Editorial: Protesting MPs an embarrassment

Possibly the last thing New Zealand needs right now is for one of its MPs to be on the CNN satellite news service as a voice of the protests outside the World Economic Forum at Melbourne.

Sue Bradford, as New Zealanders know, is well accustomed to the role of speaking for street protests. But those around the world who caught her comments on television yesterday would have noted only that she was a member of New Zealand's Parliament. She and her Green Party colleague Nandor Tanczos ought to have considered their position as MPs before they went to join the melee in Melbourne.

Like it or not, when they travel abroad they are no longer speaking simply for themselves, their cause or their party.

Parliamentarians of other parties are conscious when they travel that they carry a national tag. They observe a responsibility to the country's interests and its image that overrides their politics.

Inside the Melbourne conference, National's finance spokesman Bill English is no more likely than Finance Minister Michael Cullen to say or do anything that could further undermine international confidence in the dollar and the economy.

It is all the more embarrassing that the Green pair may have been the only members of a national parliament to lend their presence to the demonstrations.

The fact that they attracted the attention of CNN suggests that elected representatives were not exactly thick on the streets. It will not be known to casual observers that neither of the New Zealand MPs was elected in his or her own right.

Both owe their status to an electoral system that awards some seats to parties to fill from their lists. The two members might have remembered their good fortune before they paraded themselves in such company.

The disparate mob that has disrupted recent world trade gatherings has been dubbed "anti-capitalists" by the international press. It is a reasonable collective label for a movement that seems to include everybody from unrepentant Marxists, trade unionists and old-fashioned protectionists, through all sorts of conspiracy theorists, to environmentalists and various New Age devotees.

Within the crowd there are also elements who, Sue Bradford concedes, go beyond the bounds of lawful protest. After Seattle, Washington and London, she and Mr Tanczos must have known they would be drawn into ugly scenes at Melbourne.

They announced they were going at the invitation of the Australian Green Party "to take part in meetings and forums looking at alternatives to free trade and globalisation." Fine. Politicians and like-minded groups are perfectly entitled to hold forums such as that, just as politicians and groups that believe in free trade and the benefits of globalisation are perfectly entitled to hold forums such as that in Melbourne this week. Nobody will be trying to stop the anti-capitalists from entering or leaving their forums and nobody will be trying to shout down their discussions from outside.

But why do the opportunities presented by free trade and globalisation attract such vehement protest? Globalisation is largely a consequence of new technology providing instant communications on networks worldwide. The irony is that the scale of protest at Seattle and other places was made possible by that very technology, which permits vast numbers of people to plug into misinformation and share conspiracy theories. They are enthusiastically using software developed by a man they burned in effigy at Melbourne this week.

Crazy it may be, but the sentiments behind the demonstrations cannot be ignored. Gatherings such as the World Economic Forum are reminded that they cannot take for granted the wealth-generating potential of global communications in a world without barriers to trade. They face old enemies of prosperity in the form of ignorance, envy and insecurity and they hear the familiar instinct to protect domestic industry behind the call for labour and environmental rules in trade treaties.

Gatherings of the rich will probably never win the political battle, and they do not deserve to while so many rich markets maintain barriers to the products of the poor. But the least-developed countries are now pressing the case for trade. It is important to help them overcome these protests of the privileged.