Globalisation Brings Equality And Environmental Disaster

14 Years ago, newly married, I very proudly showed off Mangere Bridge to Mitu, my Indian wife. Her reaction has stayed with me. Expecting glowing praise for the lack of crazed bus drivers and unpopulated nature strips she solemnly said, ’It’s just not fair’. It was the first time in her life she saw, first hand, the gross inequalities in the distribution of the world’s resources.

Chandran Nair is the founder of the Global Institute For Tomorrow and author of Consumptionomics. He has insightfully highlighted how that inequality could not only be an injustice but could bring consumer capitalism to it’s knees.

Globalisation has been an important driver of developed nation’s economies. Automobile manufacturing joint ventures in India, Japanese plasma televisions in Liberia. Literally, mountainsides of Australian and New Zealand coal shipped to Asian steel furnaces.

The West sees gob smacking potential in markets like India where car ownership is 30 per 1000 citizens compared to 750 per thousand in the OECD. They feel justified when they see China become the world’s largest car consumer at only 150 cars per 1000.

This is Nair’s point. The 20^th century’s watermark of success was indiscriminate consumption. India and China, deprived of Lycra cycling shorts and iPads, are making quantum leaps in consumerism. Hungry tigers pouncing about after being freed from the chains of homebred Stalinism. This he believes has to be vanquished for if the developing world continues to affectionately adopt this model the world will perish.

If China and India were to have a comparable consumption of cars of 750 per 1000 there simply wouldn’t be enough oil to power 1.5 billion cars.

Nair makes the unsettling claim that Americans consume 9 billion chickens a year and that Asia consumes 16 billion. But here’s the thing. Asia is 13 times the population of the United States and if they were to consume at American levels by 2050 they would be impossibly consuming 120 billion birds.

Nair projects this vision of increasing environmental disaster that could, ironically, eventuate with a more equal world.

I greatly enjoy Nair’s take on this startling paradox but what is acutely disappointing is his proposed solution.

He believes that Asia should almost solely bear the responsibility of reducing consumption of it’s citizens. Strong Government intervention, with various environment taxes, to ensure that Mr. Singh or Mr. Lee don’t aspire to Mr. Smith’s open plan townhouse. To settle for less than the West, for the greater good.

Last year my eyes welled up thinking what a great humanitarian I was. I went with my Father-in-laws servant, affectionately called Hero, to buy him a mobile phone. Being a tightfisted humanitarian I purchased the cheapest model. I pompously handed it to Hero, who looks like a Somali pirate, waiting for the flow of tears and great touching of feet. He took one look at the phone, screwed his face up like he had taken poison and threw it back across the counter. ‘Touch wallah chaiye!’ (I want the one with the touch screen!).

Hero is illiterate and comes from one of the poorest districts of West Bengal but he would dutifully see the advertisements for local rip-offs of the iphone in the Times Of India.

The heart of India is now host to the strongest consumerism. They will not take second best even if it kills the planet. Why should they?

Isn’t it absurd to expect India to punish her citizens if they aspire to their western counterpart’s level of environmental destruction?

A draft of this article was shown to friends and I was surprised at the number who insisted that India must further decrease it’s carbon footprint. Possibly exacerbated by Gillard backtracking on her election promise to not implement a carbon tax.

Grudgingly, on long careful reflection I feel this has genuine merit. If this planet is to see it’s next century without it’s populace choking on Chinese car exhaust and drowning in apopylytic floods from Russian forest fires, India must equally bear the yoke.

Assuming there are one billion people in the developed world, quick math gives us the equation. If the third world was to equally share the burden of nursing our planet back to health they would have to increase their consumption, per capita, by 50 fold and the First World would have to consume a 6th of current levels.

The West has molested Mother Nature single handed, whilst excluding India from 150 years of industrial progress, and alone must pay penance.

Death Rattle Of Multiculturalism?

David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, is a recent convert to white extremism. Joining a fast growing flock that includes German Chancellor Merkel, French President Sarkozy and has beens, John Howard and former Spanish Premier Jose Maria Anzar. All declaring, with no ambiguity, that multiculturalism has failed.

Will this retrenchment to a pre-chicken tikka masala fairyland hold steam? Will Gillard catch the bug?

Cameron, not unlike a metrosexual skinhead, has put forth a detailed criteria for immigrants. ‘Do they believe in universal human rights- including woman and people of other faiths? Do they believe in equality of all before the law? Do they believe in democracy and the right of people to elect their own Government? Do they encourage integration or separatism?’

Britain, pompously proud of the freedom she enjoys north of the White Cliffs of Dover made a legendary success at suffocating no less than a third of the world. She reigned an Empire of subjects not citizens. You have to believe your subjects are human before granting them a right.

They have emotionally never let go of that ‘greatness’ and have never managed to find the courage to look themselves in the mirror to see an impotent, pasty old man.

This delusional belief in themselves prompted their participation in the unholy wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. The fascist practices of these conflicts included torture of citizens kidnapped and imprisoned, wholly illegally, and the murder of thousands of families in air raids. Not an immediately obvious way to express a belief in universal human rights and a deep respect of other faiths.

Cameron insists that to qualify for British residency you must believe in democracy and the right of people to elect their own Government. With the revolutions in North Africa this has triggered a collective giggle. The West’s almost unquestionable support of Mubarak, who was no pin-up of democracy, has received a widely televised, brutal assessment by the media.

Furthermore, Cameron’s Foreign Minister has said that the Egyptian people should be encouraged to elect whomever they want in Government as long as it’s not the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a school of democracy that deserves further study as it seems to be a new branch of the institution.

His demand that they should encourage integration and not separatism is welcome as Cameron is plainly a separatist.

The sheer insurmountable impracticality of judging these criteria is proof enough this new gated community will convincingly fail. Would prospective immigrants be given a multi choice exam? Was Hitler a: - a) genocidal maniac b) famous composer c) grossly misunderstood.

Wilde said that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. Racism is the lowest form of politics. It is the refuge of the mediocre.

Cameron has good company with Merkel and Sarkozy. They are all leaders that have failed to project a uniting vision. Like Hitler they have contracted with the politic’s of race when the coffers are empty. Hate is free and unites the bewildered.

Gillard may have an on-again, off-again relationship with the truth but she not a person of hate. She will have enough smarts not to commit political suicide in our rainbow country.

Though to be seen as an evangelist of the multicultural ideal is politically daft. So she won my heart when denouncing Abbott and his Klan henchmen’s attack on travel expenses of the grieving relatives of the Christmas Island tragedy. She declared that Australia would not be drawn yet again in to the policies One Nation. A rare display of principle that would have had her pollster spin doctors gagging for a designer cup of herbal tea.

My initial perception of Chris Bowen, The Immigration Minister, was someone who had been put in the job to give grave television interviews that made it plain that the Government rescued boat people only if it really, really had to. My heart swelled when he strongly spoke against the ‘fashionable’ sweep of world leaders declaring multiculturalism dead on arrival.

History will show that this will be an enduring definition of Australia. Further differentiating us from a Europe that cannot dictate our culture. The eagerly anticipated dying, last breaths of white Australia.

But white Australia is far from buried. It is a nation that histrionically apologises to it’s indigenous people but wouldn’t have an aboriginal over for tea and scones. A nation that sacrifices it’s young in the fight against terrorism but detains and deports refugees who flee from terror.

But for now our leaders will continue to define us. It is who we are.

Besides, going back to boiled cabbage and cold mince is a fate worse than death.

Julian Assange No Dr Devi Shetty

Dr Devi Shetty is tragically out of step with the times. If it were an even remotely fair world he would the 21^st century’s Julian Assange. But he is a man of vision and action. Not a smelly peddler of the bleeding obvious.

Establishing the Narayana Hrudyalaya Institute of Cardiac Sciences only 10 years ago, it now performs the highest number of cardiac surgeries in the world. . “One hundred years after the first heart surgery was done, only 8 percent of the world’s population can afford it. What happens to the rest?” asks Shetty.

Having practiced in Britain for years he also asked himself why an Indian equivalent of the National Health system had not been established.

Up against the conventional wisdom that India is simply too vast in size and population for a financially struggling Government to adopt such a revolutionary institution, Dr Shetty responded by becoming a disciple of the what he calls the ‘Wall-Mart Effect’.

A system of bringing down costs and prices with huge scales of economy. Allowing a corporation rather than the Government to serve the poor profitably and astoundingly effectively. A less harsh user pays concept.

His health city near Bangalore has over 1,000 beds. Performing a heart stopping 30 plus cardiac operations a day. Shetty himself has performed over 15,000 operations in his career. They have a staggering 1,000 walk-in patients a day. The sister concern in Kolkata is looking to expand to 5,000 beds!

This astronomical infrastructure is where the ‘Wal-Mart effect’ kicks in.

Dr Shetty, demands, with his enormous buying power, that manufacturers of hospital consumables supply directly from the factory not via a problematic and expensive broker. This brings down costs.

Illustrated dramatically by Dr Shetty refusing to pay for laboratory machines that cost as much as $40,000. The manufacturer has to contend with making profit from the chemicals that the machine consumes in return for leasing the machine free to the hospital.

Every evening Doctors are sent an SMS that gives a breakdown of their individual profit/loss statement. Every Doctor is responsible for their consumption and revenue. Dr Shetty tells of how even stitch thread left on the spool is not wasted. For in other Indian hospitals the patient is charged for consumables and there is a careless attitude to conserving resources.

A blood gas analyse will cost 20 cents compared to $10 dollars elsewhere. Simply because of the huge amount of outpatients that are treated. In-patient care is considerably less profitable.

Another seismic achievement of Dr Shetty’s is Yeshasvini. This is a Karnataka comprehensive health insurance scheme that has nearly 3 million members. The monthly premiums are 15 cents a month. They now sleep in peace knowing that they will not die from not having $2000 dollars.

Dr Shetty’s sublime progress was inspired by the West but now they study him. The mortality rates at Bangalore, less than 5%, are considerably lower than New York State.

We should be scratching our heads at how he can have a dedicated nurse for every ICU patient. We should be staggered that he only charges one in 6 patients for open heart surgery. We should be rabidly supporting his plan for a health city in every Indian State.

But we won’t. I pray we see an age where he will get more respect than disaffected hackers and programmers of social websites.