Our approach to human rights

Respecting people and communities

We have drawn together a set of standards called ‘Respecting people and communities: ANZ’s approach to human rights’. These standards help us to develop a culture of respect in the way we treat our employees, work with our clients and suppliers, and contribute to the communities where we operate.

Our approach to human rights

Our standards reflect what we are doing already to be respectful of local cultures and priorities, ensure we comply with laws and go further in situations where we have the responsibility, skills, resources and expertise to do so.

The standards were developed in consultation with stakeholders, including shareholders, community groups and our staff, who want to know where we stand on these issues and to see evidence that our commitments are ‘more than words’.

Practical actions we have taken to improve our understanding and management of human-rights-related issues and opportunities in our business include:

  • setting and achieving public targets to employ more people from under-represented and disadvantaged communities across our business;
  • establishing and maintaining occupational health, safety and wellbeing plans for all countries in our network which are updated annually;
  • introducing mandatory social and environmental (including human rights) training for Client Relationship Managers with credit discretion;
  • embedding our human rights standards into our Supplier Code of Practice;
  • ensuring robust governance systems are in place to enable fast and effective identification and remediation of human rights issues, in particular through our Group Reputation Risk Committees;
  • continuing our long-term commitment to help improve financial capability and inclusion among disadvantaged communities;
  • supporting the UN Global Compact and OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, and applying the Equator Principles to all project finance transactions; and
  • reviewing our ‘People policies’ to apply a globally consistent approach to employee entitlements and benefits.

While some aspects of our standards are ‘aspirational’, we believe they are achievable and essential to living our brand and growing our business responsibly.

In applying our standards, we understand our responsibility to respect the national sovereignty of host governments. Our response to human rights issues and ability to effect change may depend in some cases on local conditions and cultures, legal frameworks and the extent of our management control over another entity.

Our standards build on our values and the culture we wish to encourage across our business.

Our progress will be communicated through our Corporate Responsibility (CR) e-bulletin and interim and full-year Corporate Responsibility reports.

In July 2011, we published a dedicated human rights edition of our CR e-bulletin which describes the progress that we have made to embed our human rights standards across our business. Find out more

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2011 performance

Since introducing our human rights standards last year we have taken a number of steps to bring them to life for our staff, customers and suppliers.

Our priority in the first year of implementation was to identify the areas of greatest risk and opportunity for promoting human rights. Three initiatives were identified and progress has been monitored throughout the year. These include:

  • reviewing our ‘People policies’ to ensure they reflect the standards;
  • defining the human rights standards and acceptable behaviours we expect of suppliers; and
  • integrating the standards into our social and environmental training program to help staff responsible for making business lending decisions.
  • Find out more about our progress against these priorities

The future

Over the coming year we will undertake work to further raise awareness, understanding and implementation of our standards across our business, in particular in selected countries in the Asia Pacific region.

 

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