Century began with so much promise but it’s already lost its lustre

We are almost a quarter-way through the 21st century – time enough to check on how we are doing. Were we justified in striding into the New Millennium, as I did, with exuberance and optimism? My partner and I bragged we were now global citizens as we each celebrated the new century from iconic global locations, me watching fireworks at the Sydney Opera House, and him, studying in China, from the Great Wall. My brother, who managed an office building in Adelaide, had to work. Just in case. But Y2K did not happen, and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief that the doomsayers were wrong. All was well with the world.

And so it seemed as we trained ourselves to use “20” instead of “19″ when recording dates. Before the end of the first year, the Serbian despot Slobadan Milosevic had been ousted by popular demand; this was followed by what would become known as the “colour revolutions” in Georgia and then Ukraine, where millions marched to demand democracy replace dictatorships.

Sydney welcomes in the new millenium.Credit: Andrew Taylor

Before the decade was over, even the peoples of North Africa and the Middle East were clamouring for an end to repressive government, first in Tunisia and Algeria, then, in what was labelled The Arab Spring, in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria and Bahrain. Democracy seemed to be breaking out all over.

We breasted the new century confident the recently adopted Kyoto Protocol was going to see developed nations comply with mandatory targets to reduce greenhouse emissions. In 2006, Kyoto’s second year of enforcement, former US vice-president Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth was a global hit and a massively influential educational resource on what lay in store for the world if we failed to act urgently to address climate change.

Then in September 2011 came the Occupy Movement, a group demanding an end to wealth inequality and political corruption that benefited the wealthiest 1 per cent at the expense of the rest of us. It started near Wall Street and soon spread to other cities across the United States and, before long, the world.

With the world trending towards democracy, agreeing to combat climate change and growing pressure to address economic inequality, were we moving into a freer, safer, and more equitable era?

Libyans mark the tenth anniversary of the Arab Spring in February 2021. Credit: Getty Images

Now 22 years in ... how are we doing? The scoreboard is not looking good. The impetus towards democracy has faltered badly, effective global action on climate change never really got started, and wealth and income inequalities and political corruption have increased markedly.

According to Freedom House, a non-partisan American organisation that monitors democratic and other freedoms around the globe, the number of full democracies (classified as ‘free’) has declined since 2005 from 89 to 82 of the world’s 195 countries. Just 28 per cent of the world’s 7.8 billion people live in free countries. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2020 Democracy Index named the US as one of 52 “flawed democracies”.

The Kyoto Protocol essentially collapsed, to be replaced in 2015 by the Paris Agreement, a non-binding deal to limit the world’s average temperature to no more than 2 degrees. This was superseded by the Glasgow Climate Pact late last year, where nations agreed to ‘phase down’ (as opposed to the original draft of ‘phase-out’) coal production. Again, plenty of nothing, abated somewhat, perhaps, by the current willingness of the world’s financial sector to support net zero emissions, either by 2030 or 2050 depending on who you ask.

As for inequality, no one will be surprised to know that it has increased but the details are startling. According to the 2022 World Inequality Report, global inequalities are as great today as they were at the peak of Western imperialism in the early 20th century. Interestingly, inequalities are far greater in some countries, such as the US, Russia and India, than in western Europe or China, confirming, as the report states “that inequality is not inevitable, it is a political choice”.

A homeless person shields themselves from the rain in Los Angeles. Credit: AP

In addition, over the past 40 years, countries have become significantly richer, but their governments have become considerably poorer, a trend that has been magnified by the COVID-19 crisis, during which governments borrowed the equivalent of 10-20 per cent of gross domestic product, essentially from the private sector.

“The currently low wealth of governments has important implications for state capacities to tackle inequality in the future, as well as the key challenges of the 21st century such as climate change,” the report notes.

And since 1995, the share of global wealth possessed by billionaires has risen significantly and was so exacerbated during the pandemic that 2020 marked the steepest increase in global billionaires’ share of wealth on record.

We are now three years into a pandemic that has already infected 317,567,929 people and killed 5.5 million globally and which shows no signs of petering out. As well as being a health hazard, the pandemic is proving to be a major accelerator of inequality. Our political systems are being tested and mostly found wanting; the consequences of this are likely to be catastrophic. Increasingly, governments are preferencing economic health over human health, and are risking the latter when needed to achieve the former.

A COVID-19 patient receives treatment in ICU at St Vincent’€™s Hospital.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Australia’s relaxing of close contact and isolation provisions are examples of this. These new policies are anchored on the supposed availability and equitable distribution of rapid antigen tests, which we know is not happening, with the result that infected workers are likely to unwittingly further spread a virus that is already rampant. Figures produced earlier this week by Professor Mary-Louise McLaws, a professor of epidemiology at the University of NSW, show that so far in 2022 Australia has had 58,799 new cases and 16 deaths a day.

Getting the balance between economic and human health is not easy, and there are no rules and few relevant precedents, but we do know that increasingly, health experts are being disregarded in favour of business interests. The long-term consequences of this may well be devastating.

Already in Australia, we are witnessing the deliberate erosion of expertise in the public service, which means governments often have no reliable evidence base on which to formulate policies on health, diplomacy (another disaster) or any other area involving our national survival. Universities were subjected to intellectual vandalism by being denied JobKeeper while businesses, including luxury purveyors and other non-essential industries, sent their fat welfare payments straight to the bottom line.

Such inequalities are political choices. They result from a breed of politicians with no commitment to, or even interest in, the common good. They govern for narrow sectoral interests, diverting public funds to shore up their political backers while ignoring the economic distress of so many in the population.

Illustration: Joe BenkeCredit: The Age

It is this kind of government mismanagement of economic hardship that has increasingly been experienced by large populations and which has fuelled people’s anger, exacerbated growing distrust of governments and made political evangelists and snake oil merchants appear attractive. It is posing a growing threat to democratic processes in many Western countries.

Australia’s compulsory voting and fairly run federal electoral system fortunately makes us less vulnerable to the forces that are actively trying to destroy democracy in the US, but the blatant vote-buying in the past, and foreshadowed in the budget for this year’s election, shows we have a federal government that has no respect for the process.

The problems the world faces – and we in Australia cannot escape most of them the way we dodged the GFC – require smart, informed leaders who understand that we need more, not less, equality to preserve democracy and thus enable us to deal with the urgent threats posed to our very existence by worsening climate change and pandemics.

The kind of dystopian future this implies is laid out grimly in To Paradise, the impressive new novel by Hanya Yanagihara (of A Little Life fame), released this week and the final section of which depicts a totalitarian America in 2093, living with regular pandemics and ravaged by climate change.

Central Park’s vegetation has been killed off by rising temperatures, people don cooling suits to go outside, food as we know it today is non-existent, infected people and their families are dispatched to offshore islands (sound familiar?) and left to die, while the way climate refugees seeking to arrive by boat in the US are treated makes Scott Morrison’s Operation Sovereign Borders look like a red-carpet welcome. It’s speculative fiction but the storylines are no longer implausible and it as scary as hell.

Peter Hartcher is on leave. Anne Summers is an author and columnist.