Warren Buffett's letters to Berkshire shareholders are always great reading, and the website has them all since 1977. Worth spending a lazy afternoon trawling through them.
This week it was announced that Graham Tuckwell of ETF Shares was donating $50 million to fund new scholarships at The Australian National University. Good one, Graham.
It prompted me to take a look back at the biggest donation of them all, that of Warren Buffett. In the 2006 letter to shareholders, he confirmed that he planned to give away all his wealth. Here's an extract from the newsletter:
"Last year I arranged for the bulk of my Berkshire holdings to go to five charitable foundations ... In my will I’ve stipulated that the proceeds from all Berkshire shares I still own at death are to be used for philanthropic purposes within ten years after my estate is closed. Because my affairs are not complicated, it should take three years at most for this closing to occur. Adding this 13-year period to my expected lifespan of about 12 years (though, naturally, I’m aiming for more) means that proceeds from all of my Berkshire shares will likely be distributed for societal purposes over the next 25 years or so.
I’ve set this schedule because I want the money to be spent relatively promptly by people I know to be capable, vigorous and motivated. These managerial attributes sometimes wane as institutions – particularly those that are exempt from market forces – age. Today, there are terrific people in charge at the five foundations. So at my death, why should they not move with dispatch to judiciously spend the money that remains?
Those people favoring perpetual foundations argue that in the future there will most certainly be large and important societal problems that philanthropy will need to address. I agree. But there will then also be many super-rich individuals and families whose wealth will exceed that of today’s Americans and to whom philanthropic organizations can make their case for funding. These funders can then judge firsthand which operations have both the vitality and the focus to best address the major societal problems that then exist. In this way, a market test of ideas and effectiveness can be applied. Some organizations will deserve major support while others will have outlived their usefulness. Even if the people above ground make their decisions imperfectly, they should be able to allocate funds more rationally than a decedent six feet under will have ordained decades earlier."
Many examples of philanthropy by Australians, not quite on the scale of Graham Tuckwell's but generous nonetheless, have surfaced in recent years, and perhaps Australians are not only starting to match Americans in their desire to give back some of their wealth, but are also wanting to talk about it.