“THE global village is a water bed- you press down here, it comes up here,” Reverend Tim Costello told the audience at the Big Ideas: Poverty: Whose problem is it? session of the Melbourne Writers Festival.
The global village he speaks of is the world we live in.
“The extraordinary challenge, I think, is whether we can get beyond simply national self-interest and think of a global ethic,” Costello said.
Fellow speaker and strategic policy advisor Bill Bowtell agreed with Costello’s global focus.
Where the two differed were their proposed solutions for eradicating poverty.
Costello’s suggestions embraced the need for cooperation between governments, civil society and the commercial sector.
In addition to encouraging aid for the horrors gripping Pakistan currently, the CEO of World Vision Australia suggested increased transparency in dealings in natural resources between developing nations and the wealthy world.
Costello supported the introduction of a small levy to the cost price of natural resources cultivated in developing countries to provide struggling societies producing valuable assets with much-needed funds.
The concept is akin to international trade tariffs currently benefiting exporters in wealthy countries such as Australia.
The purchase of Australian goods overseas benefits the Australian economy.
According to Costello, this is not always the case for developing countries.
He said the tax might prevent wealthier countries plundering resources from those less fortunate to promote their own growth, greedily reaping the future fortunes of poorer countries in need.
Revenue raised ought to be immediately injected into the local economy for the benefit of the people living in the region, he said.
Costello repeated that the process would have to be conducted in an open and honest manner, something the people, businesses and governments will have to reinforce.
“Parents will make huge sacrifices for their children to have better lives, even knowing that their lives will not necessarily be better,” he said.
“That energy needs to be harnessed in the way we think about dealing with carbon footprint pricing, [and] dealing with good governance and natural resources.”
Bill Bowtell’s ideas on redistribution of wealth also involve taxation, but not of natural resources.
Much like Robin Hood, Bowtell suggested taxing the rich to free the poor.
“If this does not happen, the problems will be immense,” he said.
Bowtell cited the inability of initiatives towards controlling climate change to be implemented without sufficient funds as an example of the potential consequences.
One of the brains behind Medicare Australia, Bowtell declared the “old charitable model for relieving poverty” a failure.
Though he acknowledged some progress had been made over the course of the past decade, Bowtell believes a Robin Hood-type tax to be a last resort to eliminate poverty once and for all.
And, he said, this must be applied on a global scale.
The planet as an entity is yet to experience the benefits of good governance, according to Bowtell.
The conditions Australians lived in two centuries ago could be compared to those of persons living in extreme poverty today.
However, Australia has since become one of the wealthiest nations in the world.
“Poverty is an outcome of bad organization and bad thinking,” Bowtell said.
He believes a concerted effort to better organize the planet’s future may save it; the upcoming Group of Twenty (G20) summit in South Korea and United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG) summit in New York may provide world leaders an opportunity to start doing just that, he said.
Bowtell also warned the redistribution of wealth will occur through either revolution or peaceful taxation.
“[The poor] take by force what they can’t get any other way,” Bowtell said.
