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Bank AGM Season 2024

The 2024 Australian bank AGM season is done and dusted, with one key takeaway: Big portions of the banks’ shareholders, including many of Australia’s top super funds, want to see the banks live up to their climate commitments and stop financing companies that plan to grow their fossil fuel production.

An average of more than a quarter of ANZ, NAB and Westpac shareholder votes went in favour of Market Forces’ resolutions calling on the banks to exclude finance to fossil fuel companies that don’t have Paris-aligned transition plans. This is hugely significant given the boards of all the banks recommended against these resolutions and 95% of shareholder votes typically go in line with board recommendations.

2025 is a big year for Australia’s big four banks. ANZ, NAB and Westpac have all set policies which require their major fossil fuel clients to have climate transition plans in place by October this year. Theoretically, that means if a fossil fuel company cannot demonstrate on paper that it has a plan to scale down its emissions in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement they could be ineligible to receive financial support from Australia’s largest lenders.

But these policies still contain plenty of loopholes that could see the big four continue to pour money into climate wrecking companies even beyond the October ‘deadline’.

We’re putting pressure on the banks to fix these loopholes to ensure they don’t give another cent to the world’s climate wreckers, and we need your help!

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Tell ANZ, NAB and Westpac to close their fossil fuel finance gaps and end their support for climate wreckers once and for all!

Westpac’s climate stagnation emphatically rebuked by shareholders

2024 AGM result: 34.2% in favour

  • Westpac held its 2024 AGM in Sydney on the 13th of December, and faced significant shareholder backlash for its failure to bring its fossil fuel finance policy in line with its commitments to the Paris Agreement.
  • Despite one in five (21.6%) Westpac shareholder votes going in favour of a Market Forces resolution on fossil fuel finance in 2023, Westpac failed to make any changes to its policies in 2024.
  • Westpac’s decision to ignore the concerns of these shareholders was empathically rebuked at its 2024 AGM, with a massive 34.2% of shareholder votes cast in favour of the same resolution from 2023, a near 13 percentage point increase.
  • Investors holding more than one third of Westpac’s shares have now sent the bank a clear message: your current approach isn’t going to cut it; it’s time to rule out finance for fossil fuel companies that aren’t aligned with the Paris Agreement.
  • If Westpac fails to listen to its shareholders for a second year in a row, it runs the risk of even more embarrassing shareholder revolts like this in future years.
Tiwi Traditional Owners stand in front of a banner that says 'sWindling our future away' (with the Westpac logo as the W) 'Westpac, stop funding fossil fuels'

Shareholder resolution

Westpac was the only major big four Australian bank to not introduce any further exclusions to its existing fossil fuel finance policy in 2024. Westpac also continued to take in billion dollar loans and bonds for companies with some of the biggest fossil fuel expansion plans in the Asia Pacific, including Santos, APA Group, JERA and GE Vernova.

Market Forces’ resolution, supported by shareholders representing over a third of the company, proposed to exclude finance to fossil fuel companies without Paris-aligned climate transition plans.

Is Westpac serious about its deadlines for fossil fuel clients’ transition plans?

As it stands, Westpac has given its upstream oil and gas customers until October 2025 to produce a transition plan aligned with a 1.5°C, but never confirmed if it will cut off finance for clients that don’t. It’s a step that big four rival Commonwealth Bank took back in August 2024 when it announced it had already stopped providing new finance to oil and gas producers deemed unlikely to produce a Paris-aligned transition plan before the start of 2025.

The point of a deadline is that something must be done by that date. By October 2025, Westpac will have given its oil and gas customers more than three years to produce a Paris-aligned emissions reduction plan (this policy dates back to July 2022). Yet with the deadline rapidly approaching, shareholders still have no idea whether this policy will have any impact on Westpac’s financing decisions at all.

Market Forces’ Bank Analyst, Kyle Robertson, asked the board for a clear answer about what is going to happen after October when the bank is approached for more finance by its climate wrecking clients like Santos and Woodside.

The responses from the board were generally evasive, but Westpac Chair Steven Gregg did say that it would depend on the “relationships we have with those clients”. Above all, for Westpac’s Paris commitments and fossil fuel finance policies to have any credibility, an egregious fossil fuel expansion strategy cannot be overlooked simply because the bank has a ‘good relationship’ with companies destroying our climate like Santos and Woodside.

Changes need to be made in 2025

With a massive display of shareholder support for more climate action, Westpac has work to do in 2025. To address shareholder concern, Westpac must:

  • categorically commit to stop financing fossil fuel companies that don’t have a 1.5°C-aligned transition plan from October 2025, and
  • apply its existing policy requirement for upstream oil and gas companies to have a 1.5°C-aligned transition plan by October 2025 to all of its fossil fuel customers, including pipeline companies, gas-fired power generators, and metallurgical coal miners.

Westpac only requires oil and gas extraction companies to have transition plans, meaning some of its heaviest emitting clients in other fossil fuel sub-sectors are completely exempt from this policy.

Current clients that slip through the cracks of Westpac’s current requirements include:

  • JERA, Japan’s biggest power company which also accounts for nearly 10% of global LNG trade and holds stakes in Woodside’s Scarborough and Santos’ Barossa massive fossil gas expansion projects.
  • GE Vernova, the world’s biggest gas turbine manufacturer, with aggressive gas expansion plans in Asia. In the Chattogram region of Bangladesh alone, gas or LNG projects with GE involvement would add approximately 430 million tonnes of carbon dioxide quivalent (CO2-e) to the atmosphere throughout the plants’ operational lives, over four times the CO2 the country emitted in 2022.
  • APA Group, a pipeline company with plans to develop several large-scale pipelines that would unlock Australia’s biggest gas development, the carbon bomb Beetaloo sub-Basin.
  • BHP, a diversified miner currently pursuing three coal expansion projects in Australia.

Westpac has failed to provide a justification for why this policy isn’t applied across its entire fossil fuel lending portfolio. It’s simply inconsistent that Westpac draws a line around companies extracting oil and gas given the burning of fossil fuels requires a full value chain of production involving pipelines, trading and power infrastructure. The bank’s clients in these sub-sectors are just as heavily involved in fossil fuel expansion as the companies extracting it from the ground.

Westpac’s current policy, while preventing finance to thermal coal companies (coal used for producing electricity), does allow lending to clients in the metallurgical coal mining sector (coal used for steel production), despite the sector’ enormous contribution to climate change.

Westpac still backing Santos

In September 2024, ANZ, NAB and Westpac supported one of Australia’s worst climate offenders, oil and gas giant Santos, to refinance and upsize a massive $1.24 billion loan.

While CommBank and Westpac were both lenders in the original $360 million loan in August 2022, CommBank pulled out when the deal came up for refinancing. Westpac, on the other hand, more than doubled its original contribution to the loan, a clear indication of the massive gaps in approach to fossil fuel finance of the two rival banks.

Market Forces Shareholder Action Campaigner, Cari Lin, questioned the board about why it’s continuing to support companies with massive oil and gas expansion plans like Santos when one of its biggest peers is walking away.

In response, outgoing Westpac CEO Peter King told Ms. Lin said that if clients don’t produce a credible transition plan by October 2025, “we will need to reassess our relationship” and “it’s important that we have customers that are transitioning”.

Whether that means Westpac will actually end its relationships with its expansionary oil and gas clients remains to be seen.

Westpac’s support for Beetaloo pipeline developer, APA, under fire

One of Westpac’s pipeline clients, APA Group, could be the lynchpin in whether Australia’s biggest proposed gas development, the Beetaloo sub-Basin, goes ahead.

APA is proposing to develop several large-scale pipelines to connect the Beetaloo sub-Basin to Australia’s east coast gas market, as well as to new and existing LNG terminals to ship the gas overseas where Australian gas companies know they can fetch higher prices. APA’s capacity and willingness to build these pipelines could be the difference between the project getting off the ground or not.

Over its lifetime, Market Forces estimates Beetaloo will produce 1.1 billion tonnes CO2-e, equivalent to Australia’s largest coal plant, Eraring, operating for more than 83 years.

Bizarrely, Westpac’s requirement for transition plans only applies to the companies extracting the gas at the end of the pipeline, and not to companies whose new pipelines will transport the gas to where it will be burned or shipped overseas.

Westpac’s board was grilled over this blatant inconsistency by Professor Roy Tasker:

In response, Westpac Chair Steven Gregg effectively kicked the can down the road by saying that they will review their policy in the coming years, but that their efforts are focused on where they think they can have the biggest impact.

It’s hard to see where Westpac could have a bigger impact than its relationship with a company involved in one of Australia’s biggest proposed fossil fuel developments.

With a massive degree of shareholder support for requiring transition plans for all fossil fuel companies (including infrastructure developers), pushing this much needed policy change into an unspecified future date isn’t going to cut it for Westpac’s board.

Board confronted by communities facing climate-fuelled unnatural disasters

2024 was the hottest year on record, according to the World Meteorological Organisation. That follows on from 2023 setting that same record just one year prior.

Yet while temperatures soar, the world’s consumption of coal, oil and gas hit a record high in 2023. And it’s everyday Australians bearing the worst impacts of it.

Westpac itself estimates that over $20 billion of its home loan portfolio is at high risk from climate disasters. Some experts have estimated that climate change-fuelled disasters could reduce the value of Australia’s housing market by $800 billion by 2030.

For most Australians, a home is the biggest purchase they’ll make in their entire life. What was once the Australian dream is now existentially threatened by increasingly catastrophic bushfires and floods.

Angela Frimberger of Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action had firsthand experience with the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-2020, and detailed to Westpac’s board exactly what is at stake if the world’s major financial institutions continue to pump money into the expansion of the fossil fuel industry.

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