Elect the Ambassador!
By Duncan Kerr
Published by the Pluto Press Australia 2000
$32.95
REVIEW BY GEOFF FRANCIS
One side-effect of the Keating government's ignominious electoral defeat in March 1996 was that a large number of ALP politicians suddenly found their incomes cut from ministerial largesse to that of a mere backbencher. The trickle of intellectually lightweight and politically irrelevant drivel that has been finding its way into the book stores ever since presumably represents some attempt by these individuals to find an alternative means of building up their investment portfolios.
Elect the Ambassador! is the latest — and hopefully the last — of these. Its main theme is that "globalisation" is something that neither can nor should be resisted. Duncan Kerr asserts that "globalisation" is inevitable (and indeed has already occurred) and that our response should be to endeavour to make its various constituent bodies more accountable and democratic.
Here, he argues, lies the road to — what? One of the many core weaknesses of this book is that the writer offers no vision of what he hopes his proposals would actually achieve, other than in vague terms such as "a solution that combines market openness with fairness". His goals appear to be restricted to seeking to limit in some non-specific way the damage that the globalisation of capital is doing to the lives of ordinary people. Some vision.
Kerr's commitment even to this meagre end lacks credibility. While predictably critical of the current administration of John Howard's Liberal-National Coalition, Kerr remains an unashamed apologist for the attacks on the living standards of working-class people that were undertaken by the previous Hawke/Keating governments. Apparently, "the Hawke and Keating governments swam against the stream in seeking to preserve a strong system of basic welfare provision".
His arguments are frequently muddled and more indicative of a commitment to tabloid journalism than to political thought. In one chapter, for example, he trivialises the issue of public versus private healthcare by comparing it to making a choice between Pepsi Cola and Coca Cola!
So, we don't clearly know what Kerr is against or what he is for. But he sure as hell does know how he's going to take us there. His "better world" can evidently be achieved by making organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank more "democratic". This, he asserts, will be achieved if the populations of individual nation-states are allowed to elect their national representatives to such bodies.
Herein lies the most glaring and fatal of the many absurd flaws in this book. Not surprisingly for a career politician, Kerr's concept of democracy remains an elitist one which delivers no power or control over their own destinies to ordinary people — only the right to vote for which of a choice of two or three candidates will get to serve as a self-seeking career bureaucrat.
Another of this book's weaknesses turns out, paradoxically, to be its only strength. In the course of trying to build a case in support of his nebulous arguments, Kerr does present a number of interesting facts and figures about some of the damaging effects caused by the ongoing globalisation of "economic rationalism", especially in the field of income inequality. But as a supporter of the system that produces these effects, he is able to offer no plausible solutions.
Kerr's means of dealing with the real and growing opposition to corporate-controlled globalisation — as witnessed in Seattle, Washington, Quebec, Prague and across the world on May 1 this year — is simple. He ignores it. He has to. To do otherwise would be to tacitly admit to his own irrelevance.