Australia's globalisation challenge

Popular globalisation also means that efforts to cover up governmental or corporate blunders are more vulnerable to public scrutiny and criticism. Even the remotest villagers – perhaps forced from their lands by unsustainable logging or mining – can access information about their rights, receive support from local, regional and global networks, and tell their story to the world. Instantly.

Many of the building blocks for popular and public order globalisation are now coming into place through international co-operation. United Nations treaty committees actively monitor every country’s compliance with international human rights commitments, and an International Criminal Court can now bring perpetrators of war crimes to justice.

Enormous challenges face our globalised world: the growing gap between rich and poor, the concentration of power into the hands of a select few, increasing social violence, conflict over finite resources and environmental degradation.

Despite the progress made in recent decades, poverty and inequality remain worldwide, and they’re getting worse. Ninety-five percent of humanity is now born in the South, the developing world, where nearly 1.3 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water, 840 million people are malnourished and one in seven children have no school to go to. Half of humanity - three billion people - survives on less than $2 a day.

The gap between rich and poor both between and within countries is widening exponentially. A child born this year in Australia will have a lifetime income 74 times that of a baby born in the developing world. Forty years ago, this income gap stood at 30 to 1. A hundred years ago, it was 11 to 1. Clearly, the heaviest price for this rising inequality is paid by those living in poverty. Yet inequality has impacts on all of us, including environmental decline, civil conflict, political instability and increased migration pressures.

There is little evidence that those with the power to tip the balance are committed to doing so. In the past decade, the world's richest countries have increased their wealth by around 30 percent. During that time total global Official Development Assistance (ODA – the amount wealthy countries give in aid to poorer countries) declined from US$53 billion in 1992 to US$41 billion in 1998. Australian aid is no exception, with the 2001 aid budget at an all-time low of just 0.25 percent of our gross domestic product, a long way from our commitment to reach the United Nations target of 0.7 percent. Inequality within almost all countries is also growing, as a result of large-scale, exploitative development and government policy skewed against poor people.

More alarmingly, aid to those most in need – the world’s 48 Least Developed Countries (LDCs) – declined from 24 to 21 percent of total aid between 1988 and 1998. Of these countries, which are home to 614 million people, 22 have suffered economic stagnation or decline over the past decade. Foreign investment in most LDCs has been insignificant, and has nowhere near offset the decline in aid. Meanwhile, the external debt of developing countries spiralled from $US857 billion in 1985 to $US2,651 billion in 1998.

Globalisation has also seen the rise and rise of multinational corporations. Private sector investment in developing countries now dwarfs the flow of official aid. Private investment is an important driver for economic growth, and it can result in poverty reduction. Yet too often private investment undermines people’s rights and destroys the environment: the private sector is rightly under increasing pressure to be accountable for the social and environmental consequences of its actions.

The economies of the world are increasingly becoming integrated. With the creation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the formal rules for a world economy are in place. However, many of these rules are loaded heavily against poor and powerless people and nations. Trade agreements are benefitting producers in the North far more than those in the South. Patent protection laws are putting the interests of some of the world’s wealthiest companies above the survival needs of poor communities in the developing world.

Oxfam Community Aid Abroad’s Globalisation Challenge to Australian political parties is based on three propositions: