2025 Year in Review: Australia

In 2025, the Australian economy experienced moderate growth and easing inflation (although with a slight jump at year’s end), following aggressive monetary policy tightening since the post-pandemic inflation highs. This paved the way for multiple interest rate cuts by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), providing reprieve for Australian homeowners and helping to catalyse respectable sharemarket returns. Labour market conditions softened slightly but remained historically strong in 2025.

While the Australian economy appears to have had a relatively ‘soft landing’ in 2025, this came against a backdrop of turbulent global conflicts, political upheaval from Donald Trump’s administration, and the ongoing technological and economic disruption from the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. As Australian businesses continued to adapt to a world where disruption and unpredictability have become the new norm, this has raised the stakes for boards in providing adequate oversight of emerging risks and opportunities.

Within this operating environment, shareholder and proxy advisor revolt on ASX300 remuneration resolutions remained heightened in 2025. Although the number of remuneration ‘strikes’ dipped slightly to 34 (from 40 in 2024), the severity of dissent increased, with 30 companies receiving more than 30% opposition and 10 exceeding 50% votes against. Multiple companies incurred consecutive strikes in 2025, with the number of proxy advisor recommendations against remuneration reports also remaining elevated.

Director re/elections were a critical avenue for shareholders to voice their discontent at 2025 Annual General Meetings (AGMs), with 44 ASX300 directors receiving protest votes above 20% – up sharply from 32 in 2024. In 2025, investors and proxy advisors were emboldened to hold directors accountable for a broad range of perceived governance failures, strategic missteps, risk management shortcomings, and persistent remuneration concerns. For some companies, more severe cases of director opposition often saw the intersection of many of these issues.

ESG-related shareholder activism broadened significantly across the ASX300 in 2025, both in volume and scope. We observed a substantial jump in the number of ESG-related shareholder resolutions to 27 lodged across 9 companies (16 resolutions lodged across 7 companies in 2024), with nature-related issues as a defining focus since emerging during the 2024 season.

Our 2025 Year in Review – Australia, provides a snapshot of the voting outcomes, sentiments, and key reasons for proxy advisor recommendations and shareholder voting patterns, with a focus on S&P/ASX300 companies. It also provides an overview of important industry and regulatory trends in Australia and globally, across various remuneration, governance and sustainability themes.

ASX300 boards have entered 2026 with increasingly demanding agendas, shaped by heightened investor and regulatory expectations, reduced tolerance for weak governance, and evolving ESG considerations that influence long-term corporate value and reputation. We hope this 2025 analysis provides a useful reference as you plan your Board’s 2026 priorities and calendar of activities, and we would welcome any feedback or the opportunity to discuss the findings further.