What
do Australian Historians and Intellectuals Have to Say About Globalisation?
WHY SHOULD THE EDUCATION COMMUNITY
CARE ABOUT THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM?
By Rob Durbridge
Federal Secretary of
The Australian Education Union
An event like the World
Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Melbourne September 11-13 attracts all the
spin doctors for every interest, often obscuring real issues. For educators the issues may seem remote but
a closer look shows that services like public education could be dramatically
affected by the unfolding agenda of global trade liberalisation. We should protest the secretive and elitist
agenda of the WEF and expose the policies and laws they are implementing. Education is not a commodity and should be
excluded from commercial agreements along with other cultural, land, health
and social rights.
The WEF is a meeting
of the Chief Executives of the world’s biggest 1,000 corporations. Unlike other global bodies the WEF is not established
by governments. It has no legal obligations
to the environment, culture or the democratic processes of anybody other than
to shareholders in rich countries. It has been crucial in driving trade and
investment liberalisation, privatisation and anti-unionism in recent decades.
The key reason for the Melbourne meeting (apart from a convenient all-expenses
paid ramp to the Olympics) is to deal with the crisis caused in the World
Trade Organisation (WTO) by the abandonment of the “new millennium” trade
liberalisation round in Seattle last November and to discuss the Asian economic
woes.
We are told that the
WEF is meeting to discuss global unfairness and poverty and that there is
no alternative to globalisation. But
we expect to have a say in these matters through our elected governments on
how this is to occur. Do we really
believe the WEF will discuss how to make the world a nicer place? The job of the CEO is to increase the profit of the firm, and often
their packages are linked to just that. The
world economy is profitable, but it is increasingly unequal.
At the invitation of
the Business Council of Australia representing the 100 biggest Australian
firms, the WEF meeting is, in effect, a selective and closed body which exerts
enormous economic and political influence in the world. It is the face of
the new world order. As such the WEF operates to influence the policies and
programs of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), World Bank and International
Monetary Fund which can ignore, override and punish democratic governments
using international treaties with trade and penalties for teeth.
GATs and Teachers, Students,
Allied Educators, Parents, Grandparents...Half the Population
What has all this to
do with educators, students and their families...all up half the population?
We know that WTO deals
with tariffs and trade in goods, so we are used to manufacturing workers and
farmers being upset. They were joined
in Seattle by environmentalists and labour rights activists. But it is only
now that we learn that the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) also
applies to education. The WTO has made decisions which could have the effect
of mandating global education corporations to compete with government and
private education institutions,
and to demand the same subsidies we give private bodies, on pain of penalties
and trade retribution.
While the GATS principle
of “national treatment” can mean that public systems are outside the scope
of the agreement, even if privatised, competition from subsidised global corporations
could effectively residualise and marginalise these systems. This is a consequence
of secondary, higher and other education services being included in the list
of GATS in Marrakesh in 1994 and further negotiations conducted in February
2000. Did the governments of the day know or think to ask about the implications?
Did they tell us? What is the current or alternative government policy? The answers are all unknown.
The New Zealand government
mistakenly argued that GATS had no impact on national education policies,
believing that GATS meant global opportunities for their education entrepreneurs,
but then adopted privatisation and deregulation policies which are
the prerequisites for loss of control in favour of transnational corporations.
When the unions in NZ tried to get information about it, they were met with
the Official Information Act which prevented access to details until
it was too late for public scrutiny.
If GATS continues down
the pash being urged on it by the WEF, Australian public schools, colleges
and universities could well face competition from transnational education
providers that Australian taxpayers are forced to subsidise.
Some will see all of
this as far-fetched radical rhetoric. But at the behest of international financial
bodies many developing countries have already been forced to cut back and
privatise their education systems. Australia
is an exporter and importer of education services which brings us into the
scope of the GATS, and the potential is also there for corporations to compete
for a slice of the $30 billion per year spent by the Commonwealth, states
and private fee-payers on pre-school, school, TAFE and higher education.
As if we did not have
enough problems with the Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment (EBA) and the new
Kemp funding agenda of fund-shifting to the private sector at the public sector’s
expense! These policies can now be
seen as a key element in opening up the national “market” in education as
a precursor to building a vast privatised international market in the provision
of education services.
“Rollback” to the “New
Millennium” of Global Education Markets
Article XIX of GATS
spells out that the agreement is not static but is a process of successive
negotiations directed to “achieving a progressively higher level of liberalisation.”
Under the “standstill rule” GATS prevents limits being imposed (read
regulation of standards) without compensation to affected provider countries
and under the “rollback rule” the progressive lifting of restrictions on trade
in education services is projected.
The prize of course
is bigger than Australia...it amounts to what Education International (the
world’s largest non-government body representing 60 million education unionists
including the AEU) calculates to be a thousand billion (US) dollars worth
of services, more than 50 million teachers and a billion students. Suddenly
education is a commodity in a market and a huge prize for predators looking
for opportunities...and that satellite dish on the outback school (worthwhile
in itself) represents an access point for exploitation.
We are familiar with
the UN and International Labor Organisation Conventions to which Australia
is a signatory and which provide us with a framework for international good
citizenship. However, the UN is a body of worthwhile policies with little
or no capacity to enforce them.
In an era where new
communications and information technologies will provide huge opportunities
for distance delivery of education these policies may be even more far-reaching.
For example, a company called World School has been floated which will
employ English-speaking teachers on-line 24 hours a day in five different
countries to be accessed by those who can afford them.
University of California UCLA Extension School caters for students
in 44 US states and eight other countries.
Let us not be sanguine about the potential for global education corporations
delivering on-line without regard to the needs, decisions or culture of the
countries concerned.
The Australian Education Union is making a submission to the Senate Enquiry on the WTO to argue that the Australian government must limit the scope of the WTO. Further, the AEU will be asking the ALP and other political parties to define their views in the lead-up to the next Federal election. Strategies to deal with the threat posed by global corporations to a wide range of community interests cannot develop unless public knowledge of the issues becomes more widespread. The protests against the WEF should be directed to achieve that