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Speaker 1: Right well, and yet another frankly welcome sign that the

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Speaker 1: world's climate overhype may be over, or at least correcting.

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Speaker 1: The latest is that the government has announced it's now

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Speaker 1: easing the rules on how much compulsory climate reporting the

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Speaker 1: big listed companies have to do. Now, I don't blame

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Speaker 1: you if you feel it this minute like your eyes

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Speaker 1: are about to glaze over, but do not let that happen.

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Speaker 1: So this is actually much more important than it sounds.

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Speaker 1: This goes back to the bad old days. I've just

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Speaker 1: Sindan Grant twenty twenty one, when then administration brought in

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Speaker 1: rules forcing large publicly listed companies to report to shareholders

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Speaker 1: the impact that climate change may have on them. It

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Speaker 1: was world leading, it was groundbreaking. It was incredibly expensive. Turners,

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Speaker 1: the car company, reckons that their first report, which only

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Speaker 1: runs to seven pages, cost them one million dollars to produce.

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Speaker 1: Some companies have told the relevant Minister, Scott Simpson, that

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Speaker 1: it costs them two million dollars to produce their reports.

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Speaker 1: The ones who are getting off easy here are still

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Speaker 1: paying a pay cparrently close to two hundred thousand dollars.

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Speaker 1: Veteran director Johan Withers famously complained about this in July

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Speaker 1: when she said that climate reporting was taking up more

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Speaker 1: of her time than preparing financial statements, which is the

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Speaker 1: actual thing that shareholders are interested in. And that is

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Speaker 1: completely nuts. And for all of the money and all

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Speaker 1: of the effort that these businesses were putting into it,

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Speaker 1: not one carbon particle was saved from going into the atmosphere.

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Speaker 1: It did not bring down anybody's emissions. That was not

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Speaker 1: the point of it. It was simply to talk about it.

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Speaker 1: And the money was just wasted on paperwork instead of

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Speaker 1: being reinvested into the business to raise productivity, which is

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Speaker 1: the thing that should we should be laser focused on

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Speaker 1: in this country. Now. I applaud the government for doing

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Speaker 1: what it has done today, but it does not go

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Speaker 1: far enough because they've only eased the rules for the

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Speaker 1: smaller companies, so about eighty eight of them will now

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Speaker 1: not have to report, but seventy six of the big

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Speaker 1: ones are still going to be required to do this

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Speaker 1: utterly pointless, expensive, unproductive exercise. If it is pointless and

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Speaker 1: expensive and unproductive for the small companies, it is also pointless,

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Speaker 1: expensive and unproductive for the big companies. The government should

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Speaker 1: go further than it has today. For more from Heather

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Speaker 1: Duplessy Allen Drive, listen live to News Talks' b from

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Speaker 1: four pm, weekdays or follow the podcast On iHeartRadio