BHP Shareholders for Social Responsibility

BHP is now a resource mining company, having divested its major manufacturing divisions to create the OneSteel and Bluescope Steel companies.

As BHP shareholders we are anxious for the financial health of our company, our share price, our dividends, and our franking credits.

We are also anxious for BHP's long term viability, and the security of its employees. Viability will be affected by the growing realisation that we must take effective and immediate action on Climate Change, developing transitions into a less carbon dependent and more resource frugal society in a planned manner.

We would like to see board and management share in the gains, and the pains, of shareholders, employees, other stakeholders and our environment. Global Warming has introduced new factors, environmental, social, technical and political into our concerns.

We have concerns regarding:

• the effects of mining on people, creatures and plants nearby and downstream
• loss of quality and quantity of water in catchments as a result of mining
• treatment of employees who are driven to become 'whistle-blowers'
• workplace and local health and safety as affected by production processes
• the nature and quantity of waste material, solid, liquid and gas, created by industrial processes
• the amount of used material we create, and the increasing difficulties of recycling and dumping it
• the extreme hazards resulting from uranium sales in an unstable world, to competing or fearful regimes, of military applications and terrorist potential, of the radioactive legacy it leaves for thousands of generations to come

The group was formed in 1994 as a result of concerns regarding the environmental damage done in Papua New Guinea, to the Ok Tedi and Fly Rivers, by BHP's Ok Tedi copper mine.

This led on to interests which include:

• 1995 - BHP's influence upon PNG legislation, which removed the rights of local people
• 1996 - Gippsland-Sydney gas pipeline, environmental and native title issues
• 1997 - Lack of rehabilitation at deep open cut coal mines in Queensland's Bowen Basin
• 1998 - Whistle Blower cases; a continuing oil leak at Groote Eylandt, and
  unsafe practices on the Griffin Venture (a 100,000 tonne floating oil storage near North West Cape in Western Australia)
  (ref 'Whistleblowers', ABC Books, 1997)
• 2000 - Gammon Ranges National Park, South Australia, mining and exploration leases in Weetootla Gorge.
• 2002-2006 - We or our proxies attended each AGM with questions on a number of issues in Australia and overseas. The BHP Billiton website enables you to listen to the proceedings for 2005 and 2006.
  
• 2007 - Attempt to place a resolution onto the AGM Agenda. In the short time available we achieved 70 requisitions but needed over 100 to succeed. As we talked with shareholders we found a great many are concerned regarding BHPB's move into uranium sales.
  To see this Resolution, please click here

For more information on specific problems please click here

To contact us please click here

last updated 4/12/2007