The below text can be used to assist you to draft and pass a motion at your local union branch, or delegates conference.
Please edit and adapt the speech, or motion as you need.
“That the [Branch Committee] endorse the following statement of policy and associated actions. This motion should be communicated to the [Union] [State] Division Executive and to the [Union] National Executive. Ultimately, it should form the basis of a motion to go before the [Union] National Council.
I move a motion calling for:
- [Union] officers to make clear representations to HESTA, calling on its Board of Directors to make urgent changes to the fund’s investment practices, to rule out investment into companies engaging in war crimes, specifically war crimes stemming from operations in Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, and ensuring rapid divestment from any companies in breach of this policy.
- [Union] officers to require the funds investment managers to divest from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights database of all business enterprises operating in the illegally occupied Palestinian territory that have a detrimental impact on the Palestinian people’s civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights
Union-nominated members of the HESTA Board use their position and privilege to back union calls for these changes, and importantly, to keep members informed of the progress towards this goal.
Supporting Speech text (approximately 4 minutes)
On 19 July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered its advisory opinion reaffirming that Israel’s settlements and occupation of Palestinian land since 1967 are illegal under international law. It also outlined the obligations that signatory states like Australia have, to not recognise these settlements as legal, not to render aid or assistance to maintain settlements, and to ensure these settlements are brought to an end.
The ICJ also reaffirmed that the settlements and Israel’s racist, apartheid policies that facilitate them, breach International Humanitarian Law, and violate instruments like the Geneva Convention and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. These transgressions are the root cause of the significant and egregious harm and suffering of the Palestinian people.
While this may seem far removed from the daily lives of healthcare and community service professionals working here in Australia, our complicity and connection to the illegal occupation of Palestinians is uncomfortably close.
This is because of the financial investment that union-endorsed superannuation fund HESTA makes into companies that are propping up the settlements, violating the human rights of Palestinians and exacerbating the illegal occupation of Palestine by Israel. These investments are made by HESTA with [union] workers wages.
In 2016, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights developed a database of all business enterprises operating in the occupied Palestinian territory that have a detrimental impact on the Palestinian people’s civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.
These companies undertake activities that have a materially harmful impact on the lives of Palestinians, contribute materially to the maintenance of settlements, and consequently contribute to significant human rights violations committed via the settlements by Israel.
As of June 2025, HESTA invested $218 million of healthcare professional’s wages into ten of these companies, including banks providing loans to Israeli settlers financing the construction of new homes on stolen land, surveillance companies operating technology to monitor Palestinians at checkpoints and along the apartheid wall, and tourism operators with listings in the settlements that provide income to illegal settlers and discriminate against Palestinians.
Investment by HESTA into these companies is an explicit expression of support for their activities, the settlements and the human rights violations linked to them, which include forcible transfers, forced displacement, demolition of homes, restriction on freedom of movement, arbitrary detention, discrimination and systematic inequality.
International Humanitarian Law stipulates that financial institutions like HESTA have a legal obligation, during an occupation, not to enable or facilitate war crimes like forced removal, transfer of populations in or out of occupied territories, or the taking or enabling the taking of private property. Investment from HESTA into businesses engaging in these activities in the occupied Palestinian territory arguably finds HESTA complicit in these war crimes.
This also makes us, the workers and union members on whose behalf the investments are being made, complicit, if not legally then certainly morally.
The workers who make up the industries that HESTA purports to serve – healthcare workers, nurses, doctors, social and community services professionals – spend their lives trying to help and improve the lives of others. They spend their lives caring for their fellow human beings. They do not want their retirement savings invested in companies that are complicit in human rights abuses and war crimes.
We must note that in handing down the advisory opinion on 19 July, the ICJ reaffirmed that all states, and their actors (including government, institutions, companies like HESTA and organisations like unions), have an obligation against complicity in endorsing or normalising Israel’s settlements.
[Union’s] role on the HESTA Board gives [Union] members the power to have real influence in the decision-making of this industry super fund. Unions have an important say in fund investment decisions. This statement commits [Union] to recognise its power and responsibility, and take action to pressure HESTA to divest completely from any companies on the UN List.
We demand that HESTA takes steps to overhaul their investment screening processes to ensure that HESTA is not complicit in war crimes.