19 September 2000
IMAGINE a world in which every village, in every country, has access to the Internet. It would be a revolution in the prospects for developing countries and, according to World Bank president James Wolfensohn, it is just five years away.
And if Australia can grasp the opportunity, Wolfensohn told journalists in Sydney yesterday, this country could make itself a leader of that revolution. Its government could develop a ``virtual Colombo Plan" that would utilise Australia's immense range of technical expertise and state-of-the-art IT usage to offer low-cost, universal education to the world via the Internet, and win itself immense goodwill and profile.
``To make Australia a central place for capacity-building for developing countries would give it an influence wholly disproportionate to the size of the country," the Australian-born banker argued. ``It would be an incredible initiative, if the country is able to do it. You've got the people. You've got the innovative quality in how to deal with issues.
``It would be a fantastic leadership role for Australia to take, and it would be unique. It would involve (offering online) distance learning centres and going to governments and saying `We can help you with everything from building government capacity to education at a community level'.
``You've got the language base here to deal with almost any language. And you have the educational capacity and the technology to do it. It's a very low-cost way of projecting, but in terms of building friends, just as Australia did in the Colombo Plan, I think it would be a luminous thing for Australia to do."
The idea of Australia formulating an Internet-based development and education system to link villages in India and Indonesia with the global knowledge economy was not in James Wolfensohn's mind when he flew into his old home town of Sydney to see the Olympics, his first view of the Games since he took part as a fencer in the Australian team in Melbourne in 1956.
But like any world-class fencer, he has risen from the pack by his ability to spot opportunities. For most of his career, that was what well-heeled clients paid him to do, as his career path sent him soaring from his beginnings as a young lawyer at Allen Allen & Hemsley in Sydney, to executive partner of Salomon Brothers on Wall Street, to setting up his own investment consulting firm in New York. Along the way he took out US citizenship and won wide respect among the American power elite.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton invited him to take over as president of the World Bank, and Wolfensohn's concerns switched from those of the well-heeled to those of the shoeless. There is a wide consensus that Wolfensohn has done a remarkable job in the role, radically rewriting the bank's priorities to focus on reducing poverty and building democratic institutions.
It is not an easy time to be heading the World Bank. Global institutions are under violent attack from those reacting against globalisation. Despite spending up to $US50billion a year to develop social and economic infrastructure in developing countries, the bank - which is not really a bank, but an official development fund that leverages contributions from donor country members such as Australia into bigger loans for projects it approves - has become a prime target.
Wolfensohn welcomes the worldwide attention that demonstrators such as the S11 alliance have focused on the unequal spread of the benefits of the globalisation, but warns that in ``lashing out at anyone in authority", they ignore the reality that the bank's central purpose is to tackle those inequities.
He welcomes Australia's role as leader of the Cairns Group in trying to open markets for agricultural exports, but regrets that the richer Australia has become since 1975, the less it has been willing to give to poorer countries in development aid. Hence his revolutionary proposal for a Colombo Plan delivered over the Internet.
Just reappointed to a second term as president of the World Bank, Wolfensohn says he has four central priorities for the next five years:
* Ensuring the bank is totally focused on reducing poverty and involving the communities it serves in that fight.
* Ensuring developing countries have a proper structure for development, with governments, legal systems and financial systems that are open, honest and accessible to all. (He sees President Abdurrahman Wahid in Indonesia and President Vladimir Putin in Russia as leading social revolutions to give their countries such systems.)
* Pursuing the shift in the bank's focus from infrastructure development to human resource development focusing on education and health. He gives particularly priority to developing vaccines and preventive programs against AIDS, saying it has already infected 23million people in Africa.
* Building partnerships with business, other institutions and countries such as Australia, so they work together to reduce the inequity in global development. Foreign investment by business, he argues, is now eight or nine times as large as governments' foreign aid programs, and the way business does invest can have a big impact on poverty.
It is a big task, but Wolfensohn relishes it.
Tim Colebatch is economics editor.
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