Invest for good 

OPINION: Conscious consumerism – the trend for people to make ethical choices as they shop – is posing an enormous dilemma for New Zealand's largest banks.

The Royal Forest and Bird Society's decision last week to dump ANZ as its banker in favour of Kiwibank, a bank it claims has stronger environmental credentials, highlighted the challenge.

Forest and Bird (very obviously) cares about how the environment is treated.

It doesn't want habitats cleared to dig for coal or pump oil and it definitely doesn't want to deal with a bank making loans and generating profits by enabling environmental damage.

Facebook has had a bad few weeks. The social media giant had to apologise for failing to protect the personal data of millions of users from being accessed by data mining company Cambridge Analytica. Outrage is brewing over its admission to spying on people via their Android phones. Its stock price plummeted, while millions deleted their accounts in disgust.

Facebook has also faced scrutiny over its failure to prevent the spread of “fake news” on its platforms, including via an apparent orchestrated Russian propaganda effort to influence the 2016 US presidential election.

Facebook’s actions – or inactions – facilitated breaches of privacy and human rights associated with democratic governance. But it might be that its business model – and those of its social media peers generally – is simply incompatible with human rights.

Human rights abuses in company supply chains are not found only in emerging markets, one of the world’s top responsible investment professionals says.

NZ Super Fund head of responsible investing Anne Maree O’Connor, who was recently ranked eighth among the world’s most influential responsible investment specialists in the 2017 survey of Independent Research in Responsible Investment, says the focus is shifting to developed countries where abuses of migrants’ rights are emerging, from the horticulture sector to hospitality and healthcare.