Corporate Sustainability: Why Ethics Break Down in Practice

by Amy Koss

Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Advanced Studies student Amy Koss is the winner of the 2026 Natoli Student Ethics Competition for an undergraduate student.

 

As a student studying sustainability, I find it telling that corporate ethics is so often met with one cynical response: greenwashing. Australian companies regularly promote ethical values, ESG commitments and corporate purpose, yet public trust remains mixed. Why?

The answer is not that companies lack ethical frameworks. It is that those frameworks often fail to surface in day-to-day commercial decisions, reducing sustainability to a communications exercise rather than a strategic priority.

Qantas provides a clear example. The company publicly promotes sustainability initiatives, including its “Fly Carbon Neutral” program and a pathway to net zero, aligning itself with United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production). However, these claims have been challenged by climate advocacy groups, who argue that such messaging risks underrepresenting the environmental impact of flying and relies heavily on carbon offsets rather than fundamental emissions reduction. This creates a disconnect between how sustainability is presented and the underlying environmental reality, weakening public trust in whether corporate climate commitments reflect genuine change or carefully managed branding.

This gap is not accidental. It reflects how organisations are actually run. Incentives remain heavily tied to financial outcomes, while ethical commitments are often measured through reporting rather than lived behaviour. Under pressure, decisions often prioritise short-term financial value over long-term business sustainability, particularly when environmental trade-offs are difficult to quantify.

Closing this gap requires boards and leaders to embed ethics into the mechanics of decision-making. This includes linking executive incentives to customer and stakeholder outcomes, requiring ethical impact to be internally and externally monitored alongside commercial trade-offs, and ensuring that sustainability claims are grounded in verifiable action rather than aspiration.

Until ethics is built into how decisions are made, not just how they are described, the gap between what companies say and what stakeholders experience will persist.