Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Is our climate overhype coming to an end?

There's yet another, frankly welcome, sign that the world's climate overhype may be over, or at least correcting.

The latest is that the Government has announced it's now easing the rules on how much compulsory climate reporting the big listed companies have to do.

Now, I don't blame you if you feel at this minute like your eyes are about to glaze over, but do not let that happen. Because this is actually much more important than it sounds.

This goes back to the bad old days of Jacinda and Grant in 2021, when the Ardern administration brought in rules forcing large, publicly listed companies to report to shareholders the impact that climate change may have on them.

It was world-leading, it was ground-breaking - and it was incredibly expensive.

Turner's, the car company, reckons that their first report, which only runs to seven pages, cost them $1 million to produce.

Some companies have told the relevant minister, Scott Simpson, that it cost them $2 million to produce their reports. And the ones who are getting off easy here are still paying apparently close to $10,000.

Veteran director Joan Withers famously complained about this in July, when she said that climate reporting was taking up more of her time than preparing financial statements, which is the actual thing that shareholders are interested in - and that is completely nuts.

And for all of the money and all of the effort that these businesses were putting into it, not one carbon particle was saved from going into the atmosphere.

It did not bring down anybody's emissions and that was not the point of it. It was simply to talk about it.

And the money was just wasted on paperwork instead of being reinvested into the business to raise productivity, which is the thing that we should be laser-focused on in this country.

Now, I applaud the Government for doing what it has done today, but it does not go far enough, because they've only eased the rules for the smaller companies. So about 88 of them will now not have to report.

But 76 of the big ones are still going to be required to do this utterly pointless, expensive, unproductive exercise.

If it is pointless and expensive and unproductive for the small companies, it is also pointless, expensive and unproductive for the big companies. And the Government should go further than it has today.

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