at Woolworths are examples of democracy in action. All of which got me thinking about what Churchill said about democracy. It’s a shame his famous quote on the subject – ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others’ has been misrepresented as a criticism of ‘mob rule’ and ‘populism’ – because it wasn’t and his thoughts on democracy are far more subtle than what’s captured in that quote.

Churchill was making the point that democracy is messy and uncertain and subject to the vicissitudes of popular feelings and emotion – but it’s the only form of government compatible with human dignity.

You’re likely to hear ‘democracy is the worst form of government’ from those who believe the public shouldn’t be allowed to vote for Donald Trump. Jared Diamond (of ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ fame) said Brexit was too complicated to be decided by a public vote. ‘…[W]e know subjects that are suitable for referendum and not. Subjects that are suitable for referendum are issues of society values that do not involve complicated questions of economics.’

Diamond didn’t say who was the ‘we’ he was talking about. Nor did he say who should be allowed to decide ‘complicated questions’. According to the American journalist Andrew Sullivan, ‘Democracies end when they are too democratic.’

Churchill spoke that line about democracy in the House of Commons in 1947, but as the historian Richard Langworth has pointed out, he was paraphrasing a longer remark about democracy.

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…

Churchill understood that the individual and their vote were at the heart of democracy. He said this in the House of Commons in 1944. I think it’s a far more powerful statement about democracy than the one Churchill is known for.

At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper – no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point.

On 14 October last year, more than nine million Australians walked into little booths across the country, and holding little pencils, they wrote ‘No’ when asked whether Australians should be divided by race. The rhetoric and voluminous discussion from the elites was deafening. Yet the little people won – and the principle that we’re all equal won too.

Finally, staying on the topic of Churchill, there’s something else he said – and it applies to Banducci and Woolworths.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.

Banducci and Woolworths were enthusiastic disciples of the woke corporate agenda. But that didn’t save Banducci against the ABC, and it won’t save Woolworths from the half-dozen parliamentary and government inquiries already started or about to be launched into the company.

Recommended Reading and Watching

• The title of this piece in The American Spectator last week caught my eye – ‘Trump is the man Nixon couldn’t be’. It’s fascinating. It’s by Newt Gingrich and is an interesting survey of US presidential lawbreaking (alleged and actual) from JFK to Watergate. This is a taste – ‘One of the most amazing things about Watergate is that Nixon’s predecessors, Presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson, had done far more illegal things. The allegations Nixon was charged with pale in comparison. Many of the people who worked to destroy Nixon had been directly involved in breaking the law in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In retrospect, it is stunning how hypocritical Nixon’s enemies were.’
• In the first episode of a new podcast and video series from the Institute of Public Affairs ‘Australia Censored’ released last week, I talk with John Storey, the IPA’s Director of Law and Policy, about the threat to freedom of thought and speech in Australia – and about how we win back our freedoms. We begin by defeating the Albanese government’s plan to censor the internet under the guise of stopping ‘misinformation’.