Hardly anybody in the world would be worse off and many will be discernibly better off, three years from now, if the aims and ambitions to which the 20 biggest economies committed themselves in Brisbane yesterday are to be realised. A fresh focus on infrastructure investment, liberalisation of world trade, extra efforts to stimulate growth and to liberate the potential of the private sector could, the OECD and the World Bank say, make the world economy grow by two per cent more than it is presently likely to. There are specific commitments — about youth unemployment, about reducing the gap between male and female participation in the workforce, about combined action to deal with Ebola about action to deal with reform of international profit transfers so that profits are taxed primarily in the country in which profits are made. Each, if realised, promises something more than a general prosperity and economic security: it would involve some redistribution of resources into economies and sectors of economies where talents and abilities can be liberated, and a fairer system prevail.
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The G20 agreements sit alongside other bilateral and multilateral meetings, announcements and deals over a week of international conferences, including APEC at Beijing, the East Asian summit in Burma, an informal meeting of the BRICS group, comprising the five major "emerging economies", and global warming deals between China and the US, an informal security conference between the US, Japan and Australia, and, probably today or tomorrow, announcement of a deal between Australia and China significantly liberalising, if not entirely, freeing bilateral trade.
Australia, during its presidency of the G20, has been strongly focused on getting undertakings, from individual countries as much as from the G20 as a whole, which were transparent, quantifiable, and able to be subjected to audit, not least by the OECD and the World Bank. In this sense, the prime minister, Tony Abbott, insists that the communique represents much more than fine words, good intentions, and playing to various galleries. Rather it represents firm intentions on concrete action, which leaders and their governments will attempt to implement on timetables they have largely set themselves. The effort is commendable, the success in getting detail praiseworthy, but the communique is hardly a treaty to which the parties have legally committed — in some cases are even able to commit — themselves. The President of the US, Barack Obama, for example, faces a markedly hostile congress. He has insisted, after the communique, that promises and financial commitments made about climate change fall within his existing executive authority. But his capacity to take extra stimulatory action, or, for that matter, to commit his administration on infrastructure spending, is limited. Abbott has so far been unable to secure senate support for his existing economic plans, let alone any new ones likely to help secure the two extra points of economic growth over the next three years. (Indeed, it is difficult to see, from materials which have been published so far, just what extra spending, or local economic activity, the Australian government has now committed.)
Even with the best of intentions events have a way of taking over. Abbott's insistence that "we are all going to approach this in our own way" — in relation to climate change (where, it is plain, Australia and Canada are markedly out of step with most of the other industrialised nations, including, now China and the US) — reflects the elbow room all of the G20 leaders have given themselves.
From Australia's point of view, the meetings were a great success. It is, however, by no means clear that the conference was a personal triumph for the Prime Minister, or for his Treasurer, Joe Hockey. While the broad agenda, and hopes, of both were fairly well reflected in the communique, it became quite clear that other leaders were unwilling to surrender control of the agenda, and that some of the discussion items, particularly with climate change and Ebola, took place, and went in directions, over Australian objections. Our main ally, the US, and our biggest trading partner, China, were meeting secretly in make an agreement on climate change which represented a humiliation for Abbott and his inactive approach. Even more embarrassingly, President Obama went well out of his way, addressing Australian audiences, to undermine Abbott on the subject. The man who scored some cheap headlines by promising to "shirtfront" Russia's Vladimir Putin was shirtfronted himself, and by the leader of the free world.
