Transcript of speeches by the Prime Minister and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd at St Paul’s Cathedral on 31 March 2009.
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Prime Minister:
With my friend Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister of Australia, I come here to St Paul’s, a church of enormous beauty and monumental history, a place of sanctuary which amidst the passing storms of time has always been a rock of faith at the centre of our national life. St Paul’s is a place to which over the centuries people have come in hope and in faith - a great national institution standing between Westminster and the City, midway on the horizon between the world of politics and the world of finance, and with a lot to teach us both.
So just as I came here, as the Bishop has said, to speak in this Cathedral before Gleneagles in 2005, I believe there is no more appropriate place to talk with you about the G20 summit which opens in London tomorrow. And let me say there is no more appropriate leader to join us in this discussion than Kevin Rudd, a Prime Minister of great courage, a leader of great conscience and a visionary for reform. And I welcome him to our country.
Today, you will be pleased to know, we do not want to talk about the details of specific or technical financial programmes or policies, but instead we want to talk about enduring values - indeed the enduring virtues - that we have inherited from the past which must infuse our ideals and hopes for the future.
And I want to suggest to all of you here today that this most modern of crises, the first financial crisis of the global age, has confirmed the enduring importance of the most timeless of truths: that our financial system must be founded on the very same values that are at the heart of the best of our family lives.
Instead of a globalisation that threatens to become values-free and rules-free, we need a world of shared global rules founded on shared global values. Now, I know it’s hard to talk about the future when you’re having a tough time in the present. You don’t redesign a boat in the middle of a storm.
But we need to talk about the future because it falls to us to shape it. When Martin Luther King talked about the fierce urgency of now, he asked us to awaken to a tide in human history which if missed means you can end up being literally too late for that history.
It is usually only in hindsight that people can interpret the forces which have so transformed their lives - only in the classrooms of the future that the people of a country can stand back to identify and analyse the great turning points in their national story.
But we do not need the benefit of hindsight to know that the sheer scale, scope and speed of today’s global changes is throwing up problems which, if we do not address, will condemn millions around the world to a life that is unsustainable, insecure and unfair.
There are four great challenges of this new global age which our generation must address urgently: financial and economic instability in a world of global capital flows; environmental degradation in a world of changing energy need; violent extremism in a world of mass communications and increased mobility; and extreme poverty in a world where there are still growing inequalities.
Answering these questions will determine whether people have continued faith in globalisation, in multilateralism, in modernity itself, whether they will have confidence in the future. And what all these challenges have in common is that none of them can be addressed by one country or one continent acting alone. None of them can be met and mastered without the world coming together. And none of them can be solved without agreed global rules informed by shared global values.
The oil-price crisis last year, the financial crisis this year, a climate-change crisis every year: it means that we are not at a moment of change; we are in a world of change. Twenty years ago only one billion people were part of the world’s industrial economy; now the figure is four billion. For centuries people rarely moved even from their home town; now every single year 200 million people - the equivalent of the whole populations of Britain, Germany and France - move from their country of birth, and next year another 200 million will do so again.
In one decade the majority of the world’s manufacturing, for two centuries focused in Europe and America, has shifted to Asia. The global sourcing of goods, services and capital means we now depend so much on each other that what happens anywhere can have an impact on what happens everywhere.
And this raises anxieties and questions for people about what will happen to them, and what it means for their dream that their children, the children of the next generation, will do better than the children of the last. I recognise that for too many families anxious about jobs, worried about mortgages, uncertain about their future, the most important financial summits are those that take place around their kitchen table.
And I understand that people feel unsettled, and that the pain of this current recession is all too real. And the danger is that, in every country, workforces will become so worried that they will try to pull up the drawbridge, turn the clock back and retreat into a dangerous protectionism that, in the end, protects no one. If people’s fears are not addressed, they may choose to walk away from the benefits that the opening up of this world can bring. Managed well, the same globalisation that has brought us so much global insecurity can also bring great opportunity.
Over the next two decades millions of people in emerging markets will move from simply being producers of their goods to being consumers of our goods, leading to the world economy doubling in size, with twice as many opportunities for businesses, twice as many round-the-world middle-class jobs and incomes. That is why I am an avowed supporter of open markets, free trade, private capital and a flexible, inclusive and sustainable globalisation.
Let us be honest: the globalisation that has done so much to improve choice, driven down the cost of everything from computers to clothes and lifted millions out of poverty has also unleashed forces that have totally overwhelmed the old national rules and the systems of financial oversight.
I have always said I take full responsibility for my actions, but I also know that this crisis is global; its source is global, its scope is global and its solution will be global. We’ve seen worldwide changes so fast that they have outpaced people’s understanding of them, so that managers sitting in boardrooms were selling financial products they didn’t know the value of, to traders and investors who didn’t know what they were trading and investing in, covered by insurers who didn’t know what they were insuring. Complex products like derivatives and securitised loans, which were supposed to disperse risk right across the world, instead spread contagion across that world. The sensible limits to markets agreed in one country became undermined by global competition between all countries and then a race in standards to the bottom. Instead of banks being, as they should be, stewards of people’s money, too many of them became speculators with people’s futures.
I say to you plainly: this old world of the old Washington consensus is over, and what comes in its place is up to us. Instead of a global free market threatening to descend into a global free-for-all, we must reshape our global economic system so that it reflects and respects the values that we celebrate in everyday life. For I believe that the unsupervised globalisation of our financial markets did not only cross national boundaries; it crossed moral boundaries too.
You know in our families we raise our children to work hard, to do their best, to do their bit. We don’t reward them for taking irresponsible risks that would put them or others in danger. We don’t encourage them to seek short-term gratification at the expense of long-term success. And in Britain’s small businesses, managers and owners are the enterprising people our country depends on and we rightly celebrate. But they do not train their teams to invest recklessly or behave in an underhand way or keep their biggest gambles off the books.
Most people who have worked hard to build up their firm or shop understand responsible risk taking but don’t understand why any company would give rewards for failure or how some people have grown fabulously wealthy making failed bets with other people’s money. So it is absurd for those on the extremes to blame the private sector for our problems. What we actually need is the practice of most of our private sector to be adopted by all of our private sector.
And our task today is to bring our financial markets into closer alignment with the values held by families and business-people across the country. Yesterday I said there were five tests for our G20 meeting, and the first of these is to clean up the global banking system.
Most people want a market that is free, but never values-free, a society that is fair but not laissez faire. And so, across the world, our task is to agree global economic rules that reflect our own enduring values.
That means rules that make transparent the risks that banks take, rules that bring hedge funds and shadow banking inside the regulatory net, rules that force global banks to hold sufficient capital and ensure their liquidity, rules that require boards who understand their businesses and take responsibility for the decisions they take, and systems of pay and bonuses that reward people for long-term value and not short-term risk-taking. This is the world in which we will have trust, and in which we can genuinely say again, ‘My word is my bond.’
Now, let me put markets in context. They can create unrivalled widening of choices and chances, harnessing self-interest to produce results transcending self-interest. When they work, they will fulfil the promise of Adam Smith that individual gain leads to collective gain, that even when people are pursuing private interests and private wishes they can nevertheless deliver public good.
But as we are discovering to our considerable cost, the problem is that, without transparent rules to guide them, free markets can reduce all relationships to transactions, all motivations to self-interest; as Jonathan Sacks has said, they can reduce all sense of value to consumer choice, all sense of worth to a price tag. So, unbridled and untrammelled, they can become the enemy of the good society.
And we can now see also that markets cannot self-regulate, but they can self-destruct and, again, if untrammelled and unbridled, they can become not just the enemy of the good society; they can become the enemy of the good economy. Markets are in the public interest but they are not synonymous with it.
And the truth is that the virtues that all of us here admire most and the virtues that make society flourish - hard work, taking responsibility, being honest, being enterprising, being fair - these are not the values that spring from the market; these are the values we bring to the market. They don’t come from market forces; they come from our hearts, and they are the values nurtured in families and in schools, in our shared institutions and in our neighbourhoods.
So markets depend upon what they cannot create. They presuppose a well of values and work at their best when these values are upheld. And that is why I argued controversially some time ago, in a view that is now, I think, more generally agreed, that there are limits to markets just as there are limits to states.
Just as in the 1970s and 80s people felt government was too powerful, in the grip of vested interests that had to be channelled to work in the public interest, so too it is now clear that financial markets can become too powerful, come to be dominated by vested interests of their own, and so it falls to us, supporters of free markets, to save free markets from the most dogmatic of free marketeers.
To say this is not anti-business; it is not anti-private sector; it is not anti-market. Quite the contrary; my point is that strong rules rooted in shared values are the best way to serve both ourselves and our market systems. Markets need morals.
The reason I have been long fascinated by Adam Smith, who came from my home town of Kirkcaldy, is that he recognised that the invisible hand of the market had to be accompanied by the helping hand of society, that he argued the flourishing of moral sentiments comes before and is the foundation of the wealth of nations.
So the challenge for our generation is now clear: whether or not we can formulate global rules for our global financial and economic systems; global rules that are grounded in our shared values.
Now that people can communicate so easily and instantaneously across borders, cultures and faiths, I believe we can be confident that, across the world, we are discovering that there is a shared moral sense. It is a sense strong enough to ensure the constant replenishment of that well of values upon which we depend and which must infuse the shared rules of our society.
And when people ask, ‘Can there be a shared global ethic that can lie behind global rules’, I answer that through each of our heritages, traditions and faiths, there runs a single powerful moral sense demanding responsibility from all and fairness to all.
Christians do not say that people should be reduced merely to what they can produce or what they can buy - that we should let the weak go under and only the strong survive. No: we say, ‘Do to others what you would have them do unto you’.
And when Judaism says, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, when Muslims say, ‘No one of you is a believer unless he desires for another what he desires for himself’, when Buddhists say, ‘Hurt not others in ways that you find yourself hurtful’, when Sikhs say, ‘Treat others as you would be treated yourself’, and when Hindus say, ‘The sum of duty is not do unto others what would cause pain if done to you’, they each and all reflect a sense that we share the pain of others, we believe in something bigger than ourselves, that we cannot be truly content while others face despair, cannot be completely at ease while others live in fear, and cannot be satisfied while others are in sorrow. I believe that we all feel, regardless of the source of our philosophy, the same deep sense, a moral sense, that each of us is our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper.
Call it, as Adam Smith did, ‘the moral sentiment’. Lincoln called it ‘the better angels of our nature’. Winstanley called it ‘the light in man’. Call it duty or simply call it conscience, it means we cannot and will not pass by on the other side when people are suffering and when we have it within our power to be both responsible and to support fairness, and endeavour to help.
So, I believe that we have a responsibility to ensure that both markets and governments serve the public interest, to recognise that the poor are our shared responsibility, and that wealth carries unique responsibilities too.
I know that there is one analysis which says that we must seize the opportunity of this crisis to reject materialism in all its forms - and crass materialism is unacceptable. But for me, the answer does not lie in asking people to foreswear all material things, or give up on aspirations for the future, but instead of remembering what our pursuit of growth and prosperity is really all about: spreading freedom that ever more people can live the lives they choose, and do so with responsibility and by being fair to others.
But it is no repudiation of wealth to say that wealth should help more than the wealthy, it is no criticism of prosperity to say that our first duty is to those without it, and it is no attack on the life-long attachment I have to aspiration to say that each of us has a responsibility also to ensure no one is left behind.
I believe that today, we must reaffirm these age-old truths about society: that when those with riches help those without, it enriches us all and the truth that when the strong help the weak, it makes us all stronger.
Our meeting tomorrow is only the start, and world leaders only a part. I am still humbled by the memory of one of the protestor’s signs at the Make Poverty History rally I saw in Edinburgh in 2005. It said: ‘You are G8; we are six billion’. The campaigning groups, the faith communities, the companies, the social enterprises and trades union represented here rightly demand a lot of us as leaders in coming days. But you, too, are part of the solution, and I believe that religious leaders, business leaders and leaders of the financial sector, charities and trades union, teachers at our schools and universities, must begin a conversation, a national debate as serious as anything I have entered into in my lifetime, about the shape of the economy and the society we have now to renew.
Let me conclude: the battle the leaders of the G20 are fighting is not the old one against old enemies, but it is a new one, against global recession, against climate chaos, unemployment, insecurity, poverty and hopelessness. And leaders meeting in London must supply the oxygen of confidence to today’s global economy, to give people in all our countries renewed hope for the future.
Our first test, as I said, is that we must clean up the banking system, curb the use of tax havens, and introduce principles for pay and bonuses, so instead of banks serving themselves, they serve the people.
Our second test is that we must take the action necessary to prevent any suffering, as we have seen in the past, of mass long-term unemployment, and we must create and save more than 20 million jobs.
Thirdly, by international economic cooperation, we must reshape the global financial system for new times, so that with early warnings and proper precautions, we can prevent crises like this happening again.
Fourth, we must avoid the mistakes of the 1930s and not descend into protectionism and isolationism.
Fifth, we must press ahead with the low-carbon revolution.
And we must never, ever forget our obligations to the poor.
Just yesterday I received a letter from Pope Benedict, reminding the G20 that positive faith in the human person, and above all, as he said: “Faith in the poorest men and women of Africa and other regions of the world affected by extreme poverty is what is needed if we are going to get through the crisis”.
I can confirm today that, even while others may use this financial crisis as an excuse to retreat from their promises to the poorest, nothing will divert the United Kingdom from keeping to our commitments to the Millennium Development Goals and to our promises of development and aid.
So, today, I think I speak for all the leaders of the G20 when I say: the duty of leadership is to identify, to name and then help shape the changes of this new global age in the interests of all people. And so, we completely reject the idea that the only thing we can do in the face of a recession is to let it run its course and do nothing, as if the economy operated according to iron laws and the only role of men and women is to live by these laws and what these laws dictate. This is to demean our humanity, because there are always options, always choices, always solutions that human ingenuity can summon.
A few years ago when economists were pressing the most dogmatic of free market policies on some of the poorest countries in the world, they argued for it by saying ‘Tina’ - there is no alternative. But African people came up with shorthand of their own not Tina, but ‘Themba’ - short for ‘there must be an alternative’. In that cry, Themba, we hear everything that must guide us today, because while it was an acronym, it was also the Zulu word for the most important thing that humans can have hope.
Themba - the confidence, conviction and certainty that where there are problems there are always solutions, and we do not need to accept the defeatism of doing nothing. It is the conviction that through pursuing cooperation and internationalism, we need never return to the isolationism and protectionism of the past. It is the certainty that there is always an alternative to fear of the future, and what conquers fear of the future is our faith in the future: faith in who we are and what we believe, in what we are today and what we can become; faith, most of all, in what together we can achieve.
So, we are not here to serve the market; it is here to serve every one of our communities. Governed by rules which reflect our morality, it is our best hope of a better world. Let us imagine that world together. Let us fight for it together, and then with faith in the future, let us build it together, for the world we build tomorrow will be born in the hopes we share and agree upon today. Thank you very much.
The Bishop of London:
Thank you very much indeed. Do keep the questions flowing in; I have just received the first tranche. Now we have the privilege of welcoming and listening to The Rt Hon Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia. It would not be too strong to say the election of Kevin Rudd constituted something of an ‘Obama moment’ for that country. He has a reputation as a politician who takes ethics very, very seriously. The Prime Minister of Australia.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:
Honoured guests, honoured friends, people of good heart, good mind and good conscience gathered here at St Paul’s, it is fitting that we gather today in this great cathedral to reflect together on the great events of our time. In the 1,400 years that Christians have gathered on this site they have met together to reflect on the great events of their time, on the significance of those events across the tide and times of humankind, and on the great moral question across all the challenges of all the centuries; namely, what then should be done?
There is a tendency for each generation to regard the challenges of their time as somehow unique. There is, however, something tempering about the history of this great place, given its great history. When we remember that those who have gone before us here have endured invasions, civil war, devastating fire, the Great Depression and then a total war, which rained death from the skies, this disciplines us therefore through the disciplines of history to see the challenges of today across the span of time.
We are, however, living through events today that are questioning the economic orthodoxy of our age and the human values that have shaped that orthodoxy. One of those values is trust. We are asked today, at the onset of the worst economic recession since the Depression, to reflect on the axiom, ‘My word is my bond.’ I am advised this was the motto formerly inscribed on the coat of arms of the London Stock Exchange in 1923, just six years before the onset of the Great Depression.
The truth is sometime last September something almost audibly cracked in the public’s trust in our financial markets. Stock-market values around the world collapsed. Since then they have lost more than half their value. Since then more than 30 of the world’s biggest banks have either collapsed or been bailed out. The reverberations across the broader financial system continue today, affecting the lives of working people across every corner of God’s Earth.
The consequence of this collapse has been palpable and painful across every continent, across every country and across virtually every community in the world; across developed economies, across developing economies, where the defences against recession are much more ragged.
The World Bank has advised us that an extra 53 million people will be trapped in poverty this year alone as a result of the crisis. They advise us that 200,000 to 400,000 children per year may die from 2009 onwards if the current crisis persists. These are the human costs of the economic crisis. Each of them, each and every one of them, is a human face: a factory worker losing her job in regional Australia; a farm labourer losing his child in rural Africa.
So, to answer the great moral question of the ages: what then is to be done? The challenge for all governments is to rebuild an economic system in which all, not just some, can have trust. That means understanding what has gone wrong with the current system. It also means reaffirming that which is still right with the current system. It means, in a word, getting the balance right; affirming the right to individual enterprise while reaffirming our responsibility to the common good.
Over the last quarter of a century this balance has begun to be eroded. Unfettered free markets became worshipped as a god, and we know that that god was false. This ideology held that markets were self-regulating, that governments’ regulation of such markets was interference and that the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest was not only morally legitimate but, equally, to be morally encouraged.
The time has come to restore the balance. This must begin by affirming the freedom, empowerment and prosperity that can come from open markets at home and abroad. Economic history teaches us that closed markets impoverish humankind, and there is nothing ennobling at all about poverty.
But open markets must be properly regulated, regulated with transparency, with impartiality and with fairness for all who would compete within those markets, not just for some. We must equally accept that markets may fail, and we must therefore provide for universal public goods; public goods such as universal health, universal education and a safety net for all; public goods by whatever means they may be delivered.
All these require the active agency of government, as opposed to an ideology that says government intervention is, by definition, bad. It is time to rediscover the proper agency of government across the world. In other words, government should balance the market to ensure that both individual liberty and the common good are enhanced.
The ideological dichotomy of our age is that one should somehow cancel out the other. This represents the polarisation of the extreme left and the extreme right, whereas our age is calling on us to restore the proper balance. For it is only by restoring balance between market and government, between individual and community, that we can rebuild trust in an economic system that encourages each and cares for all.
There is another dimension to the current crisis which challenges us all. That is, the current crisis is simultaneously local and global. All of us are legitimately seized with the impacts of this crisis that confront us in our own local communities: those who lose their job, those who lose their house, those who lose their marriage, those who lose their self-respect. The unfolding social cost of this economic crisis confronts us starkly.
We, therefore, must act with every resource we can, with every agency of government, with every action of community, to tend to the wounds of those who now suffer through this crisis through no fault of their own, and to act wherever we can to prevent people from falling into joblessness and despair. This must be our first responsibility.
But we must equally be reminded of John Wesley’s great proclamation, ‘The world is my parish.’ The world is my parish. Because beyond our shores and beyond that which we can readily see, the unfolding suffering from this crisis in the developing world is growing apace. For those of us in developed economies, this is the unseen cost of the crisis, the invisible face of the global recession, but in conscience and for people of conscience, we cannot stand idly by.
So what does this mean? It means that we cannot under any circumstances sacrifice the Millennium Development Goals. It means that we cannot shred our solemn commitments on official development assistance. It means we cannot strangle developing-country trade by adopting new protectionist measures in the developed world. It means we must help unclog the arteries of developing-country trade with effective trade-finance facilities for the period ahead. And it means we cannot pretend that the challenge of climate change both for developed and developing countries will somehow simply fade away.
All these things require global action on an unprecedented global scale, just as all those things necessary for the recovery of the general economy as a whole require global action on an unprecedented global scale. And herein lies a further challenge for us all: to act in the global good while recognising at the same time that acting in the global good is also acting in the national good. For centuries we have been conditioned to think otherwise, whereas the requirement of this age is for global coordination and cooperation on an unprecedented scale. The challenge with the current crisis, as with climate change, now lies beyond the scope of any single national state to act.
Friends, this brings us back to the question of the values which constitute our moral compass for the unchartered journey that lies ahead. For the last quarter of a century, we have been told through the spirit of the age that our principal values are those of security, liberty and prosperity. These values are entirely legitimate, but to these values of security, liberty and prosperity must also be grafted the values of equity, of sustainability and community.
The truth is one set of values reinforces the other. One set of values enables the other. They also balance each other. Just as they underpin the necessary balance which must now be achieved between markets and governments and between the individual and the community. Communities acting spontaneously together with communities acting through the conscious agency of government will now be critical to help individuals and families through the difficulties that lie ahead. In this, local community action in support of individuals who lose their job, in support of the families who lose a reliable income will be of increasing importance.
In the current economic crisis, the underlying truth is this. We are all in this together. We are all in this together: governments and business, business and unions, individuals and communities, one nation with another.
When the world community met here in London in 1933, a great global conference of 66 nations to deal with the Great Depression, they failed to agree on a global course of action and instead continued with individual national actions in a futile attempt to protect one country from the adverse economic impacts of another. The result was that the Great Depression continued for a decade and more.
Let us learn from history afresh. This crisis will test us greatly in the time that lies ahead, but if we learn from history, if we restore the balance between markets and governments and if we rebuild the values which underpin these two great institutions. And if we are of sufficient courage to act together and for the common global good, then together we can craft a new feature for all human kind, not just for some. Thank you.
The Bishop of London:
Thank you very much indeed and we have had an avalanche, as you can imagine, of questions, some profoundly philosophical, some rather angry and without more ado, I think, if I could plunge into some of them and invite you to speak from your seats. We really do have quite an agenda, so I am sure that you will appreciate that brief answers will be very much appreciated.
Well, a sharp question first, from the charity sector. Banks and other businesses, who have brought the global economy to its knees, have received billions in state aid. Charities, who are holding together the social economy, have received almost nothing. Why is this?
Prime Minister:
We are trying to do more for charities. We do recognise that voluntary organisations and charities at this particular point in time are facing even more pressures upon them than in previous days and months. So we want to boost the effort that charities and voluntary organisations are engaged in, helping the unemployed but also helping people with advice, helping people with mortgage problems, helping people who are looking for new jobs, helping people with the day to day difficulties that they face as a result of the downturn.
So we have put more money aside in the pre-budget report. There is a budget coming up in the next two weeks. I do not want to presume what the Chancellor is saying, but I believe that it is our duty to help charities at this time.
Can I just say about banks, though, we are putting money into the banking system to save the banks, not to save the bankers, but to save people’s savings and people’s deposits and to make sure we have a banking system that can serve the people. We are buying shares in banks so that we can have the return when shares rise in price again. We are insuring the banks and we are charging them for the guarantees that they are being given and so this is not a something-for-nothing exercise. It is something for something and in return for the banks receiving money in shares, they have to promise that they will lend more to those who rely upon them.
So the Royal Bank of Scotland has had to agree to lend £25 billion more this year before it got any money. The Halifax Bank of Scotland/Lloyds TSB has had to agree to £14 billion more lending. So yes, these are big figures, but this is not something for nothing; this is something for something and we have a duty to save the deposits and to protect the savings of people in this country. And equally, we have a duty to put the financial system back on its feet and to do so with clear rules, proper transparency.
And one thing, just as an example, you will find on Thursday at the G20 that for the first time ever the world economies will agree international rules for the remuneration of bankers. In other words, every country will sign up to a set of rules that we and others will apply to the banking system. So the difficulties in the past have led to us agreeing that there will be global rules in this area for the future and just as we are eliminating tax havens, we are trying to eliminate these bad practices by insisting that there are global rules and not simply rules that apply to one country and can be undermined in the next, but global rules that everybody can accept.
The Bishop of London:
Thank you very much. Mr Rudd, when you were elected, one of the first things that happened was that Australia signed up to the Kyoto Accords and I have a question here. What progress are you looking to achieve at the G20 to ensure a rigorous agreement and progress at Copenhagen?
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:
The purpose of ratifying Kyoto in Australia was because Australia, and at that stage the United States, were the odd countries out, which was a remarkable thing, given that this was a global challenge for us all.
That process comes to its culmination at the Copenhagen meeting at the end of this year and much work has to be done between now and then. The question of climate change is alive in the thinking of Prime Minister Brown and myself as we approach the meeting here in London this Thursday.
There are a series of subsequent gatherings, which will occur in April and May in the lead up to a meeting of the G8 and the major economies in July and they will be specifically focused on how we begin to build the consensus necessary for a substantive outcome in Copenhagen.
Going back to what I said in my earlier remarks before, there is a temptation on the part of some to assume that climate change simply becomes too difficult, too hard to deal with in various parts of the world because we now confront a global economic recession. I do not share that view. I believe we have a responsibility to the planet to act. It will be politically difficult to act in many countries because of the constraints which the recession globally will impose. But I believe we must therefore exert every effort between now and mid-year and each stepping stone to Copenhagen with a view to yielding a success. The road will be hard, the obstacles are great, but our resolve is steady.
Prime Minister:
There are two challenges we have to meet on the road to Copenhagen. The first is we have to get other countries to agree both intermediate and long-term targets for carbon emissions. And I believe the challenge is to persuade America, of course, and then persuade many of the emerging markets that they must accept not only large cuts in emissions over the next 40 years, but immediate cuts in emissions that will show results in the next few years.
And then the second thing is the financial mechanism by which we can help poorer countries. If we cannot help the poorest countries develop energy-efficient technologies and allow them the resources that will enable them to move to low-carbon rather than high-carbon sources of energy, then we will not get the changes we want. So we will have to provide and show that there is a financial means by which we can support developing countries and emerging markets to move, for example, from coal-fired power stations to sources of renewable energy, which will in the short term be more expensive.
Now on that road, I think we have to insist that the world is changing and that we need a low-carbon recovery. In other words, as we invest out of this downturn, that we should invest in low-carbon products and processes, low-carbon technologies, move for example while the oil prices are lower, to the electric and low-carbon vehicles for cars and for other lorries and everything else and at the same time of course green our buildings, green our homes, green our communities.
Now this is one of the ways that we can not only invest out of recession but create the jobs that we need for the future. So it is a huge and purposeful challenge that all of us have to meet.
The Bishop of London:
You have both argued in what you have said that the market needs a very strong moral context and you have also said that regulation must play a role in that, but a question here, values, virtues, trust particularly, takes a very long time to implant and restore and how do we really help to build a moral consensus that is in the DNA and not just in the rule book?
Prime Minister:
Absolutely, but remember it took 16 years after the Wall Street crash for world leaders to come together to even attempt to rebuild the global economy. And these 16 years were wasted years in which we saw protectionism and then all the other evils that fell from that.
We have acted quickly to bring people together. The basis of my speech is, is there a basis for a global society? Is there a basis in this globalised economy for people with shared values to agree shared rules for running that economy? And I believe we are further along that process than people think, that there is a basis in a shared global ethic, that there is a basis in people now coming together to try and formulate shared global rules based on that ethic and I hope coming out of the London summit we will see the first steps towards creating that truly global society based on the values that we hold to be important. So there is no time to waste, we must move ahead with it and I believe you will see the summit starting that process.
But of course it cannot be done by governments alone; it has to be the shared values of people demanding change and that is why your role in this is so important. If we can together work out the shared values and shared rules which govern this new global society, not going back to the old national rules, but global rules, then I think that the strength of public opinion in this internet age, where we can communicate with each other across the world, could make such an enormous difference. So the issue is not just for governments; it is for all of us working together.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:
I think the common feeling in this gathering today, but in gatherings like it right across the world, is simply this. In recent times, we have just got the balance wrong. And there has been I think, an emerging sense of disquiet over a long period of time about the fact that the balance between individual in the community, between markets and government has simply got out of kilter.
And I think when we have looked at our friends in the corporate community, it is true that we have seen great examples of corporate excess, which everyone is familiar with. We have also seen great acts of corporate responsibility and let us hold this within a common reality and our friends in the corporate world, as both Gordon and I defend the principle of open markets, I think themselves feel that their sense of balance has been undone in recent times as well.
So how do we pull it back? I think a very important part of Gordon’s presentation before was his reflection on where the great religious and faith traditions of the world take us and I thought it was an elegant exposition of the great traditions of faith, all of which have this common principle, which is an action for self being consistent with its impact on another. That is work which has been done over centuries and the millennia by those who have preceded us in our various civilisational and religious traditions. It is simply taking that great wisdom and restoring the balance, which in a perversion of the balance in the last couple of decades has got it all wrong. And the rules, which Gordon has been working on hugely through the G20 processes as the host for this great summit, that are being crafted, those new rules begin to push that balance back in the right direction. Nothing is perfect in this business, but I think we are heading now in a much better direction.
The Bishop of London:
In restoring that balance, do you see a role for schools? How would you want to change the educational context in which those values are learned in the light of what you have said?
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:
I have an enormous faith in the kids of the world, just an enormous faith in them. My wife Therese and I, as we walked into this great cathedral this morning, were just taken by those young people in the choir. Life, hope, vitality, but an essential goodness and whether you are running into kids in a group in the back blocks of Papua New Guinea up in the highlands and islands of the South Pacific and rural villages across Asia, in some of the poorest communities in urban America, what I see with young people are enormous vessels of hope. The other great thing about the emerging young generation of people across so many countries is they are blind to the traditional divides of race and religion.
I think we are at an unprecedented turning point enable to harness this great potential. So how is this done in the schools and how is it taken better? Each national jurisdiction will resolve that according to its laws and its practices, but my one humble suggestion would be to take the axioms, which Gordon referred to before, drawing from these great faith traditions and seeing them underpin new and emerging codes and sets of civic values, which underpin the way in which we engage with one another in the future and as the new generation of young people assume positions of leadership.
Prime Minister:
There are thousands of schools in this country giving off their time to raise money for charity. Only a few weeks ago Comic Relief, which people thought might not raise so much money this year because of the downturn, raised the greatest amount of money ever involving more young people than ever, more schools, and I think we owe it to our young people to thank them for giving us this faith in the future.
Why I am also confident about the future is I went to Tanzania a year or two ago and I went to this village where there were very, very few people. I was taken into this hut to meet someone who was suffering from Aids. His sister was helping him. She wanted to be a doctor but you knew perfectly well she had no chance ever of being a doctor given the current poverty that they lived in. He could not have the money to get the bus to go to hospital to get the treatment that he needed and he said to me, as we were talking, he said are we not all brothers? And so the same moral sense guiding him, even in his abject at despair, as guides so many people in this country, and I do believe there is a shared global ethic.
I think the great thing that has happened over these past few years is that by being able to talk and communicate with other people in a different continent, we have found that a lot of the barriers of prejudice and a lot of the barriers that led to division and indeed extreme division, have broken down and I believe that the young people of this world who are communicating with each other across these frontiers are actually changing the world by what they do.
And I think we should encourage these contacts, schools linked up to Africa, huge environmental campaigns run by very, very young children, a sense of belief in the future that in a way undermines the cynicism that we often find reflected in our national newspapers. So I believe that we should be far more confident about the future, confident because we have young people who genuinely want to change the world.
The Bishop of London:
One example of that is that Twyford School, who sang, are in email contact with a school right at the heart of the capital of Mozambique, in Maputo, so that is a very lively example. A rather quizzical question now from one of the gathering: economic growth is not what the UK and Australia need, but gross domestic happiness. Do you agree?
Prime Minister:
If we could create that, Kevin.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:
Both Gordon and I are hoping to undertake a joint mission to Bhutan at any point that presents itself in the future. So much which has underpinned Gordon’s remarks and my remarks go to this core values question, which is as I said that this extreme version of the market, which has become something of an orthodoxy in the last quarter of a century, has become the false god of our age, the golden calf. Whereas it has been the experience of the ages, and the literature of the ages, and we will discover it again in this age, that as people reflect on wealth, those who have it in extreme form, it does not actually constitute happiness. Happiness actually lies in human fulfilment and the virtues which lie in the mainstream traditions of the great faiths who are represented here today.
I think a rediscovery of that through one important agency, given the impact of the current crisis, and that is the agency of family and community. This crisis in the United Kingdom, in Australia and in other countries will cause many people to lose their jobs. There will be a discovery afresh on the part of those affected by that, that those who are their neighbours or their friends of this extra call-back to family and to community, and in that, the discovery afresh of old truths.
The great truth of St Francis: in giving, that you receive, and in pardoning, that you are pardoned. That is, that you only become fully human when you fully give. In a way, therefore, through this and through community at the local level, supported by these extraordinary missionaries of hope - which Gordon referred to before - in the young people of the world, I think these deeper values of happiness, and therefore wellbeing, flow and will flow. Like Gordon, I am enormously encouraged by these missionaries of hope right around the world, challenging the cynicism of those older than them, challenging them in their face, afresh, and with vigour.
I have in Australia a youth-aid organisation where the mandatory retirement age is twenty-five. This bunch of young kids are out there, and they are called Oak Tree. They are just recruiting kids right across the country, running their own aid projects in various parts of the developing world and in Africa, without any support from any of the rest of us, which they do not want. These, I think through their agency are rediscovering values of happiness, which come off an axiom which has been around for the ages: in giving that you receive.
Prime Minister:
I think prosperity must have a purpose beyond prosperity itself, and that wealth must, as I said, serve more than the needs of the wealthy. But I also think, as Kevin used these words, there is nothing ennobling about poverty. When you think of it, when you applauded the Millennium Development Goals and the need to achieve them, what we were really saying is that we cannot tolerate a situation in the world where there is extreme poverty. All the Millennium Development Goals are about the necessary resources so that every child can be in education, so that every mother can have her healthcare and her family too, so that everyone has the chance of escaping extreme poverty and that we do so not at the expense of the environment, but by making the environment safer and more sustainable.
Therefore, we are setting out in the Millennium Development Goals aims that require us not to reject materialism in the sense that people have to go without when they are poor, but requiring us to take action to ensure that there is justice and fairness in the distribution of wealth all around the world. I think we have to balance off the need to pursue the noblest of aims that go beyond prosperity, with the need also to ensure that people are not denied the chance to fulfil their potential because of the threat of poverty. I think that is something we have to bear in mind when we are debating the causes of this crisis. We have to ensure all the time that we respect the needs of the poor.
The Bishop of London:
Now, bearing in mind a celebrated comment of recent times, the panellists are asked by one member of the gathering: is ‘doing God’ important to developing our shared global values?
Prime Minister:
Maybe I should explain to Kevin the terms of that question.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:
Gordon, I understand the terms of that question. I had a chat with Alastair Campbell the other night.
The Bishop of London:
We have named.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:
It is far better to name the spirits that are among us. It is the great dilemma of people of faith who are active in political life, and that is that the moment you begin professing faith and begin expounding its principles, and those which then impact on social and community action, you elevate the prospects of the hypocrisy stakes being argued against you, to name the truth of it and to name the essential dimensions of the problem.
Look, from where I come from, I am a garden-variety Christian of no fixed denominational abode. I think the key thing is, whatever your faith tradition, that to the greatest extent that you can, that you not only own it, but that you reflect on that which you seek to do, always recognising, I think in the injunction of St Paul in a church named after him, that we all fall short of the glory of God, and that those of us in the political process certainly do so, and we are among them. Off you go, mate, and give a more saintly version of that.
Prime Minister:
Some of you may know that my father was a church minister, so I was brought up with this huge debate all the time about politics and religion. My father used to say to me that one of his friends had no way, he thought, fairly of telling his congregation that he had a particular political persuasion, because he thought it was unfair to those who did not share his political view, that they were expected to sit at his feet while he was lecturing in politics. So the answer was on the Sunday after the election, if his party won, the hymn would be ‘Now Thank We All Our God.’ If the opposition won, it would be ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ and then ‘Forgive our Foolish Ways.’ If another party won by any chance as a surprise, it would be ‘Our God Works in Mysterious Ways, his Wonders to Perform.’
I think politicians have to be very careful that they do not turn out to try to be bishops. I think the Bishop of London does the best job of being the bishop, but I think it is clear that what you do and what you say reflect the views that you have, the beliefs you hold, the faith you were brought up in, and the faith you believe in. I think it is then for the public to judge. I think we have to be honest about our views, tell people what we believe in, but I think we have to respect that there are people of different political persuasions, and much as we might disagree with their views, that they have the right not only to express them, but to build them out of the faiths that they hold.
The Bishop of London:
Thank you very much indeed. We have so many fascinating questions it is unfortunately impossible to work through them all. Could I ask both speakers to think of a last message in advance of the G20 that you want to leave with this assembly? It is an extraordinary place, St Paul’s, in fact, because we have people of many different faiths here. We have the Patriarch of Jerusalem; we have the Grand Mufti of Egypt; we have the Grand Mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina; we have Cardinal McCarrick from the United States.
We have people of an extraordinary variety, and that is very appropriate, because under this dome, which represents the whole world, we have got four teachers from the East, and they are looking west. On the other side we have got four teachers from the West, who are looking east. It is a vision of a world that is coherent and learning from one another. I would just like to ask both the speakers if they had some concluding reflections, perhaps the Prime Minister of Australia first.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:
A before B, is that right? Britain second? I want to have time to think.
The Bishop of London:
I was trying to flannel, to give you an opportunity.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:
I suppose it is home rules, isn’t it? Two points. It is an honour to be in this great cathedral for the observations I made at the very beginning, because it gives us a sense of history, and that the deliberation on the great questions of the day helps us to reflect that others before us have had even greater deliberations. It is important. On the question of what we do, and for example the point about not letting the Millennium Development Goals slide and slip, this must be core business for all governments. Let me say something in direct support of my good friend and colleague, Gordon Brown. I said this to the United Nations last September. This bloke has been on the question of the Millennium Development Goals the collective conscience of the West, well before they were ever popular or trendy. Gordon has kept this alive, both as Chancellor and as Prime Minister, and his continued engagement with the likes of me around the world always has that on the agenda. I do not know whether to describe it as a ‘still, small voice’, but in the theological tradition of the ‘still, small voice’, this loud booming Scottish voice is always on people about this. Advocacy is necessary. That is my first point.
The second also builds on one of his. He spoke in his remarks, and I wrote the term down before, about the oxygen of confidence. What we are on about in this summit today is to try to restore the balance in terms of the rules of the global financial system, and underpinning that, do something towards restoring the balance on the values that underpin that system. The other part of the enterprise is this. Then, having about us not just a strategy for global economic recovery, but also importantly a narrative of global economic recovery in which we can all be confident. What we say, and how we speak about the challenges that lie ahead is as important as that which we do as well. Therefore, on the building and rebuilding of confidence in the institutions that we have spoken about, the policies on which we are deliberating, and on the outcomes that we will see on Thursday, let us have about us the habit of rebuilding hope, optimism and confidence. A rational basis for hope, a rational basis for confidence, a rational basis for optimism, and anchored in the rebalancing of the values which I fear, in sadness, that we in recent decades may have lost.
Prime Minister:
I have had the privilege in the past few days of meeting leaders from all over the world in Chile and Latin America. I met President Lula, who was explaining to me what his strategy was. He said: ‘When I was a trade unionist, I blamed the government. When I became leader of the opposition, I blamed the government. When I became the head of the government, I blamed America and Europe.’ There is a danger of a blame game while we are trying to solve the problems ahead. There is also a danger of people reacting in a very protectionist manner. I understand that, because people feel insecure, and you see in America and elsewhere, people holding on to their jobs and saying, ‘We cannot allow imports into our country.’
But that would destroy trade. In fact, I was at the International Monetary Fund a few months ago, and there was a demonstration outside it. You could see the worries of people, but one banner actually said ‘Worldwide Campaign against Globalisation.’ You could see what they meant: they felt insecure about the future and wanted us to take action. I think the question for us - Kevin has spoken so eloquently. I first read Kevin’s work not on politics, but a brilliant article he wrote on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Kevin is a man of great vision and courage, and I think you can see why he is a very successful Prime Minister of Australia. Thank you very much for coming to speak today, Kevin. We are very grateful.
Some people would say it is impossible even to deal with this huge global financial crisis. I think out of it what we are building in recognition of our global interdependence is a truly global society, where we have global rules founded on global values. That may today seem impossible, and when people look at a communiqué on Thursday - a communiqué which I believe like every document is a moral document - that people will say we have not done enough. I believe that is what we are doing. We are building a global society where people can communicate with each other across the world, and because we have to work together we have to find a way, just as when local communities became part of national societies, to create the global basis on which we can work together.
Is it impossible? I think not. In the past fifty years, we have seen so many things that people said were impossible happen. We have seen the end of the Cold War and the falling of the Berlin Wall. We have seen the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of Apartheid. All things that people have said impossible. We have seen the virtual eradication of polio, and we have seen debt relief for the poorest countries. What people thought impossible decades ago, and even a few years ago, by the acts of people like you represented here today, have been made to happen. Not governments, but peoples working together. I think our ambition is probably the biggest of all for our generation. Out of the difficulties we now face, and out of the possibilities of working together, we actually do create a truly global society where people respect each other’s values, but at the same time find the basis in shared values to build a stronger society and community for the future. That, I think, is what we are setting out to achieve, and I hope we can do so together. Thank you very much.
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