Greenpeace adopts fresh tactic to pressure airport

By CHRIS DANIELS

Greenpeace, the environmental group known for abseiling off buildings and rubber-boat protests will employ another form of protest in Auckland next week - the shareholders' resolution.

It is a weapon first deployed in the United States, when shareholders used their rights at annual meetings to pressure companies into withdrawing business from South Africa's apartheid regime.

Now it will be used in a struggle to get Auckland International Airport to shut down its on-site incinerator and replace it with steam sterilisation.

The incinerator, says Greenpeace, is emitting too much dioxin into the atmosphere and should be shut down. It has been breaching its resource consents for the past two years, a situation the airport company says will last until the end of March.

Greenpeace's methods are simple - buy a small parcel of shares, then use the rights that come with ownership to put constitutionally valid resolutions to the vote at each annual shareholders' meeting.

It recently used this tactic in Britain to put pressure on oil giant BP, which was planning to drill for oil in the Arctic ocean, just off the North Alaskan coast.

Greenpeace climate campaigner Stephanie Tunmore was project leader for that manoeuvre, which got the support of more than 13 per cent of shareholders.

At present in New Zealand, Tunmore told the Business Herald that campaigning organisations are increasingly turning to shareholder rights as a method of forcing companies to think of social objectives along with profits.

"Governments have less and less control over companies, they are less and less able to regulate multinationals," she said.

"That leaves the legitimate owners of the company - the shareholders, as the new regulators."

Old methods of political lobbying were becoming less and less effective in getting large companies to change their behaviour, Tunmore said.

Any polluter thinking Greenpeace had abandoned its confrontational and headline grabbing methods in favour of pin-striped boardroom shenanigans will need to think again.

The shareholder resolution, Tunmore said, was used in conjunction with, rather than instead of, the rubber boats and the abseiling.

Although the Arctic drilling went ahead, BP has since pulled out of "frontier exploration", abandoning other plans it had for Arctic drilling.

Tunmore said the relationship between company directors and shareholders was changing, spreading from the United States, to the UK, and now Australia and New Zealand.

"The relationship that had evolved between shareholders and directors is almost one of subservience, they take their dividends and leave them to it.

"In 1999, there were 222 resolutions filed with more than 150 major US companies, so it's a way of life over there. They expect it, shareholders believe they have a right and a responsibility to regulate the company."

Victory in this sphere of corporate activism was not measured in actual votes won, as in electoral politics, said Tunmore. A campaign could be successful simply by putting the issue on the agenda and forcing the company to react, justify and defend its actions.

Resolutions could even be withdrawn if the company made a suitable, binding commitment to actually doing what it asked for.

The Greenpeace vote at the BP annual shareholders meeting was enough to embarrass the company and, some say, instrumental in pushing it into launching its new, "enviro-friendly" public face and logos just one year later.

It is also a cost-effective method of communicating an environmental message to the public, as the company is paying for the resolution, along with its response to it, to be circulated to thousands of shareholders.

Which means New Zealand's listed companies might have to start paying more attention to their environmental and social records, if they want their annual shareholders meetings to move quickly from the chairman's speech to the cup of tea and biscuits.

Further reading
nzherald.co.nz/environment