Extract from The Guardian
The prime minister’s economic agenda was spectacularly sidelined but his promises on climate change bind him to nothing
- Lenore Taylor, political editor
- theguardian.com,
It cost almost $500m, shut down a city for an entire weekend and was
attended by more than 7,000 people from all corners of the world, but
did Australia’s G20 year actually achieve anything?
Actually it did. It delivered a graphic lesson in the power, and limitations, of prime ministerial and presidential peer pressure.
Tony Abbott wanted a summit focused on increasing economic growth, neatly segueing into domestic arguments over controversial stalled budgetary policies that he claims will have the same growth-enhancing effect in Australia.
But Australia’s intransigence on the climate change issue and the force with which it was swept aside by the US president, Barack Obama, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, and the British prime minister, David Cameron, meant the weekend deviated quite spectacularly from that plan.
Peer pressure is also what every other G20 outcome relies upon to have any chance of success.
The headline achievement was a list of 800 new policies the IMF and OECD say could increase collective G20 growth by 2.1% if they are implemented.
A brief perusal of the list indicates that is a very big if.
But Mike O’Callaghan, the director of the G20 studies centre at the Lowy Institute thinktank, said that because the IMF and the OECD would check whether countries had implemented the policies on their lists, peer pressure – in effect, embarrassment – was the best chance of the promises being kept.
The other G20 “achievement” was pushing forward international efforts to clamp down on profit shifting and tax avoidance.
The major outcomes had already been worked out by the OECD, but World Vision’s chief executive, Tim Costello, said the G20 meeting was important because no country wanted to be singled out as the one blocking action on tax avoidance.
“Nothing that has happened here this weekend changes anything, but the threat of global attention focused people’s minds in the lead-up to the meeting and will continue to focus them in the future,” he said. “And that keeps driving this process of transparency forward.” Peer pressure again.
But in the end, after all the pressure on him to make concessions on climate change, Abbott agreed to communique words that didn’t bind him to do anything. And he made very clear as soon as the leaders were leaving Brisbane that he didn’t really have any immediate action in mind. (The fact he had told them earlier he was “standing up for coal” probably gave them a hint). The Green Climate Fund they had pushed so hard to win support for – just one of a bunch of funds you could give money to, he said. The game-changing emissions reductions pledges by China and the US was also not such a big deal in the prime minister’s mind.
If Australia’s “concessions” to other countries on the issues it didn’t want to talk about, or commit to, can so quickly look like lip service, it stands to reason that the fate of the promises from other countries that Australia is hailing as major victories could be exactly the same. Peer pressure is powerful, but only up to a point.
Actually it did. It delivered a graphic lesson in the power, and limitations, of prime ministerial and presidential peer pressure.
Tony Abbott wanted a summit focused on increasing economic growth, neatly segueing into domestic arguments over controversial stalled budgetary policies that he claims will have the same growth-enhancing effect in Australia.
But Australia’s intransigence on the climate change issue and the force with which it was swept aside by the US president, Barack Obama, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, and the British prime minister, David Cameron, meant the weekend deviated quite spectacularly from that plan.
Peer pressure is also what every other G20 outcome relies upon to have any chance of success.
The headline achievement was a list of 800 new policies the IMF and OECD say could increase collective G20 growth by 2.1% if they are implemented.
A brief perusal of the list indicates that is a very big if.
But Mike O’Callaghan, the director of the G20 studies centre at the Lowy Institute thinktank, said that because the IMF and the OECD would check whether countries had implemented the policies on their lists, peer pressure – in effect, embarrassment – was the best chance of the promises being kept.
The other G20 “achievement” was pushing forward international efforts to clamp down on profit shifting and tax avoidance.
The major outcomes had already been worked out by the OECD, but World Vision’s chief executive, Tim Costello, said the G20 meeting was important because no country wanted to be singled out as the one blocking action on tax avoidance.
“Nothing that has happened here this weekend changes anything, but the threat of global attention focused people’s minds in the lead-up to the meeting and will continue to focus them in the future,” he said. “And that keeps driving this process of transparency forward.” Peer pressure again.
But in the end, after all the pressure on him to make concessions on climate change, Abbott agreed to communique words that didn’t bind him to do anything. And he made very clear as soon as the leaders were leaving Brisbane that he didn’t really have any immediate action in mind. (The fact he had told them earlier he was “standing up for coal” probably gave them a hint). The Green Climate Fund they had pushed so hard to win support for – just one of a bunch of funds you could give money to, he said. The game-changing emissions reductions pledges by China and the US was also not such a big deal in the prime minister’s mind.
If Australia’s “concessions” to other countries on the issues it didn’t want to talk about, or commit to, can so quickly look like lip service, it stands to reason that the fate of the promises from other countries that Australia is hailing as major victories could be exactly the same. Peer pressure is powerful, but only up to a point.
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