Card tables and raptuous applause, not paddlocks and memory sticks

Never seen before security and other restrictive arrangements around Brisbane’s recent G20 forum where the reverse of how it should have been.

Where the G20 Summit should have been
held - card tables and rapturous applause.

Rose petals and red carpets should have been thrown down before the leaders of the world’s 20 richest economies, rather than barricades and bomb searches.

Money has always perverted human values and ideals, that’s a generalization, but accurate and timely, and so rather than meeting in secretive and secluded places those same leaders should have gathered around a few card tables at the city’s King George Square.

An appreciative audience should have looked on, cheering as the leaders agreed to liberalize the world economy, making certain that the less than one percent that control most of it, agree to share their spoils with the rest of the world.

The cheering and applause would not have slowed when those G20 “men in suits” voted unanimously to instigate sweeping changes around the world to ensure everyone would not only have something to eat, but that their homes would be secure and the political intrigue with which the world is riddled, would vanish to be replaced by hitherto unseen transparency, friendship, compassion and collaboration.

Amid the continuing rapturous applause, the delegates would commit as one, vowing to act in unison with neighbouring and distant countries as they worked to build a world community in which contemporary Western lifestyles would be softened to allow less developed countries to prosper and edge ahead.

With the world fed, housed and thirsts quenched, and the economy broken to become a servant of man, rather than the reverse, the G20 leaders would have packed up their papers, folded their tables, acknowledged the crowd and taken an economy flight home.

Utopian flights of fancy always stumble and fall when reality intervenes, especially when it is the hard-edged, brutal and unforgiving economic convictions to which the contemporary world has willingly surrendered its kindness, fairness and decency.

Collusion and conspiracy breeds behind closed doors and the transparency allowed by the bright light of day is quickly obscured by darkened windows, cloistered and secreted away in brief cases and on memory sticks, hidden from public gaze by locks and impenetrable codes.

Endless arguments justify the G20 retreat from public gaze, but surely if what is discussed and decided upon is in the broad and best interests of ordinary folk, from the bloke baking your bread to the woman in charge of this newspaper, then why can’t it be laid out for all to see, and consider?

It can’t, not because of the aforementioned arguments, rather because it is simply not fair and despite the swagger and fist-pumping of G20 leaders it is about further entrenching an economic inequality that favours a few and disadvantages most.

The G20 - don't know, don't care, don't understand

The late Donella
 Meadows.
 

Joe Hockey and his G20 counterparts don’t know about, don’t understand or don’t care about the indisputable facts spelt out in the 1970s by the Club of Rome.

Arising from their recent Sydney meeting was a pledge to develop “ambitious but realistic” policies to add more than $US2 trillion to global gross domestic product over five years.

That pledge, if you take note of the realities described by the Club of Rome in its 1974 book “Limits to Growth”, is not only unsustainable, but wholly irresponsible.

The late systems analyst, author, environmental scientist and teacher, Donella Meadows, examined and explained the finitude of earth’s resources, considered present and likely usage, population growth, wrote about her findings and warned the world of difficult times ahead.

Meadows’ work was acclaimed by those aware of the world’s unfolding social and resource difficulties, but subjected to a barrage of criticism from many.

Ms Meadows penned the book in the 70s and although there was then an understanding of the damage caused to our atmosphere by fossil fuels it was not until the eighties the American scientist James Hansen spelt the complications of human activities linking it irrefutably to market-driven growth.

Mr Hockey, his fellow finance ministers and central bankers have, in signing up to boost world growth have simply worsened difficulties the world already faces.

The G20 pledge is populist in that it fits neatly with what has become human nature to have more, but today we know that “more” in its modern sense equates with a damaged climate, manifested as weather foreign to what most are familiar with and upon which humanity depends.

Rather than align themselves with the brutality of unfeeling growth, those who attend such events as the recent G20, need to be considering how nations understand and deal with the certainty of contraction and a world in which resources will become rarer and subsequently more expensive.

Rather than exhorting people to seek solutions to what ails them through growth, they need to work at understanding the “Limits to Growth” and lead a discussion about how people of the world can find contentment through living a more restrained life.

Such a conversation is contrary to the urgings of the market-driven system, but it is a necessary one for if we continue with business as usual and such things as the G20 Pledge, humanity’s grip on this rather slippery slope will be weakened even more.

The courage to address such ideas is in short supply for it demands a break with what exists and a willingness to take society in a fresh and safer direction; a challenge that is beyond most world leaders who do nought but muddy facts through the proselytizing of fallacies.