[asia-apec 1520] Moore in The Press (Christchurch)

[APEC Monitoring Group]

FRIDAY, 18 AUGUST 2000


      F E A T U R E S   S T O R Y

MIKE MOORE: ``I know I can do more for lifting human standards than in just
about any other job on this planet."
JOHN KIRK-ANDERSON/The Press
 Moore: I come to praise the future
18 AUGUST 2000
A year after his appointment as director-general of the world's most
powerful trade organisation, former Waimakariri MP Mike Moore is becoming a
major player on the world stage. An evangelist for free trade, he is
regarded by many as the devil incarnate. But with God and justice on his
side why should he care? CATE BRETT reports.

Effigies of him are burned in capitals around the world; the plight of every
oppressed creature on the planet – human, animal, or plant – is laid at his
feet by jeering protesters wherever he goes, and yet Mike Moore sleeps
straight in his bed each night, secure in the knowledge he is "doing the
Lord's work".

He kids you not.

"I know I can do more for lifting human standards, more for my country, more
for this region, more for the people I believe in than in just about any
other job on this planet."

Mr Moore describes a magnificent mural painted on the walls of the building
in Geneva where he works, depicting Jesus addressing a stop-work meeting of
the carpenters' union: "It was donated to the ILO by the Christian Trade
Union movement in the 1920s and I find it quite inspiring."

As he approaches the first anniversary of his appointment as
director-general of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – the world's most
powerful trade organisation with 137 member countries – Mike Moore is
gaining a reputation as a fiery evangelist for the good news of
globalisation and free trade.

Back briefly in his home town this week to spread the word at a meeting of
the Canterbury Employers' Chamber of Commerce, Mr Moore opened his address
with the old bravura characteristic of his days as a Labour politician:

"Ladies and gentlemen: I come to praise the future.

"There has never been a time in the history of our species when we have had
such an opportunity to build better living standards and a safer and more
secure world for all. Globalisation is a part of this opportunity."

While Mr Moore outlined the scope of this opportunity and the benefits free
trade was bringing to Mexican farm hands picking fruit in California and
Bangladeshi seamstresses making clothes for Europeans, outside the Centra a
group of about 60 protesters, some wearing Mike Moore masks, and holding
signs saying "Free trade is costing the Earth", chanted "traitor" and "Mad
Mike on your bike".

It was a pretty low-rent affair compared with the estimated 50,000 who
rioted in Seattle last December during Mr Moore's inauspicious debut as the
WTO's top dog. But to what remains of Christchurch's activist Left, Mike
Moore's sell-out to the apostles of capitalism and their Washington allies
is especially galling given his past lives as a printer, union activist,
social worker, and old school Labour man.

Raised in poverty in Northland by parents who ran a second-hand shop, tales
of Mr Moore's childhood deprivations and lack of formal education – he left
school at 16 to become a bricklayer's labourer after failing University
Entrance – have acquired an apocryphal quality.

But now the Labour politician who marketed himself as "a man of the ordinary
people", a man "intimidated and embarrassed by the arts and by poncy
waiters, and by my lack of social grace", wakes each day in Geneva, one of
the world's most sophisticated cities and regularly dines with the world's
most powerful political and industrial leaders.

Labour's man from Kawakawa is increasingly being described by the
international press as one of the most impressive exports to have emerged
from this small corner of the earth.

****

Which perhaps goes some way to explain his ill-disguised irritation at
finding himself back in his home town, facing the same old line up of "Kiwi
knockers" and "ill-informed critics".

While his chosen disciple and parliamentary successor Labour MP Clayton
Cosgrove keeps silent vigil in the corner, a trimmed down and spruced up Mr
Moore makes a perfunctory attempt at giving an interview to his home town
newspaper. His heart isn't really in it.

The line of questioning, he suggests, is predictable of New Zealand
journalists, re-hashing the same "old-fashioned Marxist line" that sets the
WTO up as the tool of imperialist capitalism crushing the world's workers
underfoot.

(Marx actually hadn't come into the picture at this point, although as the
well-read Mike Moore knows, the old boy had a few perspicacious things to
say about globalism.)

A mild suggestion that the WTO's failure to launch a new round of
negotiations at Seattle last year may indicate that many countries are
looking for some respite from the social costs associated with unfettered
free trade, draws a derisive response reminiscent of Robert Muldoon:

"Unfettered trade? What's that? The simple thing is if you have trade, you
have to have rules, that's what the WTO is there for. And the rules are
determined by sovereign States. Our critics talk about `Fair vs Free' trade,
what the hell does that mean? These are buzz words; these are slogans that
allow you not to think."

This seems a little rich coming from a man whose political rhetoric was
always liberally peppered with specious one-liners, but Mr Moore has a
point.

The Left has tended to portray the WTO and its agents as part of the
machinery of this monstrous process known as globalisation. The reality,
though, is infinitely more complex and contradictory – as evidenced by the
fact that the WTO counts among its allies the likes of agri-giant Monsanto,
Cuba's Fidel Castro, and Bangladesh's Hasina Wajed. The Cuban President has
this to say about the WTO: "No nation, big or small, can be left out of this
important institution – nor should it."

As he travels around the globe addressing groups as disparate as the US
Senate and Sweden's Socialist Youth, Mr Moore's message is the same:
globalisation is a process as inexorable and profound as the industrial
revolution and the best hope we have of ameliorating its negative effects
and maximising its benefits is through global, government-to-government
negotiation and multilateral trade agreements.

International trade rules, negotiated and ratified by the WTO's 137
sovereign governments, provide the key to equalising the enormous power
imbalances between rich and poor nations, says Mike Moore.

"The rule of law allows the little guy to win against the big guy; the law
is the equaliser – that is why it advances the sovereignty of small nations.

"It allows a little country like Costa Rica to win against the United States
on underwear exports, of all things. Is it perfect? No. But the absence of
the WTO would not make the system any cleaner. On the contrary."

However, Mr Moore's portrayal of the WTO as an agent of sovereign States
pursuing their national interests is in itself grossly simplistic, glossing
over the dominant role played by the world's multinationals whose allegiance
is to global stockholders rather than nation States. (Some economists
estimate more than 40 per cent of US exports and nearly 50 per cent of its
imports are goods that travel not in the open market place but between
multinationals themselves as they trade among their own foreign-based
subsidiaries.)




Now I'm dealing with a whole lot of intelligent people.- Mike Moore,
comparing the Labour Party with the WTO




Mr Moore concedes the WTO has some way to go to prove itself a friend of the
world's developing countries. Despite decades of trade liberalisation, a
quarter of the world's population (1.2 billion people) survive on less than
a dollar a day, while the 200 biggest companies in the world now control
between them one quarter of the world's wealth.

In the eyes of the developing world the West – and the United States in
particular – has adopted the rhetoric of free trade while preserving
barriers to its own markets for the most vital third world commodities –
textiles and agriculture. A complaint echoed by New Zealand farmers
challenging US lamb tariffs.

In numerous speeches Mike Moore has accused "middle-class" Leftists of
hypocrisy and arrogance in opposing the very trade liberalisation which he
believes holds the key to the developing nations' growth.

"If international solidarity means anything, surely it means helping people
around the world who are less fortunate than us.

"And surely that means buying coffee from a Ugandan grower and T-shirts made
in Bangladesh as well as demonstrating against apartheid."

In Seattle, however, this challenge to the West was countered by calls from
America and Europe for the WTO to tack environmental and labour issues on to
the agenda, something Mr Moore says has been interpreted by the developing
nations as protectionism under a new guise.

Commenting on the collapse of the Seattle talks last November, Andrew Marr
of the Observer pointed out the subversive potential of "real globalisation"
as distinct from globalisation as a "euphemism for US and European control
of the the world economy".

Marr suggested that as billions of people come into the world markets from
other cultures – most notably China – they will inevitably take a bigger
share of the action and challenge the hegemony of North America and Europe.

"The WTO, in aiding this process, is going to emerge as a organisation which
challenges the US and European heartlands more brutally than it challenges
developing countries.

"It offers rules, not force. The hardest part of these failed negotiations
(Seattle) were, underneath it all, a bareknuckle fight between Western
workers who want to protect their living standards against Asians, and
governments which want to use environmental and human rights issues as an
excuse to keep out foreign goods and keep down foreign workers."

Marr argued that as the truth dawns the real opposition to the WTO was
likely to come not from Friends of the Earth or militant NGOs but from
"articulate, well-off interests trying to defend their own positions –
protectionist Republicans, nationalist Europeans, and Japanese
conservatives".

****

For a man who now strides the world stage it is understandable Mr Moore may
be irritated by our inability to put aside provincial and national interests
and think in these global terms:

"It is a big world out there and we represent . 06 per cent of the world's
population. People are entitled to their views and not all the criticisms
(of the WTO) are wrong. Of course we should improve our play.

"But the paucity of thinking about what is happening globally does dismay
me, particularly in my own country.

"We did not invent the sheep, cattle, or pinus radiata – we didn't even
create rugby, we just improved on it. What hope has our country got to lift
its play without these ideas?"

Vintage Moore, but delivered without any of the warmth and passion of old.

"If I sound ratty it's because I'm extremely tired and I don't want to be
here, I want to go. I get the same questions over and over from New
Zealanders and no, I don't get them elsewhere."

Which is patently untrue as reports of Mike Moore's speeches delivered all
over the world address precisely the same fears and criticisms that were
expressed so vociferously in Seattle.

Perhaps what has changed though is that Mr Moore no longer feels compelled
to explain himself to a city of 324,300 people at the bottom of the South
Pacific. His accountability is now to the 137 governments of the world he
serves.

To wrestle in this snake pit of conflicting national, global, and corporate
interests 24 hours a day seven days a week must, you would think, be
stretching even his legendary skills as information sponge and street
fighter.

"No I'm not stretched. It's like herding cats, it's difficult but you know
the limits. "

Compared with leading the New Zealand Labour party, running the WTO is a
piece of cake: "Now I'm dealing with a whole lot of intelligent people."

But while Mike Moore may not miss our provincialism or ignorance, or the
infighting of the Labour party, surely he misses home?

"Yvonne and I both get homesick. I miss seafood and I miss friends and my
constituents, but I know they are being well looked after by Clayton, which
makes it a lot easier."

And in Geneva he and Yvonne have surrounded themselves with things from
home: tapa cloths, wood, old furniture from Dormer Street, books – and their
cat, Gus. His aversion to fine dining – and poncy waiters – is being tested
by the constant round of entertaining but Mike Moore says that he and Yvonne
are placing their own cultural stamp on these functions, introducing the
worlds' ambassadors to the simple pleasures of the barbecue.

And on the barbecue Mike Moore cooks fabulous loins of New Zealand lamb: "In
Geneva you get New Zealand lamb like you'll never get it here."

The marvels of free trade.