Fear and loathing of divestment

I'm rather confused about the Right wing fury over the ANU divestment campaign.   I'm not sure Judith Sloan is sleeping at nights:  she seems to be too busy practising attempts at satire, perhaps because her "logic" is not gaining ground?

Back in February, Sinclair Davidson posted about how the South Africa divestment campaign was not actually a financial success.  (And he got very cross that anyone should argue that being anti fossil fuel mining is in any way a worthy cause - or at least worthy in the sense that being anti-apartheid was.) 

So if that's right, why is the divestment campaign against all that lovely, lovely coal being burnt such an outrage?   Are they worried for the universities losing money, or for the mining companies?

For the university, the ANU shares are apparently only 2% of its investment portfolio.  How much trouble can that cause?

For the mining companies, the hope is that divestment campaigns causes public pressure for them to move away from fossil fuel mining, but how bad does reputational damage have to be before it really does hurt them when there is a market paying good money for their product?

Given the fury on the Right, the suggestion is that this is a sign the campaign can have serious effects.  The best look at the issue seems to me to be this one by Frank Jotzo, who obviously thinks they can ultimately "work", but also notes the points I made above - the current reaction from the Right is rather over the top, and (in reality) probably works to give encouragement to those pushing divestment as worthwhile.

A good case can perhaps be made, then, that the Right wing hand wringing about it is actually counterproductive to their "interests".   Hee hee indeed, hey Judith?

Update:  Sinclair Davidson has missing out on the hyperbole, so he adds to it in a column on the Drum:

Australian universities simply do not have the social licence to trash the domestic economy or place the livelihoods of thousands of Australians at risk on a whim.

 Yes, it's economic apocalypse because a university made an investment decision he doesn't agree with.

And by the way:  the Drum article just contains the usual by-line that he's a Professor of Economics at RMIT.  Isn't it especially relevant to this topic that it also disclose this:

A paper to be released on Monday by the Minerals Council of Australia says the campaign "may contravene the letter or me spirit" of the Corporations Act, and calls on the corporate watchdog to assess tile potential breach.

The council commissioned Sinclair Davidson, a professor of institutional economics at Melbourne's RMIT University, to write die paper, in its most aggressive push-back to the anti-coal collective's urging investors to sell shares in coal companies.

'To the extent that stigmatisation deliberately causes investors to make valuation errors and consequently rebalance their portfolios away from fossil fuel stocks, a violation of the Corporations Act has occurred," Professor Davidson writes.

Has anyone other than an economist associated with the IPA ever found that Corporation Act argument convincing?   How did that other IPA big legal claim go - that tobacco companies could get $3 billion a year in compensation from the government for plain packaging laws?   Oh, that's right:  a complete bust.   (Well, subject to the outcome of a rubbish Hong Kong arbitration.)    Come to think of it, perhaps the Australian government should be sending Davidson over to the arbitration to give evidence - he's the one who thinks plain packaging hasn't had any effect on smoking rates, after all.  As with divestment, the Right can't seem to keep its argument straight.