presented at Beware the Miss-leaders:
Women's Conference against APEC,
Wellington, 19-20 June
 

© Anne Else, 1999
 

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1999, we've been listening to the fairytales of the global marketplace for fifteen years. For some of us, they are the only tales we know. Young women now entering university started school the year New Zealand's first big global storyteller became Minister of Finance.

Of course, like all fairy tales, these tales change shape as they move around the world. But the basic outlines stay the same.

The global marketplace is a thoroughly Western concept, so these tales are of course based on Western myths and traditions. What are these tales are trying to teach us about how to run our lives and our countries?

1. Mothers and stepmothers are to blame for everything bad that happens to poor children. If they run out of bread, lose their way in the woods or get hooked on candy, it's never the father's or the king's fault.
2. Poor boys with big bullying older brothers can make it to the top and marry a wealthy princess. All they have to do is work hard enough, travel far enough away from home, and do exactly what they're told without arguing.
3. Poor girls with nasty rich older sisters will get to go to a ball and marry a wealthy prince. All they have to do is work all day and all night, be sweet and kind to everyone who orders them around, always try to look their best, and do exactly what they're told without complaining.
4. Shaggy beasts and slimy frogs are really kings and princes in disguise. They may look ugly, sound stupid, and act like cruel tyrants, but they know what they're doing. They're just testing you. Love and obey them and their true worth will be revealed.
5. Old women are really evil witches who have the power to blight the land. If you are too kind to them, they will hold the peasants to ransom, steal the bread from children's mouths, and keep the country poor. They must be made to stand on their own two feet and not bludge off the rest of us.
6. If a strange man suddenly wakes you up and tells you he is a brave prince who has just rescued you from a spell cast by a wicked witch disguised as a kindly old granny, believe him - and help him chop down all those old roses. He knows what's good for you and your garden.
7. If an ugly old woman builds you a high tower to live in and says it's to keep you safe from greedy foreign raiders, don't believe her. She's really a wicked witch. When a charming foreigner comes along, let him climb up your hair. It may hurt at the time, but once he's inside you'll be much better off. He will set you free and bring you lots of wonderful overseas gifts.
8. Witches are always bad, but wizards are always good. They have awesome and unlimited powers. Not only can they turn frogs into princes. They can turn one old sheep into hundreds of young sheep. They can turn cow's milk into medicine and toads into potatoes. But never try to ask them any questions about what they're doing. Ordinary people are much too stupid to understand the answers. Besides, they might get angry and turn you into a homeless beggar.
9. Look around your town or village. If you find that where there were once many ordinary people living in ordinary houses, there are now a few wealthy people living in palaces and lots of poor people living in hovels, it's a sure sign that everything is going according to plan. A happy ending is just around the corner.
    

How do these lessons get put across? The same way as the original fairy tales - by repeating them day in and day out, in hundreds of different places - newspapers, magazines, books, films, TV, radio, Parliament, government departments, private organisations.

Make no mistake - these are powerful tales, and they have strong appeal. If we are to combat them, we need to understand what that appeal is. They work so well with so many people so much of the time because they seem to offer:

Finally, the fairy tales of the global marketplace offer us:

Another reason that these fairy tales work is that they were well timed. New Right theories, like all others, were historically developed. They were successfully introduced to New Zealand at a time when it was becoming obvious that the traditional Pakeha consensus no longer worked in some important ways, and major change was urgently required.

But now there are plenty of clear indications that the new prescription is not working either. It is particularly not working for women and children. We know this is so in the so-called Third World. But the New Right prescription does not work even in the so-called First World.

Acknowledgement of this is now coming from unlikely quarters, and New Zealand is being held up as a prime example of failure. John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, writes:

"The New Zealand experiment is the free-market project in laboratory conditions: uncompromising neo-liberal ideology animated a programme of radical reform in which no major social institution was left untouched....In New Zealand, the theories of the American New Right achieved a rare and curious feat - self-refutation by their practical application....New Zealand has experienced an astonishing growth in economic inequalities of all kinds."(False Dawn: the delusions of global capitalism, Granta, 1998, pp.39,42.)

Unemployment and benefit cuts are of course partly to blame. But not everyone is unemployed or on a benefit. Most people who do have jobs are working longer and harder than they did fifteen years ago, for little or no gain.

Where is the money going, if it's not going to New Zealanders? Basically, it's going to a handful of elite managers, or it's leaving the country. The National Business Review - a paper not known for its left wing views - has just run an article attacking one example of how this export of earnings is being achieved: transfer pricing.

What is transfer pricing? It is a classic enrichment ploy by multinationals. They make their subsidiaries in other countries pay inflated prices for goods or services supplied by the overseas parent companies. This helps to bring more money home and also helps to avoid tax.

For example, "Multinational companies are siphoning cash from their NZ subsidiaries through inflated management fees - three years after strict laws were introduced to stop the practice." Last year, for example, Grey Advertising "handed over $595.000 on group income of $4.5 million and reported a loss." (NBR 18/6/99, p.1.)

Some other headlines that have appeared recently in our press give a stronger taste than statistics do of the brave new world brought about by the global reach of the New Right:

"2000 new callers a year to gambling helpline." (Dominion 28/9/98)

"NZ health slammed by OECD...access to health care has deteriorated...substantial waste of resources." (Sunday Star Times 6/6/99)

"Teens seek sex work in capital...girls as young as 16...high demand for teenage girls in the sex industry...Thai sex slaves offered for sale in Wellington." (Evening Post 10/6/99)

And from overseas:

"Septic sludge put in animal feed, French report finds."(Dominion 11/6/99)

"Russian life expectancy falls from 65 to 57...the lowest in the developed world." (Sunday Star Times 23/3/99)

"Plague rat makes comeback in Britain." (Sunday Star Times 20/12/98)

And finally, for those who don't care about sex slaves or plague rats, as long as the finances look good:

These are the global market's huge and increasingly obvious feet of clay. No matter what the theory says, in practice - the practice of human life - it becomes obvious remarkably quickly, even in a relatively lucky country like New Zealand, that a global free market is simply not sustainable in any sense of the word. It cannot sustain either ecosystems or social systems.

In fact, globalised markets are so anarchic that they cannot even sustain financial systems.

"Anarchic global markets destroy old capitalisms and spawn new ones, while subjecting all to unceasing instability." (Gray, 1998, p.216)

Human beings simply cannot live for long in conditions of such constant instability and insecurity. These conditions are inexorably spreading. Globalisation does not limit itself neatly to Coke and Nike, or confine its collateral damage to the Third World. Poverty and misery on this scale in one part of the city, or the country, or the world, will inevitably affect the whole. Americans know this: they have been in thrall to the free market since Reagan. Already, 28 million Americans, or one in ten of the entire population, live in gated communities or buildings guarded by private security forces. (Gray 1998, p.116.) In 1995 a baby born in New York, in the heart of the most materially wealthy society the world has ever known, was more likely to die in its first year, less likely to learn how to read, and could expect to die two years earlier, than a baby born in Shanghai. (Gray 1998)

The fairy tales of the global market are even less relevant to life in the 21st century than the old fairy tales. But once in place, they're hard to dislodge, even when real life constantly shows them up as lies. The important question is, how are they to be replaced?

I have no easy answers, any more than you have. All I know is that the current state of things cannot last. One way or another, change will come. The only question is, who will control it.

I have time here to put up just one idea. I believe women are on the whole much better placed to push for humanly and environmentally sustainable change, and to write the new sustaining stories to go with it, than men are.

This is because most women have never been utterly convinced of the virtues of capitalism in general, let alone the New Right version. They have a concept of work which does not arise from or depend on capitalist economic concepts. Instead it centres on the work of producing the future and preserving the past.

This is obviously a kind of work which simply cannot be shifted to the market, or to the state either, without completely altering what it means to be human. But this kind of work cannot continue to be done in the kind of world being forced on us by the New Right.

Women are much more likely to understand this than men are. But now demographers and politicians and even a few businesspeople are belatedly coming to understand it too. They are realising that many women in the industrialised world are now voting with their wombs. Women have responded to the enormous difficulties of combining paid market work and unpaid reproductive work, as well as the increasing unlikelihood of getting long-term support from men, by delaying or forgoing child-bearing, to a point well below replacement level. What happens to women who go against the logic of the brave new right world and persist in clearly "irrational" child-bearing just rams the lesson home.

In colonialist societies such as New Zealand, population growth has underpinned and symbolised every other form of growth. It has been taken for granted, just as infinite natural resources have been.

Now the most fundamental form of growth known to industrialised nation states over the last 200 years is going into reverse, with age predominating instead of youth. We've all seen the dire warnings about the costs of an ageing population. The fact that among the old, women outnumber men, seems to make the spectre of ageing much worse as far as the New Right are concerned.

Today anxious articles are starting to appear about how women might be persuaded to have more children. (One strongly suspects, though it is never actually stated, that only babies of the right colour are wanted.) But the overall downward birth trend is very unlikely to alter; demographers make much more robust predictions than anything economists come up with.

I believe we can use this fundamental shift to focus on what sustainability really means - not just in terms of population, but in social and ecological terms generally. But it can also be used to focus on the importance of equity and justice - sustainability for all, on a global scale. Because in the end, we know there can be no other kind.

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