At CommBank’s Momentum 2025 conference, leaders from across industry shared insights on sustainability, investment and energy transition. Their perspectives show where progress is accelerating and how organisations can prepare for a lower carbon future.
9 December 2025
Australian businesses understand that planning for a net zero future is vital. But transitioning to a more sustainable and decarbonised economy requires ingenuity, innovation and, most of all, collaboration across sectors.
The CommBank Momentum conference in Sydney heard from top ASX CEOs, Chairs, sustainability experts and business leaders on the challenges and opportunities companies face in the transition towards net zero. Here are eight insights from Momentum for businesses.
Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson, CommBank CEO Matt Comyn and Origin Energy CEO Frank Calabria said it was important that business and government collaborated to create demand signals that would encourage markets to bring more sustainable options to customers.
“You need both supply and demand signals,” Ms Hudson said. “It takes a coalition of people and organisations to get that going.”
Mr Calabria said the energy infrastructure build-out in greening the grid had the potential to be a game changer for national productivity, creating thousands of jobs. At the same time, customers had costs front of mind and it remained a priority to engage people in the regions on the transition.
Mr Comyn said the bank will continue to meet its own operating targets, while supporting customers transitioning to net zero through funding sustainability initiatives and via new offerings such as electricity hedging. CommBank has already delivered $64.4 billion in sustainable funding as part of its commitment to deliver $70 billion to sustainable finance by 2030.1
“If Australia can get this right, it puts us in a very strong position but it’s challenging,” he said. “We have to be engaging in the community and talking about the hard things.”
"We're committed to big, ambitious targets, including ensuring the majority of the fleet is powered by new technology. That's better for our customers, but also better for the environment."
– Vanessa Hudson, CEO, Qantas
Read more about the CEO panel here.
Sustainability, the net zero transition and mandatory climate reporting are placing new demands on company directors, but the answers often come back to the traditional board role of making the right calls on capital allocation.
Paul O’Malley, Chair, CommBank, said that boards must weigh short-term pressures against long-term resilience. Directors have to make sure their businesses look after customers in the short term but keep an eye on broader national economic considerations over the long term.
Mirvac and Orora chair Rob Sindel said there were "very practical decisions that need to be made between customers, shareholders and our employees”.
“Keeping the balance right in that triangle is the most important thing,” he said, adding that decisions couldn’t be made without a good understanding of community expectations and regulatory clarity.
GPT Group Chair Vickki McFadden highlighted the challenges on the horizon with scope reporting: “There's a very interesting conflict between being open and transparent and putting forward a target, particularly when you don't know the exact pathway to achieving that. Nobody has an exact pathway to net zero by 2050.”
Read more about the Board panel here.
Investing in and valuing natural capital (soils, waterways, habitats) can be a boon for agri-business because it becomes a way of boosting productivity, rather than an expense.
Sam Beaton, Joint CEO, Cobram Estate, pointed to the business’s Oliv.iQ® integrated olive oil production system which optimises the care and output of the olive groves, enabling Cobram Estate to reduce waste and increase irrigation efficiencies.
“As a business, it's really been in our DNA to think longer term,” Beaton said. “And that goes with the use of our natural assets, particularly land and water, because we need to make sure that those assets are working for us not just in the next four or five years, but for the next 50 years.”
Australia’s housing shortage is being amplified by rising costs, labour constraints and slow build times. Grant Cairns, Executive General Manager, Business Lending, CommBank noted, “this is making it really, really challenging to get that scale [in construction]”.
Prefabricated and modular homes were highlighted as one of the best opportunities to speed up delivery and improve quality.
Lester Raikes, Managing Director of Anchor Homes, explained that modular builds can be completed in 8–10 weeks in the factory and as little as four weeks onsite, with stronger safety controls and fewer variations. “We’re producing very good quality homes because we have oversight 100% of the time,” he said.
He pointed out that modular builds also deliver on the S in ESG, with better workplace health and safety in the factory setting, and jobs for communities in regional locations. Plus, any waste can more easily be reused in another build, with all materials in the same location.
However, awareness of what modern, green modular builds offer remains a barrier to growth at scale. Cairns emphasised the need for public education on what modern prefab actually looks like.
“Creating awareness… is really helping educate Australians around what prefabricated housing is,” he said. "The reality is it's a high-quality product, and the time frame is quite transformational.”
“Creating awareness… is really helping educate Australians around what prefabricated housing is. The reality is it's a high-quality product, and the time frame is quite transformational.”
– Grant Cairns, Executive General Manager, Business Lending, CommBank
For operators like Serenitas, incentives and cost reductions will be key to the take-up of modular homes. As CEO Von Slater put it, “My call to action would probably be more to the government and big businesses like CommBank around incentivising the scale of innovation in this space.”
The transition is not just about reducing emissions but changing the way our economy works holistically by managing the full lifecycle of materials from production, to use, to end of life.
Lisa McLean, CEO, Circular Australia said that today, more than 90% of resources are wasted, stating that “only 6.9% are going round and round in the economy.” The rest are “either landfilled, burned or out of our reach,” she explained.
She emphasised that circularity is essential to Australia’s net zero goals: “We’re not going to get to net zero… unless we tackle the waste.” While renewable energy can cut “just over 50%” of emissions, the remaining share sits in embodied carbon.
“The concept of a circular economy is based on designing out waste and pollution at every point of the economy,” she said.
"The concept of a circular economy is based on designing out waste and pollution at every point of the economy."
– Lisa McLean, CEO, Circular Australia
Ms McLean said that Australia needs to implement extended producer responsibility. Anything produced locally or brought into the country should have to meet mandated standards regarding reparability, and how it can be broken down and reused at end of life.
She added that there’s a solid business case for becoming a circular business. “We know that circular businesses are more profitable. They create new revenue streams and they use less resources. They can really de-risk investments,” McLean said.
Extreme weather is already reshaping how risk is priced in Australia, with clear implications for business balance sheets, as well as communities.
Kylie Macfarlane, Deputy CEO and COO at the Insurance Council of Australia, noted that “this year alone, we've had over $2.2 billion worth of insured losses, just from extreme weather”.
Between 2014 and 2023, the protection gap (losses not covered by insurance) reached a further $12 billion, ultimately borne by households, communities and governments.
For businesses, she stressed, making better decisions on where and how you build is critical to affordability and access to cover.
“It's no use mitigating against risks that you actually don't have present or could have in the future of your business, but making informed decisions and understanding your risk at all times is fundamental,” she said.
“Making informed decisions and understanding your risk at all times is fundamental.”
– Kylie Macfarlane, Deputy CEO and COO, Insurance Council of Australia
Matt Kean, Chair, Climate Change Authority, said falling wholesale energy costs and rapidly growing consumer demand for things like EVs, heat pumps and solar batteries were creating highly favourable economics around sustainable energy transformation.
Mr Kean revealed that since the introduction of the federal government’s home battery scheme in July, more than 140,000 installations had been supported.
“History shows that when the economics make sense, the momentum becomes unstoppable.”
– Matt Kean, Chair, Climate Change Authority
Origin Zero Executive General Manager James Magill said while residential batteries have taken off, businesses were just as interested.
“In the last six months, the pipeline of leads for larger business batteries has tripled for us, and that's largely a result of the cost story and some of the technologies available,” he said.
AI was an important topic at the conference, as both a tool to help businesses and households in decarbonising, and an energy-intensive technology.
Rik Irons-Mclean, Sector Lead Manufacturing & Energy and Enterprise CTO at Microsoft Australia and New Zealand, said the company takes a balanced approach. “We have to look at the possibilities of AI and, if we look at energy transition in Australia, we can’t do that without being able to model, simulate and operate the next generation grid. You look at climate resilience and modelling short-term weather patterns – you need AI,” he said.
For Justin Tauber, General Manager of Innovation and AI Culture, this represents a distinct set of responsibilities – different from owning data centres or supplying AI models – focused on responsible use within the organisation itself.
“Part of that responsibility is really about us being our own customer zero for our own technology and ensuring that our own sustainability goals are met by our own products” he said.
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1 For more information on CommBank’s Green, Social and Sustainability Funding Framework visit here.
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