FOX Our sense is that Australia shouldn’t run off and do its own thing. There should be some harmonisation.

BLACKSTOCK A taxonomy is being provided already by some of the global players that provide certification.

KENNA I think rather than having an Australian taxonomy it would be more beneficial for the market to focus on some channelled initiatives to get scale. One of the problems locally is that we divide our focus when we have a relatively limited amount to work with. This can make it difficult to achieve anything meaningful.

As a group, if we can get behind a few specific initiatives I think we could foster more meaningful evolution and create impact and scale which market participants can get behind.

Fox Australia has actually done a very good job. In issuance, we have had world firsts, Asia-Pacific firsts and many areas of leadership. But it has been more on the private industry side.

TAPLEY I was recently at a meeting for one of the UN global compact action platforms in New York, and a woman who represents a group of Swedish investors commented that she thought the quality of issuance coming out of Europe and Australia is best in class. Her view of the quality of the transactions and issuers in the Australian market was very high – comparable to what is going on in Europe.

When you come back to the taxonomy piece, what has been developed in this market is a robust process around providing bonds.

The same will happen in the loan market, where arrangers are insisting or strongly suggesting to borrowers that there is a defined process they need to set out around how they use proceeds, how they select assets, how they report and that they must be true to their reporting with independent verification.

With the structure that is evolving in Australia in place, layering in a fixed definition of what is green could be a bit limiting. I worry that it could be too restrictive when we already have good standards for how these deals pull together in Australia.

We have to be careful either way, because what is green in Australia is not necessarily green in Vietnam, for example. There is no easy answer to this cross-border issue.

KENNA We do need a standard of some kind, though, because if we have definitional uncertainty or inconsistency I think we will inevitably undermine the value of what we are doing. We don’t want international investors in particular looking at some of the things we are doing and concluding that they don’t accord with what the investor’s sense of green is.

FOX There is a particular issuer in Singapore which has two prongs to its framework. One is transition bonds, in other words acknowledging that it is transitioning but there is still a valid engagement piece.

BLACKSTOCK On the other hand, there is an Indian coal company that issued a green bond because it was using the funds to decommission some of its old mines.

FOX This ties into the corporate objective story – of what an issuer is really trying to achieve.

ZILELI Some investors offshore have said to us they value transition, specifically the UN Sustainable Development Goal-focused investors that have dedicated teams looking at green bonds. They know our bank lends to mining and fossil fuels in Australia, but they can see what the transition looks like. We can put a graph in front of them which shows that our electricity-generation portfolio has tilted to financing more renewable sources. They like this and they want to support the agenda.

BLACKSTOCK We have to hold ourselves to the high standard that we have started off at, make sure we do the right thing and make it an integral part of strategy. Australia has been good with this rigour and robustness so far. The taxonomy point is complicated and probably not necessary because the standards are already high.