Saying the Right Thing Isn’t the Same as Doing it: The Performance Paradox

by Bonnie Zheng

In the contemporary corporate landscape, ethics has become inseparable from organisational identity, functioning less as a guiding principle than as a constructed narrative of legitimacy. Firms increasingly align with global frameworks such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), projecting responsibility and accountability. While this suggests a shift in how businesses perceive their societal role, persistent public scepticism reveals a deeper issue grounded in disillusionment with ethics that lack operational coherence.

This tension raises an important question: if businesses are talking more about ethics, why don’t people feel it?

The answer lies not in a lack of intention, but in a gap between what companies say and what they do. Ethical priorities are embedded at the strategic level, reflected in ESG disclosures and governance frameworks. Yet operational decisions remain governed by financial imperatives, where cost efficiency and competitiveness ultimately sustain shareholder returns. In this context, ethics becomes conditional, readily subordinated when it conflicts with short-term performance.

The experience of Qantas Airways Limited illustrates this contradiction. The company has made clear commitments to sustainability, particularly in reducing emissions in line with SDG 13 (Climate Action), through targeting a 25% reduction in net Scope 1 and 2 emissions from 2019 levels by 2030. However, criticism surrounding its reliance on carbon offsetting, alongside concerns about customer service and workforce relations, suggests a broader pattern of ethical compartmentalisation, where corporate virtue is articulated but rarely enacted.

Ultimately, the issue is structural. Ethics remains peripheral rather than embedded within core performance systems. To address this, organisations must align incentives with ethical outcomes, embedding ESG metrics into executive remuneration, strengthening accountability mechanisms, and ensuring greater transparency through independent verification. Only then can ethics move beyond narrative and become a discipline that shapes everyday business decisions.

The Trust Gap: Woolworths seems to forget ethics at the check-out.

by Saketh Damera

The Governance Institute of Australia's 2025 Ethics Index records a -49 Ethics Expectation Deficit: Australians rate ethics at 92 in importance but only 43 in how they actually observe it in corporate behaviour. That gap reflects a structural problem: companies say one thing in sustainability reports and do another at the checkout.

Woolworths Group (ASX: WOW) illustrates this. Its Sustainability Plan 2025 says the company wants to “have a positive impact on our customers and communities” and claims alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals, but that alignment appears not to extend to SDG 2 (Zero Hunger). In September 2024, the ACCC commenced Federal Court proceedings alleging that across 266 products and over 20 months, Woolworths temporarily raised prices before advertising them as discounted under its “Prices Dropped” promotion. A consumer class action followed in November 2024, with a liability trial now scheduled for April 2026. These cases were filed just weeks after CEO Amanda Bardwell was confronted in a Wollongong store by a customer questioning supermarket pricing.

SDG 2 calls for universal access to safe, nutritious and affordable food; inflating prices and creating illusory discounts undermines the food security of the very communities Woolworths says it supports.

When pricing is developed in isolation from stated values or SDG commitments, those commitments provide no check on behaviour. Boards can narrow the ethics gap by embedding ethics checks so promotional decisions are reviewed against commitments before implementation; commissioning independent verification of whether operational practices align with SDGs; and tying executive remuneration to trust and ethics metrics, not financial performance alone.

Public trust recovers when commercial decisions match public values. For Woolworths, that alignment still looks like unfinished business.

Price Check on Australia's Corporate Ethics

by Austin Tran

Australian companies invest heavily in the language of ethics, with sustainability reports becoming as standard as the annual report itself. Yet public trust remains stubbornly mixed, and recent events suggest that the problem runs deeper than individual misconduct. This gap persists because companies have learned to perform ethics rather than practise it, and the systems meant to see through it are themselves compromised.

Behind the slogans ‘Caring for All Australians’ and ‘Better Together’, Woolworths and Coles position themselves as companies with a purpose beyond profit. Together, they command around 65% of the domestic market. However, their alleged conduct tells a completely different story. In September 2024, the ACCC launched Federal Court proceedings against both giants, alleging they inflated baseline prices before placing products on promotional programs, making the advertised discounts entirely illusory. If the allegations are upheld, this represents a direct assault on UN SDG 1 (‘No Poverty’), with both companies deliberately extracting more from consumers that are already buckling under record cost-of-living pressures. 

And yet the systems meant to catch this are in no better shape. Corporate accountability depends on independent assurance providers to confirm whether ethical claims reflect reality. Even in analogous contexts, verification has proven fallible: Deloitte recently submitted a report containing AI-generated hallucinations and fabricated legal citations. If the institutions paid to verify ethical claims cannot themselves be trusted, then no framework can close the gap between what companies say and what stakeholders actually experience.

Australian governance already has the frameworks. What remains unanswered is whether those responsible for upholding them have any reason to act on them. Both failures share a common root: executives are rewarded for the appearance of integrity, not its substance. Until remuneration is explicitly tied to ethical outcomes, no framework, however well-designed, will be able to override that calculus.

Compliance is Not Conscience: Lessons from Rio Tinto’s Ethical Failure

by Juliette Gao

While Rio Tinto publicly aligns its operations with SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, the destruction of Juukan Gorge remains a stark reminder of the gap between corporate commitments and real-world outcomes. Despite holding legal permits, the decision to prioritize mineral extraction over irreplaceable cultural heritage exposed a fundamental flaw: the company’s internal governance prioritized regulatory compliance over ethical stewardship.

The root of this ‘ethical bankruptcy’ lies in prioritizing short-term production targets over meaningful stakeholder consultation. When board oversight is decoupled from social impact, companies inevitably lose their social license to operate.

To bridge this gap, boards must mandate an ‘Independent Social & Cultural Audit’ for all major projects, ensuring that community voices carry genuine weight in decision-making. Furthermore, linking executive variable compensation to ‘social impact targets’—rather than purely operational output—would bake integrity into the corporate DNA. Real-world ethics must be integrated into project design, not merely polished in annual sustainability reports.

Corporate sustainability is not a checkbox exercise; it is the courage to prioritize human heritage over mineral yield. True trust is forged in respectful partnership, not harvested through the exploitation of regulatory loopholes.

The Shadow Values Saga: Why Corporate Ethics Fail Under Pressure

by Victoria Marsh

Corporate Australia is well-versed in the language of ethics. Nowadays, adhering to ESG frameworks and aligning with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are essential indicators of what it means to be a “responsible” business. Yet public trust remains mixed. Corporate leaders face constantly scrutiny and rising ethical expectations while internally the focus shifts to delivering profits, satisfying shareholders and sustaining growth.  

‘Shadow Values’ emerge from this tension - unspoken priorities that ultimately shape decisions when ethical commitments and commercial realities collide. 

Few cases reveal this more clearly than Star Entertainment Group. In its 2020 sustainability and ethics report, Star aligned itself with SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions), emphasising anti-corruption, transparency and accountable management. Yet investigations reported by the Sydney Morning Herald exposed serious anti-money laundering failures, with $900 million in illicit funds flowing through its casinos despite repeated warnings. This was not a lack of ethical awareness, but a reflection of shadow values overriding stated commitments.

Organisational environments can normalise ethically questionable decisions when they align with performance pressures. Over time, what appears unethical externally can become internally rational.

Addressing this gap requires a reconsideration of how incentives are structured. As long as ethical behaviour remains the more costly option, it is unlikely to ever prevail in practice. Boards have a critical role in shaping decision-making conditions – through linking renumeration to compliance outcomes, strengthening independent oversight or embedding ethics into everyday operations rather than reporting frameworks.

Ethical credibility is not simply a function of how extensively commitments are articulated, but of whether they can endure when placed under commercial pressure. If the underlying pressures that give rise to shadow values remain unchanged, ethical conduct risks will continue to be acknowledged in principle but negotiable in practice.

The High Cost of ASX Stewardship Failure

by Belindha Ardhani

If trust is the most valuable currency in capital markets, why did the ASX choose to pay for its technological failures with the systematic deception of the public? Known as the steward of Australia’s financial infrastructure, the ASX’s betrayal of this role was laid bare in the April 2026 ASIC Final Report. The findings exposed a critical say-do gap that represented a chasm between the board’s optimistic public promises and the internal decay of the CHESS replacement project.

This deception is a direct violation of SDG 16, which mandates the development of effective, accountable, and transparent institutions. While profit-seeking is standard, it becomes unethical for a monopoly like the ASX, which holds a unique responsibility to maintain the nation's financial plumbing. By prioritizing short-term dividends over infrastructure resilience, the ASX externalized its risks by pocketing immediate savings while forcing the entire Australian economy to bear the potential cost of a systemic collapse. 

The evidence is damning, with internal memos flagging the project as 'Red' even as public reports remained 'Green'. The subsequent AUD 250 million write-off served as a mathematical admission of this failure. This ethical collapse stemmed from a commercial conflict of interest, as institutional silence suppressed technical warnings to prioritize executive incentives over integrity.

To rectify this structural flaw, the ASX must adopt international benchmarks, such as establishing an independent regulator mirroring Singapore’s SGX RegCo to firewall regulation from profit, and treating infrastructure as a stable public utility similar to the Swiss SIX model. These reforms are essential to decouple market safety from shareholder pressure and ensure technical integrity. 

Ultimately, the ASX must act as a trusted guardian, not a profit-maximizing corporation. The board must now choose: conceal itself behind the say-do gap, or confront it through the transparency required to honour its social contract.

The Gap Between Sustainability Commitments and Reality at Qantas.

by Beatrice Vu

Many businesses make strong sustainability claims to build trust, but a gap often exists between what they say and what they truly do. Qantas Airways is an example.

They publicly commit to achieving net zero emissions by 2050 and highlight investments in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), fleet efficiency and carbon offset programs, aligning these initiatives with the SDG 13. (Sustainability Report, 2025). However, aviation remains a sector where emissions are difficult to cut as it still heavily depends on fossil fuels in reality. SAF is still far from being available at scale and Qantas’ own climate disclosures show that most of the emissions reductions in the short term are expected to come from carbon offsetting rather than operational change (Qantas News Room, 2022). Critics argue that this approach can make progress look stronger than it actually is. In 2024, Climate Integrity lodged complaints with the ACCC, claiming that their fly carbon neutral and net zero statements may be misleading (ABC News, 2024). Qantas also reports substantial Scope 3 emissions, which exceed its direct emissions, but these indirect impacts are rarely highlighted in public sustainability messaging (Sustainability Report, 2025). This gap reflects a broader challenge, which sustainability goals often collide with commercial pressures in a competitive industry where rapid emissions reductions can increase costs.

To narrow this gap, boards can link ESG goals directly to executive pay and major investment decisions, so climate commitments actually influence how leaders are rewarded (Qantas News Room, 2022). Increasing transparency around Scope 3 emissions and having key sustainability claims independently checked would also help rebuild trust. Finally, instead of relying heavily on offsets, directing more funding toward technologies that genuinely cut emissions would show that sustainability is a commitment in the long term, not just only a marketing message.