2011 Roger Awards
20 April 2012
RIO TINTO ALCAN NZ WINS
WESTPAC, SAJO OYANG & OCEANIA ALL
EQUAL RUNNERS UP
GOVERNMENT WINS
ACCOMPLICE AWARD
From late night on Friday April 20th the full Judges’ Report will be available at www.cafca.org.nz, follow the Roger Award links from the Homepage.
Finalists: Adidas, Newmont Waihi Gold, Oceania, New Zealand Aluminium Smelters Ltd/Rio Tinto Alcan NZ Ltd, Sajo Oyang Corporation, Sky City, Telecom and Westpac. There was one finalist for the Accomplice Award – the Government (in its own right and accompanying both Sajo Oyang and Telecom). The criteria for judging are by assessing the transnational (a corporation with 25% or more foreign ownership) that has the most negative impact in each or all of the following categories: economic dominance - monopoly, profiteering, tax dodging, cultural imperialism; people - unemployment, impact on tangata whenua, impact on women, impact on children, abuse of workers/conditions, health and safety of workers and the public; environment - environmental damage, abuse of animals; and political interference - Interference in democratic processes, running an ideological crusade.
The
judges were: Joce Jesson, a Senior Lecturer
in Critical Studies in Education, University of Auckland,
and a community activist; Paul Corliss,
from Christchurch, an organiser with the Tertiary Education
Union and a life member of the Rail and Maritime Transport
Union; Paul Maunder, cultural worker,
curator of Blackball Museum of Working Class History and a
founding member of Unite!; Sam Mahon, an
artist, author and activist from North Canterbury; and
Wayne Hope, Associate Professor,
Communications Studies, Auckland University of Technology.
Full details, including previous winners and annual
Judges’ Reports, can be read online at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/publications/Roger/index.html.The
winners were announced at an event in Christchurch on April
20th.
Rio Tinto Alcan NZ
Ltd (notorious for decades under its previous name
of Comalco) has been a regular finalist and was runner up in
both the 2009 and 08 Roger Awards. It is the majority owner
of the Bluff smelter operated by New Zealand
Aluminium Smelters Ltd. In 2011 it was nominated
for lobbying two Governments “over several years to secure
excessive allocations of free emissions units under the NZ
Emissions Trading Scheme”. The judges agreed, concluding:
“It appears therefore, that the New Zealand taxpayer is
subsidising a transnational corporate rort
of the emissions trading scheme… The significance
of this stance cannot be underestimated; a major
transnational player within New Zealand materially benefits
from its non-compliance with a strategy to reduce global
climate change and its ecological effects”. The
Judges’ Report concludes that the company has a 50
year history of “suborning, blackmailing and conning
successive New Zealand governments into paying massive
subsidies on the smelter’s electricity; dodging tax, and
running a brilliantly effective PR machine to present a
friendly, socially responsible and thoroughly greenwashed
face to the media and the public. Its milking of the
Emissions Trading Scheme is entirely in character”. The
extremely detailed Financial Analysis reveals that
the smelter’s claimed benefits to NZ, namely annual export
earnings of “around $1 billion” are, in fact, overstated
by four fifths.
Of the three equal runners up: Westpac (joint winner of the 2005 Roger Award winner, and a finalist in 2009 and 10), was chosen because of “an aggressive profiteering strategy at the expense of bank staff and ordinary borrowers”; Sajo Oyang because its “crew members have been abused, mistreated and otherwise exploited”; and Oceania because of its exploitation of its minimum wage resthome workers.
The Government
won the Accomplice Award because
it “seems to have forgotten that the role of the State is
not just to make things better for Big Business, or raise
taxes but it is also to make and monitor the regulations and
processes in order to create a balance to benefit the
overall welfare of the population”.
For full details on all
winners, read the Judges’ Report (attached).
http://img.scoop.co.nz/media/pdfs/1204/Roger_Award_2011.pdf