Editorial: May Day protests in fruitless cause

The anti-globalisation campaign is getting past a joke. Admittedly, when several thousand people spend May Day protesting outside the Sydney and Melbourne stock exchanges, it is hard not be amused. Stock markets, like much else today, operate in cyberspace. There is as much chance of challenging their global integration as there is of turning back the tide.

But in Melbourne, where some of the same people disrupted an international business and government conference last year, the exchange building and many surrounding businesses closed for the day and boarded up their windows and doors. The demonstrators probably consider that an achievement.

In London, which also witnessed violence and vandalism in the name of anti-globalisation a year ago, businesses were boarded up yesterday and riot police were preparing to meet street demonstrations with a good deal more force than previously.

The temperature has been steadily rising in this quixotic campaign against trade liberalisation and trans-national capitalism in general. Sometime, somewhere, people are going to get seriously hurt unless sanity is restored. The cause simply does not warrant that.

The adherents to the campaign - propagating the cause with the same global technology that generates the international commerce they resent - believed they had turned back the tide at the World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle. By now they probably realise that the momentum of economic freedom has several fronts and remains very much in the ascendant. If they did not realise that before last weekend's Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, they would have taken note of that gathering's re-affirmation of free trade goals.

The new United States Administration has made its attitude clear. Governments all over the globe, of the left and right, in rich nations and poor, have joined the WTO, made regional pacts and sought bilateral deals whenever the opportunity arises. New Zealand's Government is seeking a deal with Hong Kong along the lines of that just concluded with Singapore and has put its case in Washington this week for a free trade agreement with the United States. Australia, with the same hope, was encouraged by a message from the White House this week.

None of these initiatives are proceeding without regard for the kind of issues that opponents of globalisation raise. Social and environmental safeguards are important to every nation. And every signatory to the World Trade Organisation is free to set whatever environmental and labour regulations it wants. There is only one condition - the regulations must apply without discrimination against foreign traders.

That principle is never acknowledged by those who circulate anti-globalisation propaganda. They never mention it because, of course, they want to discriminate against foreign products. Trade negotiators are rightly wary of writing labour and environmental safeguards into treaties because they can so easily be used as a pretext for protection of domestic industries.

Labour rules are particularly fraught because different cultures have different attitudes. Child labour, for example, may be regarded as exploitation in one part of the world and an important part of family life in another. And those who would make First World wage levels a condition of trade deals would prevent poorer countries from using their competitive advantage to get ahead.

Globalisation, like business at any level, is never going to be static. Countries will need constantly to upgrade their knowledge, capital and products as competitors come into their traditional activities. Free trade carries the potential to lift all countries out of poverty and set the world on a course to even greater prosperity. Environmental safeguards can see that the prosperity is sustainable, but those who take to the streets will not be content. Whatever welfare they envisage for the world, it is not advanced by tactics that are becoming as tiresome as they are troublesome.