By DPA
Sydney : The big talking point as Sydney prepares to host 21 Asia-Pacific leaders is what outfit Australia will embarrass them with for the obligatory group photograph.
Will the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summiteers appear on the steps of the Opera House as aging Wiggles in the red, blue, purple and yellow costumes made famous by the local lads who have become global children’s entertainers?
Or will host Prime Minister John Howard play safe and have them done up by a fashionable outfitter in beige bush gear and a wide-brimmed hat?
What they’ll be talking about at the leaders’ retreat is easier to guess than what they’ll be wearing.
Global warming is a certainty, as is the need to get the Doha Round of trade liberalization talks going again. Countering terrorism will get some play, as will the raging demand for resources from India and China.
At a gathering of the leaders of Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, the US and Vietnam there is always going to be lots to say.
But managing to get beyond platitudes in the final communique is hard. APEC has to struggle for air against groupings put together on a better basis than just the geography of being on the Pacific rim.
G8 draws together the really big economies. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) casts a wider net, including all who embrace free trade. And there is the all-inclusive, year-round United Nations.
Sometimes the closing declaration can be breathtaking in its ambitions. In the 1994 meeting that President Suharto hosted in the Indonesian hill resort of Bogor, a commitment to free trade within APEC by 2020 was made, with its richer economies getting to that nirvana by 2010.
It was an implausible target and not likely to be met.
Sometimes the agenda is so slight it’s overshadowed by events outside APEC. What was memorable about the 1999 APEC summit in Auckland, New Zealand, were the efforts to avert disaster in nearby East Timor, then an Indonesian province and soon on its way to becoming an independent nation.
Tim Harcourt, the chief economist of the Australian Trade Commission, says too much emphasis is placed on the leaders’ meeting on the final weekend.
He stressed that meetings throughout the year range “from technical matters such as trade facilitation, e-commerce, transport and logistics, to people-focused matters such as human-resource development”.
Harcourt said that at APEC’s inception in 1989 it was envisaged it would be “driven by consensus, rather than a forum that would impose its will on member countries through binding agreements and laws.” In this it contrasts with the WTO, which is rules-based and demands binding commitments.
Former banker and now company director Mark Johnson is the head of the APEC business advisory council. He played down what could be achieved on the trade front in Sydney, saying an APEC free-trade area was less inviting than a breakthrough at the WTO.
He said climate change would top the agenda and that business would be hoping for long-term policy directives that could underpin business investment in carbon-capturing technologies.
“We would like to see policies that provide as much certainty to the environment as you can get,” Johnson said. “The more uncertainty, the less precise will be the response from business.”
Howard has knocked on the head the idea that APEC can draw up an action plan on global warming to replace the Kyoto Protocol. He noted that G8 meeting in Germany had decided that the UN should do the spadework on the post-Kyoto road.
President George W. Bush has also said that the US is looking to the UN meeting in Bali in December for a climate change action plan.
Bush will gather representatives of the top 15 economies in the US Sep 27-28 to thrash out the issues and lay out what he wants to see happening in Bali. Nine of the representatives will be from APEC economies.
Howard, the APEC host, is not setting his sights high and is only going to ask for an agreement that tackling global warming is a “long-term aspirational goal” for Pacific rim nations.
“The key task in Sydney is to give political direction to the shape of a future framework for climate change that is truly global,” Howard said, deflating expectations and signaling that a breakthrough on climate change was unlikely to be what this APEC meeting is remembered for.