Return to Athens/Delphi: David's Pi_ge Subject: Rt. Hon. Mike Moore: Winter Lecture Series Speech From: NewsRoom@newsroom.co.nz http://www.newsroom.co.nz Posting to Politics Wire of the NewsRoom Press Release: New Zealand Labour Party Date: Wednesday, 13 August 1997 Time: 12:22 pm NZT Rt. Hon. Mike Moore: Winter Lecture Series Speech Address by: Rt Hon Mike Moore MP for Waimakariri, Labour Spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Speech To Winter Lecture Series, Garden Place, HAMILTON, NEW ZEALAND 12.15pm 13 August 1997
It's a great honour to be asked to speak at this Winter Series on Hope in the Millennium. I am naturally optimistic. You have to be when you look like me.
The millennium will attract the usual industry of Doomsday books, and people who make a living out of scaring themselves and others. Therefore it is appropriate to study the predictions of these people over the ages and enjoy their embarrassment.
Consider the state of the world only a little more than a decade ago. All of South America, much of Asia, all of eastern and central Europe, and Africa, was governed by parties of the extreme right and the extreme left. None of these countries enjoyed much economic, political, social or environmental freedom. Name a time in world history when so many people and so many nations could enjoy freedom of the polling place, and the marketplace. I believe both freedoms are linked.
The Berlin Wall has come down. The Iron Curtain has been shredded, and those people enslaved since the Second World War set free. Who would have dreamed that Nelson Mandela would have led his country to peaceful freedom Who would have thought that in government, the African National Congress would have been able to enlist the support of the minority whites. The great exodus of white capital and people, as predicted, has not happened.
Throughout South America, right-wing military governments in the Argentine, Chile, Peru, Brazil, even Paraguay - all have but evaporated. Freedoms have been advanced in every one of those countries. Southeast Asia is now held up as an example of economic growth and progress. Because of economic freedom, Vietnam will become a new Asian tiger. At this moment India and Pakistan are engaged in peace talks. Who would have believed in the beginning, that even in the Middle East there is a glimmer of hope, a chance for peace, and a Palestinian state established and evolving. In Northern Ireland there are better hopes for peace than for 100 years. Who would have believed that NATO would be expanding to take into its fold nations that once were enemies.
Of course this peace isn't perfect. Progress is never in a straight line, but the overwhelming march of history has been a positive one, especially over past 50 years.
I was one who thought that the new age of information and technology would enslave people. I read George Orwell's book -1984- and thought that information and technology would be used by great corporations and powerful governments to suppress individuals and disturb their march to freedom. Far from enslaving people, the opposite has happened. One of the reasons that Eastern Europe is free is that governments could not control information. Bibles don't have to be smuggled across borders. Free radio, television, and technology help liberate those countries. Remember Tiananmen Square and that lonely, brave young man who stood in front of a tank? The world saw this via television. Mobile phones and faxes exploded telling the world what was happening The internet will liberate ideas and people in a way never imagined. The impact will be greater than the invention of the printing press. Hand held videos are now honest witnesses to oppressive action. No longer can cruel and brutal governments suppress their people as easily as they did in the past. There are still regimes that act with great brutality and cruelty - regimes like North Korea that can no longer feed themselves are still a time-bomb ticking away, but the collapse of its economy may force it to give its people freedom to produce and own their future.
Look what technology has done for information. One hundred and thirty years ago a worker in England had to work a full week to pay for one word in an international telegram sent to New Zealand. Now someone on the unemployment benefit needs to receive an hour's benefit to pay for a full fax to be sent back to England. It took a full day's work for the average worker 150 years ago to pay for a copy of a newspaper, now a person on the average income only has to work six minutes to pay for a newspaper, besides which you get dozens of free newspapers thrust into your letterbox. Look at the average cost of a TV licence alongside the amount of information that can now be received by television.
A very important book, written by an American Resource economist, Julian Simon, entitled -The State of Humanity- convincingly documents the amazing story of the advancement of the human species. Simon writes, "Almost every absolute change and the absolute component of almost every economic and social change or trend, points in a positive direction, so long as we view the matter over a reasonably long period of time. That is all aspects of material human welfare improving the aggregate." History and the growth, development and evolution of our species has shown this to be true.
Only ten thousand years ago our ancestors were hunters. Around this time they first discovered agriculture and built permanent homes. This, the first agricultural revolution, increased food supply and these urban developments created an opportunity for a peaceful civilisation.
Yes, there was a Dark Age in Europe but there was also an age of enlightenment, of reason and renaissance. In the age of Mozart, people were so malnourished they could not work more than a few hours a day. Two hundred years and an industrial revolution later the difference in living standards is phenomenal. According to one estimate for sixteen developed countries per capita income was thirteen times higher in 1979 than in 1820 - the most spectacular improvement in the material well-being in the whole of history. The entire populations of western countries have, in the main, shared in this transformation of material conditions.
People, do-gooders and professional, cynics will say it's uneven. Of course it's uneven. There is an argument that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, but that's not entirely true. Take African-Americans, their incomes are twenty-six times higher than the late 1860s. In New Zealand the living standards of Maori since the beginning of European contact have risen enormously. In the United States over sixty percent of all households officially classified as poor have one or more cars, and half air conditioning. An average family of four, in the United States, technically defined as poor, has twice the income of the average worker at the turn of the century.
When I was a child only the wealthy had television. Now people on the most modest incomes have freezers, televisions and videos. For thousands of years life expectancy was around twenty to thirty years. By the seventeenth century it was between thirty and forty years. Life expectancy is increasing in the developed world and now stands between seventy and eighty years. We have doubled the average lifespan since the century of Milton and Newton.
Third world trends are even more dramatic. At the turn of the century life expectancy in the developing world was below thirty, now it's over sixty. In real terms, absolute poverty has been halved for most developed countries in the last twenty years. Clean water, better food and housing, and basic drugs have played an important role in raising life expectancy. There has been a dramatic fall in the rate of child mortality. In pre-industrial Europe between one quarter and a half of all children died before the age of five. Obviously the third world still lags substantially behind most developed countries, but child mortality rates have been declining in all continents. Until the last half of this century most doctors did more harm than good to patients. The agonies of childbirth, or of operations without anesthetic, are things of the past.
Working hours declined from around sixty hours per week in the
middle of last century to under forty hours today. People are
taking much longer holidays and different kinds of holidays.
Last century only the aristocrats and the most wealthy, and
the occasional New Zealand politician, could afford the Grand
Tour of Europe. Now most New Zealand kids travel overseas.
The word OE - overseas experience - is part of our vocabulary.
It's real.
Twenty years ago a pensioner could not afford a car. Now because of progressive policies of opening our economy to imports, many pensioners have Honda cars made in the 1980s. This can't be bad.
Take education. Last century very few people got educated. School enrolment is compulsory. Illiteracy has been virtually abolished. Adult literacy in the third world has fallen spectacularly. Last century it was predicted by the economist, Stanley Jevons, that Britain would be destroyed as a super power because it would run out of coal. The Club of Rome said the same thing in the 1970s about energy resources. Remember the Club of Rome suggesting there'd be a great depression, the end of the world, because of resource scarcity? They said there'd be new OPECs formed to control other important strategic minerals and resources.
Two thousand years before Christ, in Babylon, copper was a thousand times more expensive relative to wages than it is today. By Roman times it was five hundred times more expensive. The copper price continued to trend down, in fact, new technology and new ideas have provided appropriate substitutes, for example, one pound of fibre optics can shift as much information as a ton of copper.
It's in the area of food production that the most scare tactics have been employed. I was one of a generation that was always reminded by Mum that you ought to eat all your food because of the starving people in China and India. Very few people are starving in China and India. There has been a spectacular success via the green revolution which has doubled the output of food over the last thirty years. There has been little significant expansion in land area used for agriculture. Productivity improvements have brought about a huge reduction in the percentage of the labour force involved in agriculture, from well over fifty percent in most western countries prior to the Industrial Revolution to under five percent today. The long-run trend of food prices is down relative to income.
Paul Erlich, whose bestsellers predicted twenty years ago, the
world was teetering on the brink of mass starvation, has been
proven wrong. School children were told the planet would be uninhabitable
by the year 2000. In only one region has the food situation
deteriorated and that is Africa. Their famines are due to Marxist
and military governments, civil war, regional conflict, and genuine
drought.
But most Marxists have been discredited and beaten, even in Africa.
Collectivisation failed, Mao Tse-Tung's great leap forward was a leap backwards, it cost thirty million lives and lost China a generation. When private farmers have been allowed to get on with the job and to own their own products , food production has flourished.
Last century pollution was far worse than it is today. In the
17th century Londoners were breathing what diarist John Evelyn,
called impure and thick mist accompanied by filthy vapour corrupting
the lungs. In the 19th century London fog was still notorious.
Now for the first time in several generations, fish are being
caught in the Thames.
The Thames is cleaner now than it was in the time of Shakespeare.
London smog has virtually been eliminated. Charles Dickens would
not recognise London. Lake Eyre was a dead lake but today seventy
percent of the area's rivers are considered safe for swimming
or fishing compared with thirty-six percent in 1972. Ocean dumping
of industrial waste has been reduced by ninety-four percent.
The total forest areas of the world's temperate regions have
actually increased between 1980 and 1990.
Of course there is much to be done, but my central message is more than one of hope, it is one of practical success. Extreme greens, the far left, and those who are always predicting the end of the world often suggest there need to be more state control. They claim somehow pollution was acceptable if it was in a state-controlled economy. The most appalling cases of environmental disasters have been in economies that have been tightly controlled and tightly regulated. Look at Eastern Europe. The Volga and the Don are open sewers. In Central Asia, the greatest man-made catastrophe ever is the Aral Sea. Three quarters of the old Soviet Union's water system surface water is polluted. In the Soviet Union life expectancy had dropped over the last thirty years, which is a contradiction to most of Europe.
Remember the Rev Thomas Malthus who predicted that rising populations
in Britain and throughout the world would lead to mass famines?
Or the bestseller by Rachel Carson, who in 1962, predicted that
man-made chemicals would wipe us all out within twenty years?
Or the Club of Rome's publication The Limits to Growth which
in 1972 suggested that gold would be exhausted by 1981, tin by
1987, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and natural gas by
1993?
In 1970 Stephen Schneider predicted the new Ice Age as did the respected science journal, Science Digest. Within a few years we have moved from a future vision of sabre-toothed tigers to a global sauna. In 1980 acid rain was going to kill all the forests in Europe and North America. In 1984 the UN environmental programme claimed that a quarter of the world+s surface would become deserts. There has been no net increase in global desert area over the last ten years. In 1991 Carl Sagan suggested that smoke from the torched Kuwaiti oilwells would lower global temperature, cause droughts and famines in India and massive agricultural failure in the United States. There is no end to those who are prepared to make money and fame out of predicting failure and under-estimating the intelligence of the people.
The argument that the rich are consuming too much of the world's resources and the rich will over-populate the world is also not true. The opposite is the truth. We need more rich and educated people.
As countries get richer they become more educated. The number of family members decline, population drops. They demand better and more democratic political, economic social, and environmental outcomes. When given a chance to choose, people choose liberty and progress.
I'm going to be even more controversial and politically incorrect.
The reality is that market economies look after the environment
better, that democracy and the ingenuity of our species know
no bounds when freedom unleashes the genius of the people.
Look
at the way in which we, in New Zealand, have managed to organise
sustainable fishing and forestry over the last decade. A world
first. The government I was a member of was most abused but
the successful individual ITQ schemes for fisheries is a textbook
example of the environmental benefits of securing property rights.
In the 1980's the Labour Government promoted New Zealand's natural
environment by allowing the market to work and taking the state
out of business.
We cut out the swamp drainage subsidies, abolished the land development and encouragement loan schemes which had funded the clearance of thirty thousand hectares of native forests since 1978; stopped concessional finance for building local authority hydro-electric dams; abolish tax concessions for land clearance by forestry companies; got rid of special tax deals for mining companies; corporatised state enterprises; stopped the building of state-owned think-big projects.
The key factor in building this better world has been the growth of universal democratic values. Democratic, political and economic values lifts living standards. Where people have higher living standards and a better education they expect more from their environment and from their society. State-owned managers can ignore democracy, where there is no civil society, there is no green movement, no protesters, no free media, and no Parliament that can respond to these pressures. That's why Marxist and Fascist economies can pollute more and fail.
I don't under-estimate the social dislocation and the lack of social cohesion, the amount of domestic violence or the amount of unemployment. Nor do I believe the costs of the last twenty years have fallen fairly but I do believe things are better than they were and will get better.
Take issues of gender and racial differences. When I was at
school Maori was not taught. Children were punished for speaking
Maori. Now Maori is available in most schools. We are advancing
on Treaty issues that gives us hope for the future. Britain
did not become a true democracy until the 1920s when women got
the vote. Sexist and racist jokes are no longer funny. Children
are more concerned about the environment than they were in my
day. I used to go up in the bush as a young fellow and cut down
trees for fun. When children read the book Moby Dick they realise
now that Captain Ahab is the villain not Moby Dick.
The most
fundamental change in our social system in my life has been in
regards to matrimonial property. When I was first an MP if a
woman left her husband and had not been in the paid workforce,
she got nothing. Not a bean. I used to meet with women who
only had the clothes they stood up in. That has changed. We
have a developed welfare state, we provide houses and benefits,
never enough houses, never large enough benefits, but this must
be an advance.
But the most profound change has been the victory of economic liberalism. Look at places like Singapore and Malaysia. Indonesia, two generations ago, had an average income per person of little more than a hundred dollars a year and now it+s over $3,000 per year. Timor is a blot on their copy book, it's a stone in their shoe, but with 1500 islands and 500 languages their progress is fantastic. Look at North and South Korea, It's like night and day. Japan and Germany are examples of progress through democratic political and economic values.
This speech is unfashionable - it's unfashionably positive, optimistic and full of hope. Because I believe that if you did research on every area from literacy to health, to pollution in the cities, between 1900 and the year 2000 this world has got better. We've built up great and noble international institutions such as the United Nations, and the World Trade Organisation that serve the world. With all their imperfections, a world without them would be unthinkable. The stock market crash of 1987 was deeper and more dangerous than the 1920+s crash. But the world did not go into long-term depression. We have learnt. The G7, World Bank, IMF, GATT and the Reserve Banks of the major players worked. Leaders nerves held, we didn't descent into the kind of protectionism that gave rise to the twin tyrannies of our century, communism and fascism. That was the lesson learnt bitterly and with great cost from the great depression.
We have international laws on the sea. We're building up a regime
of international laws on pollution. We're stopping the slaughter
of whales. We have regimes in place to protect endangered species.
All of this can be improved but we ought not to wander around
oppressed and apologetic or ashamed. The year 2000 will create
a new industry of black arm-band wearers and whingers.
We should
stand with pride because we are on the threshold of delivering
longer and more sustained peace, longer and more sustained economic
growth and a fairer and better society. When the leaders trust
the people, the people will rise to the occasion. Isn't that
the lesson of history? Thus we should face the future without
fear but confidence and hope.
Copyright © 1997 Rt Hon Mike Moore
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