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